Activity Jan 16 !!!

Hello all. Hope your week/end was pleasant. A reminder to finish up and hand in the homework on filling in the essay once you're done focusing by deleting. email me if you have any questions about it. Also please remember to bring scissors : the plan in class is to give a mini lecture on essay structure and paragrah to paragraph flow, then cut up the following essay and re-arrange the essay so that it is in the correct order; you may also want to look for possible paragrpahs for deletion. YOU DON'T HAVE TO PRINT THIS OUT UNLESS YOU WANT TO. So please, READ THIS ESSAY AS IT IS in its chunks and think about how to put it together, bring scissors to class and don't forget your homework!

Here it is:


1. Through these divisions, however, Brown strives and finds the, “authentic poetic voice of black America, making it heard above the din of racist parody and well-intentioned, sympathetic interpretation.”(Thomas, 417). Brown uses this irony and humor as a jumping point for readers, to make them see the underlying racial message within his poetry, especially “Slim in Hell.” When Slim Greer visits Hell and gets a tour by the Devil himself, he sees images of people fighting and gambling. Slim uses very specific names of places: Rampart Street (107. 59), New Orleans (107. 63), Memphis (107. 64) among others, to pinpoint places that Brown wishes to criticize. Finally he refers to Hell as home (Dixie) in line (108. 103).

2. Brown traveled all over the country to collect information for his poetry. He went on such “folklore collecting trips into ‘jook joints’, barbershops and isolated farms”(Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 105). The poetry written entailed the “black” way of life at the time and was very precise in its use of dialect and structure in order to build characters. One such character created was Slim Greer, a character thrust into various locations such as Atlanta and Heaven, and is used as a puppet to voice some of Brown’s concerns. Slim Greer is based on a man Brown met while waiting tables at the Hotel Jefferson in Missouri.

3. Structure is defined as “the building blocks, the way in which the elements are put together to make a more meaningful whole.” (Geddes, 396). The structure of “Slim in Hell” is very simple. It involves rhyming every second end line and dividing the poem into quatrains. The syntax of the piece is full, with no abrupt stops or shifts. He uses iambic meter (a combination of stressed and unstressed beats in a line) throughout the poem. Brown does this in order to make the poem more accessible to readers. The poems have a very singsong effect, very measured and tight. An example of this is the very first stanza: “Slim Greer went to heaven/ St. Peter said, “Slim,/ you been a right good boy./ An’ he winked at him” (105. 2-4). Because it is very simply divided with the stressed and the unstressed syllables it makes the poem flow when read. There is a rhythm that is easily picked up and understood, like a football cheer or a jump rope chant. The simple rhyming scheme also contributes the idea of simplification, making the rhythm flow more smoothly and creating a euphonic voice that surrounds the poem itself. The way that Brown sets up the lines visually on the page is also very intriguing.

4. Sterling A. Brown was a black poet born into the middle class of Washington, DC in the year 1901. It was a time of racial segregation and tension that is very evident throughout his poetry. After graduating with high honors from Williams College, he spent two years at Harvard before teaching various courses at “Negro Colleges”, such as Fisk University and Vergina Seminary and College. He has written many poems and they are collected in a book entitled Southern Road.

5. INTRO! The job of every writer, whether he/she would be writing poetry, creative fiction, non fiction etc, is to communicate and clearly explain to the reader what he/she is attempting to accomplish with his/her writing. The writer may employ various techniques, on both the structure and diction level in order to help the reader better understand the message he/she is putting forth. Sterling A. Brown uses a number of simple structural techniques, such as iambic meter and rhyming quatrains, to make it easier for the reader analyze into his poems and balance the irony and over-the-top exaggerations with his somber messages. In his poem “Slim in Hell” Brown manipulates the above listed literary techniques to clearly display his various themes.

