ELA Blog Post Week of 9-26

I am analyzing the theme of "Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou. I believe the message she wishes to convey in this poem is that beauty is more than skin deep. She talks about "them", and how "they" wonder how she's so beautiful without being a perfect model of what is considered physically attractive. For example, when she says "Men themselves have wondered/ What they see in me" she's saying even she doesn't fit what men consider good looking, but they are still drawn to her by her other traits. These other traits that are mostly more than just what is traditionally considered attractive, and she lists them in the four lines after every line that says "I say,". Most aren't physical at all, like "The need for my care" and "The fire in my eyes". There are a few physical ones, like "The arch of my back" and "the curl of my lips", but they could also be results of a good attitude. Either way, I believe it's clear the theme of the poem is that true beauty is more than meets the eye.

Metaphors in The Young Man's Song

The author of The Young Man's Song uses metaphors to add meaning to the poem. He writes about how he's flipping a penny to decide whether he should fall in love. Of course, this is just a metaphor for his almost random decision that he is suddenly the right age to be in love. Of course, he ends up realizing love is a convoluted thing that wraps him up and confuses him. You can tell by the wording he uses when the subject of love comes up ("crooked", "shadows eaten the moon", etc.) that he has negative feelings about it. The penny is a metaphor for how randomly and uncontrollably the he's thrown into this scary thing called love. In short, the metaphor changes the meaning by showing how falling in love was not really an event within the speaker's control.

Recently I attended the “Out of the Amazon” exhibit at the HMNS. It was an exhibit on the cultures of the many people living within the Amazon. While there I learned lots from the artifacts that were there, the written information, the videos, and the docent. As I toured the exhibit and took in all sorts of information on things like the food sources, rituals, clothing, housing, and just culture in general of the Amazons,
though, I noticed something odd.
I first caught wind of it while the docent was showing us the chairs that shamans sat in, which were shaped like animals to capture their spirits and give their power to the shamans who sat in them. This was very interesting in itself, but as the docent answered a question from another student and I took a moment to take in the chairs, I noticed a photograph behind them. It seemed at first to be just a photo of an Amazonian man carrying a few baskets. Something else caught my eye, though. The man was very clearly wearing a watch and a pair of jeans. How odd. I asked the docent about it, who explained he had probably traded something with tourists or anthropologists for it. That's when it hit me. This man, with items from another culture, reminded me greatly of what I had read about in “Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes, the Anthropology of Museums” by Michael M. Ames. The specific term for what I was noticing is, I believe, cultural appropriation.

It became so clear now that this is in fact exactly what I saw. This man, from a completely different culture from mine, holding an artifact from United States culture. Just as in Ames’s book, I’m almost positive that there is very little, if any, representation of US culture down in the Amazon to explain to them the significance of the watch in our country and the ways time telling affect our society. Plus, it's very possible that a very unfair trade when down when the man came into ownership of the watch. He most likely traded off some item that they have plenty of in his tribe for something as significant as a watch, basically an embodiment of the American factory system we're based on. Plus, since he’s the one in touch with his tribe members and he understands the economic system there, he could potentially make a very unbalanced deal and his American trade partners would have no idea.

I think these next 2 pictures really demonstrate how unjust this system is. We trade off everyday objects like boats, which the Amazon people take and use for their own gain, and in doing so change their own culture to the point where traditions like Yākwa are affected, and then they turn around and give us their own everyday objects, like fishing nets, which start to appear in the lives of common people here by showing up in the museum exhibits the public sees, and so our culture which was previously untouched by Amazon culture is tainted by it.
In short, what I saw at the HMNS visit was evidence that many Amazonian people are appropriating our USA culture while at the same time filling our country with fragments of their own culture.

The author and the speaker in a poem

- [ ] Just as figurative language and structure are important parts of a poem that a reader must understand to derive meaning from the poem, so are the author and the speaker. The first step to understanding these two elements is to understand the difference between them. The "author" of a poem is simply the person who typed, wrote, or in some other way created a poem. The "speaker" of a poem is the character, real or made up, who's personality forms the poem. In other words, it's the character who's personality the reader comes to understand through reading the poem. The challenge in differentiating between the two is that many times the speaker of the poem and the author are the same person, the important distinction being that the speaker is only a part of the author's personality, not his, her or their entire person. Take an example where the author and the speaker are not the same person at all. For example, say I were to write a poem from the perspective of a character named Fred. The author is me, as I created the poem, and the speaker as Fred, because if you were to read the poem and gather information about the person who's perspective the poem was being told from, the information you gathered would describe Fred, not myself. The complication is when an author writes a poem from his, her, or their own perspective. If I do that, for example, it might seem at first as if the author and speaker are equivalent, as they are both Hunter. What has to be understood is that while I myself am indeed Hunter, completely and thoroughly, the speaker is only as much of Hunter as can be understood from the poem. One simply cannot encase all of one's self into a single poem. As I write a poem about an event I experienced, the speaker may share experiences, emotions and even a name with me, but he is not all of me. He is a separate person from me, who's only thoughts and experiences are the ones that can be learned about by reading the poem. If I am usually a sarcastic person, for example, but I write a very sincere poem that never involves or references my sarcasm, then the speaker of the poem is not a sarcastic person. In short, the speaker is only a persona created by the author, though it may bear very strong resemblance to the author or the author's past self.

Example

This is a test blog post.