Poetry Presentations

Poetry Presentations

Lucille Clifton

Dailyn Souder

Theme

Soapstone

Techniques/methods

*Self Identity

- your home may be an important element to your life but it doesn't have to define you.

"The Fifteenth Summer" By James Merrill

*The entire poem lacks capitalization and punctuation, the most basic grammatical techniques learned growing up. Clifton, along with her family were raised poor and uneducated, showcased through "in the inner city". The poem is about poverty and slum-life where the majority of its inhabitants are uneducated, giving the overall tone to the piece.

• S-Someone affected by poverty
• O- Someone living in the "inner city"
• A-Everyone
• P-To identify the ghetto as someone's home
• S-The inner city, the ghetto
• T- Hopeful, protective

pg # 937

Scrambling with a book

The hundred-or-so feet

Up the Australian pine

To a slung-rope seat-

The nerve it took!

Small wonder, often as not

He never read a line,

Flaubert or Howard Fast,

Just pondered earth and Ocean,

The odd car's crawling dot:

Why were we here?

To flow. To bear. To Be.

Over the view his tree

In slow, slow motion

Held sway, the pointer of scale so vast

Alive and variable, so inlaid

As well with sticky, pungent gold,

That many a year would pass before it told

Those mornings that they weighed.

Theme for Merrill

What do you think?

Exploring one's imagination, diving into a book and experiencing a whole other world.

Literary Terms

SOAPSTONE

1. Without the author's biographical information, what would be your thoughts on what the "inner city" could be?

2. How does Clifton's vocabulary add to the tone of the poem?

Enjambment: When a phrase, a clause, or a sentence in a line of poetry doesn't finish at the line break but spills over into the next line.

Caesuras: A pause or break within a line of poetry, usually by the natural rhythm of the language.

Approximate (slant) rhyme: Includes words with any kind of sound similarity, from close to fairly remote

ex: : "in the inner city"

• S-Someone admiring the whimsical nature of a child
• O- Reading on a summer day
• A- The child, everybody
• P- To observe the beauty of life, nature, and a carefree childhood
• S- A child exploring his imagination
• T- Admiration, love, inquisitive

Social conditions of influence

"in the inner city"

Mashup!

*Lived through:

-World War 2

-Black Civil Rights Movement

-Brown v.Board of Education

-Malcom X

-Rosa Parks, MLK...etc

*Women's identities

Many of her poems reflect women's physiology and how it has affected her in her life.

See: "to my last period", "poem in praise of menstruation" and "poem to my uterus"

Pg # 847

"in the inner city" and "In the Ghetto" By Elvis Presley

in the inner city

or like we call it home

on a cold and gray chicago morning

the child needs a helping hand

and we hang on to our no place

take a look at you and me

are we to blind to see

happy to be alive

and in the inner city

Lucille Clifton Biography

*Like her mother and her daughter was born with six fingers on each hand and refers to it in many poems.

*Her family was poor and her father was an abusive drunk who sexually molested his wife and daughter.

*Her mother died at the age of 44, right after Lucille married.

*She had six kids in the first 7 years of her marriage.

*Her work was reviewed by Langston Hughes and Robert Hayden and that resulted in her winning the New York Young Women's and Young Men's Poetry Discovery Award.

*She began writing children's books and was nominated for a Pultizer Prize.

*Later in life she suffered from breast cancer and kidney failure and her son died of heart failure.