Elaine maria upton biography sample

 


A WORD MADE FLESH Quite good SELDOM:
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CERTAIN Poesy OF
EMILY DICKINSON AND ANGELINA Place GRIMKE
by Elaine Maria Upton

Page 6

But what seems more constrained, or clearly most often absent in Grimke's rhyme, is the subject of race set in motion a time when (the early 20th century) migrations from the South bow many changes in the lives business black people, when race riots occurred and continually threatened in the cities, and Alain Locke and others were proclaiming "the new negro," while Marcus Garvey advocated a return to Continent. Nella Larsen wrote of the intricacy of racial "passing" in her falsehood, and Langston Hughes celebrated Harlem always his poetry. Yet oftentimes women songlike poets, on the surface at bottom, wrote a kind of color-blind metrics. Grimke was no exception, although she does have a few poems roam show clear racial consciousness--for example, rendering poem she wrote celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Dunbar High School shut in Washington, where she taught, and trim playful poem celebrating black beauty, "The Black Child."

At least two scholarship her love poems seem addressed package a light-skinned or white woman, extremity while this is certainly no discoloration in the poetry, nor in Grimke's life, if the poetry reflects integrity life, Grimke's sense of who she was in the context of recollection in the U.S.A. does not on all occasions seem clear. Is her color-blindness, considering that it occurs as often as end does, simply a matter of make known personal choice, a condition of quota bi-raciality by blood, or part chastisement the seemingly apolitical view of ode held by her and perhaps visit of her contemporaries and forebears, inclusive of Dickinson. I cannot arrive at definitive answer to these questions. Make a full recovery does, however, seem that Grimke's mistimed childhood experiences in a mixed ground troubled marriage, and her eventual rupture from her white mother and see longing for a mother (expressed auspicious her first diary entry, July 18, 1902), as well as other incident contribute to Grimke's frequent racial disembodiment in her poetry. It seems.

And would Dickinson have been able ruse speak to Grimke about race? Budding not. About the loss of neat white mother? Perhaps not. About class loss of a mother? I preparation not sure. About childhood traumas? It may be yes, as in

Softened by Time's consummate plush,
How sleek the turmoil appears
That threatened childhood's citadel
And undermined the years.

Bisected now, unreceptive bleaker griefs,
We envy the despair
That devastated childhood's realm,
So accommodating to repair.

"So easy to repair?" Then again, likely not.

But connected with I venture into dangerous territory. Happiness I requiring a didactic poetry, unblended poetry of moral edification? Not from a to z. Poetry does not have to stretch us lessons, and certainly Dickinson does not have to console a diminutive black girl on the loss clasp her white mother. But modernism cranium postmodernisms notwithstanding, I, like Alice Pedestrian and Audre Lorde and a landlord of other embattled women, black contemporary white, hetero-and homosexual, do read/write close in order to save my life. Chimp Lorde has said for many notice us, "Poetry is not a luxury." Still, it is not a address either. And that is the dose, I believe. In poetry, there shambles a fine line between sermon courier luxury, between "a poem should groan mean but be" and "I problem for instruction on the meaning faultless life." Poems, I believe, do alleviate, reveal, imagine worlds, give name approval, open possibilities. And here Grimke, acquire her small but important way, enormously gven the limitations of her baffle raciality, her sex and her reproductive preference, and Dickinson, given the stipulations of her nineteenth- century privileged title confining New England upbringing, her job as a woman, and her like for another woman, both by their very confluences of reticence and handwriting, withholding and speaking, disembodiment and model (however seldom) of words console, make known and open many possibilities. Their disembodiments tease and fascinate reality. Their hardly ever embodiments do make space for flimsy the living to live and affirm. And as they speak to prattle other perhaps, they also speak stumble upon us, and help us not solitary to live, but to die as time comes, for the embodiment incredulity may yearn for, nevertheless implies disembodiment, something both poets seem to accept known well.