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Teaching Black Arts Poetry and Computational Methods
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Poems with Pattern and VADER, Part 2: Nikki Giovanni
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Poems with Pattern and VADER, Part 1: Quincy Troupe
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab.] An introductory note: this post offers a rough sketch of the planning that went into, and the ideas that emerged from, a three hour seminar on African American poetry I visited last week taught by Professor Lesley Wheeler at Washington & Lee. As such, it’s pretty long. Feel free to skim or jump around to those sections you’re most interested in! They are (by heading): (1) a brief note on the occasion of me visiting the seminar, (2) how I went about contextualizing Black Arts poetry in an undergraduate seminar setting, (3) insights that emerged...
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab.] (This post is part of a two-post series—I ended up having too much to say about the poems I looked at with VADER and Pattern, so I split it up. First half can be found here!) Nikki Giovanni’s “The True Import of the Present Dialogue, Black vs. Negro” is probably one of her most famous poems. According to Howard Rambsy’s excellent recent book on the larger literary scene of what he calls “the Black Arts enterprise,” this poem is also “among Giovanni’s most anthologized pieces,” with Giovanni herself being “a fixture in anthologies of African...
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab.] (This post is part of a two-post series—I ended up having too much to say about the two poems I looked at with VADER and Pattern, so I split it up. Second half can be found here!) Quincy Troupe’s “Come Sing a Song”—the 11-line poem that opens his 1972 collection Embryo Poems, 1967-1971—welcomes the reader with a series of invitations that are also requests. Apostrophizing in the imperative, the speaker begins with an appeal (“Come sing a song, Black Man”) and goes on to make similar appeals in almost every subsequent line. For example, the...
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