6. The first stanza starts in at the very left margin, but the second stanza is indented slightly inward. He also does this every second line within the stanzas. This is consistent throughout most of the poems dealing with the character Slim Greer. Brown does this in an attempt to set his poetry apart from other writers with something original but also to make the poem more aesthetically pleasing. The way the words are on the page give the impression of something that is not uniform in the least, but instead twists and turns, much like Brown’s poems. The poem “Slim in Hell” is divided into three parts. They are like acts of a play. The first scene is when Slim goes to Heaven and meets St. Peter and St. Peter tells him to go visit Hell. The second scene begins when Slim enters the realm of Hell and the last scene begins when Slim returns and talks to St. Peter again. This division of scenes, again ,simplifies things for the reader, giving him/her easy divisions (we know when he gets to Hell, we know when he leaves) to which he/she can split the poem and avoid confusion.
7. Diction is defined as a reference to word choice. “Often word choice is dictated by the impression a writer wants to give of his or her characters, particularly the narrator.” (Geddes, 388) Diction is very important to all of Brown’s work. Brown uses very localized dialect voices for his characters and narrator. The words are spelled very phonetically as words are often shortened as to how people would actually say them. This is a constant theme through most of his works. Brown draws on the dialogue of people and their personal diction to further enhance his poetry and make it more understandable to readers. Brown makes the characters speak like actual people so that the characters can speak to the real people, the readers. Brown himself quotes, “I was first attracted by certain qualities that I thought the speech of the people had, and I wanted for my own writing a flour, a pungency of speech.”(Oxford Companion to African American Literature, 105).

8. He uses the dialogue to portray an accurate depiction of life, as it was, and the speech patterns that existed. Another point to make is that Brown is highlighting that people, no matter what race or stature, are equal through language. St. Peter at the gates of heaven says: “Well,/ you got back quick./ How’s de devil? An’ what’s/ his latest trick?”(The Black Poets, 108. 97-100). Slim Greer, in comparison, as well as the Devil himself, speak with the same dialogue tendencies. That idea conveys that no matter if you are God or mortal, you speak the same and are equal on that plain. Although some readers may read this as degrading to Negros, a comical cruel exaggeration, Brown points out, “there is nothing ‘degraded’ about dialect. Dialectal peculiarities are universal. There is something about Negro dialect, in the idiom, the turn of the phrase, the music of the vowels and consonants that is worth treasuring.” (Thomas, 411). Although the dialect is a huge part of Brown’s poetry, his word choice must also be looked at. He uses colloquial words and phrases in order to make the characters seem real. He does not make them speak in Old English but in plain, if not “layman’s”, English. By making the voice of the poetry the voice of the people, it makes the poem easier to understand and more accessible to the readers.

9. Sterling Brown was one of the more formidable poets of the early century stretching across racial tensions and displaying a humor and understanding of social situations celebrated today. His use of dialect in his poetry broke through barriers in the comprehension of poetry where the poems themselves spoke the common man’s language. His various structural techniques enabled the reader to better understand and divide his poetry, to make it simpler and easier to comprehend. His character of Slim Greer was meant to represent a cross section of the black culture and is one of the most beloved characters in Brown’s poetry. All these factors make Brown’s poetry a very entertainingly thorough and well-understood read.

10. Brown uses irony and a strong sense of humor as his main vessel to speak to the reader and deliver his message. The surface irony can be found in such lines as, “people/ raisin’ hell as high as/ De First Church Steeple.” (106. 54-56). He uses the Holy Church in reference to people partying in hell. Brown uses his irony and humor (the dialect itself is humorous in a crude sort of way) to propel his characters, in this case Slim, through the poems. When Slim arrives in hell he is greeted by a sign reading “DID IS IT.”(106. 28). It’s that type of deadpan humor that propels Brown’s poetry. Perhaps the biggest irony involved is how easily Brown divides his poems. They are divided into scenes and those scenes into stanzas and those stanzas into lines. If looked at from another direction, the continuing story with Slim Greer as the main character is divided up into smaller poems. With all the division it becomes ironic that what Brown is speaking against is division and segregation between blacks and whites.

11. This drives home Brown’s message, that earth is indeed Hell for the black people because of the way the white people treated them. He makes specific references to white devils throwing black devils into Hell’s furnace. He attacks the way blacks were treated by describing the immoral things whites did (the “cabaret houses”(107. 61) and “bawdy houses”(107. 62)) and making whites the main population of Hell. Not once does he mention a Negro in Hell. Even the devil, in the end turns, into a, “cracker/ wid a sheriff’s star”(108. 91-92). Finally St. Peter beats home the point in the last scene, when Slim says he thought, “The place was Dixie/ Dat I took for Hell”(108. 103-104). And St. peter says “Where’n Hell dja think Hell was,/ Anyhow?”(107-108). Brown uses Slim as a vessel to critique the way that black people were mistreated in Southern states (hence the references to various cities) and that earth is, in fact, Hell for blacks. To make this message palatable to the readers, he waters it down slightly with his use of dialect and deadpan humor.