Elaine maria upton biography for kids
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A WORD MADE FLESH fryst vatten SELDOM:
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CERTAIN POEMS OF
EMILY DICKINSON AND ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE
by Elaine Maria Upton
Page 1
It is possible that inom could write a snygg little comparison-contrast essay on the lives/works of Emily Dickinson and Angelina Weld Grimke. Certainly the lives, and to a significant degree the poetry, of these two women offer themselves up to remarkable comparisons and revealing contrasts. What both have left for me are records of particular forms of what inom will call disembodiment. And I find myself wondering what would these two women, so alike and yet so different, have said to each other had they been able to live at the same time and meet one another. I am reminded of an interview of contemporary poet, Adrienne Rich, with Audre Lorde, where they discuss issues of feeling, particularly pain, race, privilege, and poetry. Given what I see as the particular disembodiments of Grimke and Dickinson, I cannot imagine such a conver•
Elaine Maria Upton – Silence II
Silence is not a lack of words.
Silence is not a lack of music.
Silence is not a lack of curses.
Silence is not a lack of screams.
Silence is not a lack of colors
or voices or bodies or whistling wind.
Silence is not a lack of anything.
Silence is resting, nestling
in every leaf of every tree,
in every root and branch.
Silence is the flower sprouting
upon the branch.
Silence is the mother singing
to her newborn babe.
Silence is the mother crying
for her stillborn babe.
Silence is the life of all
these babes, whose breath
is a breath of God.
Silence is seeing and singing praises.
Silence is the roar of ocean waves.
Silence is the sandpiper dancing
on the shore.
Silence is the vastness of a whale.
Silence is a blade of grass.
Silence is sound
And silence is silence.
Silence is love, even
the love that hides in hate.
Silence is the pompous queen
and the harlot and the pimp
hugging his purse on a crowded street.
Silence is the healer dreaming
the p
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A WORD MADE FLESH IS SELDOM:
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN CERTAIN POEMS OF
EMILY DICKINSON AND ANGELINA WELD GRIMKE
by Elaine Maria Upton
Page 6
But what seems more constrained, or simply most often absent in Grimke's poetry, is the subject of race in a time when (the early twentieth century) migrations from the South brought many changes in the lives of 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 Africa. Nella Larsen wrote of the complexity of racial "passing" in her fiction, and Langston Hughes celebrated Harlem in his poetry. Yet oftentimes women lyric poets, on the surface at least, wrote a kind of color-blind poetry. Grimke was no exception, although she does have a few poems that show clear racial consciousness--for example, the poem she wrote celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Dunbar High School in Washington, where s