Bria Campbell

[briacampbell3]

August Wilson- Writing

Overall, the writing process was not as hard as I thought it would be. My challenges from the beginning came with my annotations and explications I struggled a lot with trying to make sure my explication was effective and served justice to all of the language, writing style, and other components that Wilson had in his writing. Once I was able to get past that the introduction to annotations writing portion came fairly easy. I was able to expand on what I had in my explications because I had a solid foundation to follow and I believe compose an intro that gives great leeway into the annotations and explications. As far as the general introduction I had a few struggles with it, as far as what would be a good introduction to effectively sum up all of the unique and great aspects of Wilson’s writing. As I was writing I struggles with expanding on some of my main ideas and including my own perspectives of the work, but in the end I was satisfied with the way that I was able to give a general introduction to these two individual plays. 

[briacampbell3]

August Wilson- Research #2

In the two plays that I read by Wilson for this project along with Fences that we read earlier in the school year I was overall very satisfied with the language and the way that Wilson wrote. The way Wilson wrote fit in to the setting of a play everything was head on. However, I was interested in knowing why he wrote like this, why his writing was solely fitting to the environment of a play and not so easily transferrable to a movie or another setting. I read an article by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in which Wilson’s mentee up until his death talked about his legacy and overall career. He talks about how Wilson’s goal was to be an effective playwright, he didn’t write to make movies or make it to Hollywood, he wanted to create effective writing that would resonate with his audience. This allowed me to craft my general introduction better with influence from outside sources because I was able to talk about the language but also the origination of Wilson’s writing and why it was so effective in getting the message across in his play. 

https://www.post-gazette.com/ae/theater-dance/2017/01/25/Legacy-of-August-Wilson-soars-Fences-awards/stories/201701250085

[briacampbell3]

August Wilson- Research #1

When looking for research, especially for my general introduction I was trying to find what influenced Wilson is his writing. Many critics have said his work gives a far better experience being read opposed to being seen on stage and I wanted to look into that more. Wilson talked about in an interview with the New York Times about how we writes and what he writes. In this interview, Wilson explained to them that before he was anything- a writer, producer, etc. that he was a black man and it was his goal to portray that through his writing. After Wilson died many producers came forward wanting to produce movies about his work, but Wilson was adamant that he wanted no white producers or directors on his work. His widow approved one white producer on his play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” which some black directors felt removed the opportunity for the story to be told how it should have been. After reading this article it gave me a little bit more insight into why Wilson wrote how he wrote, because he wanted to accurately portray the African America life he was writing about in his book, and did not want that image to be altered in any way by someone who wasn’t as credible telling the story. Ultimately, why I now understand that critics praise the reading experience of Wilson’s play more than the visual play itself. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/theater/23wils.html

[briacampbell3]

Reading Post #6

As I got towards the end of the play, the reasons started to come to light as to why Bernice didn’t want to sell the piano. Bernice has been the isolated character throughout most of the play not showing many emotions but more on the side of taking care of her business with herself and her daughter. However, it got to the point where Boy Willie was so persistent about selling the piano after being in town for only a couple of days he went out and bought rope and a stand to roll the piano out of the house. She has a outburst of emotion where she talks about the blood and tears their mother put into this piano and how the piano has been in the family for generations and especially because of how the piano was acquired that it should be kept in the family. (I used this passage for one of my annotations also)

Because they had still been seeing ghosts throughout this time Bernice asked Pastor Avery to come bless the house in hopes of removing ghosts. However, there is a point where Sutter’s ghost is heard throughout the entire house as they are blessing it so Boy Willie decided to run upstairs to see if he can make the ghost go away to some extent. Yet, he actually gets into a physical struggle with Sutter’s ghost in the last lines of the play but no one knows how to make the fight stop resulting in Bernice attempting to play the piano which she hasn't in years to stop the fight with the ghost. Ultimately, revealing the importance of the piano in this entire play that it was kept around for a reason that the ghost possibly appeared as a sign not to get rid of the piano.

[briacampbell3]

Reading Post #5

As I continued reading The Piano Lesson I was trying to figure out the significance the piano could have, that it played such a large part being that it was in the title. Boy Willie starts to talk about these supposed ghosts that are pushing people down wells in the south and how he’s supposed to be getting land from a man who fell or was pushed down his well and he came to sell the piano that is in his sister Bernice’s house in order to be able to purchase this land. Bernice maintains her stance that she does not want to sell the piano although it isn’t revealed why. There is some sort of underlying reason as to why, but I’m not really sure what the reasoning is as to why she’s so against it. 

Throughout the play, there are mentioning of multiple ghosts. Boy Willie and Maretha and others in the house except for Bernice have claimed to see the ghost of Sutter- the man who died and Boy Willie is buying his land- I’m truly wondering what the significance of these ghosts could be and how they could play into the significance of the piano and why Bernice is so against getting rid of the piano.

[chrisburke3537]

The book I chose to read is invisible man by Ralph Ellison. At first I was having a hard time finding a book that I wanted to read because I wanted something that was going to offer me something more than just plain old reading and after reading the summary of the book and realizing that this book could often resemble by future journey to college and offer some insight into how to handle different problems in the future. So that was pretty much the thought process I went through when choosing my book.

[briacampbell3]

I like your explanation for why you chose to read this book. I’m wondering what specifics aspects stood out for you that resembles your possible future journey? Also, is there anything, now that you have had time to read the book, that changed your mind or supported your decision of how it relates to your journey?

[briacampbell3]

Reading Post #4

I am now on my second play entitled the Piano Lesson by August Wilson, and from the beginning I could already tell the direction that the plot was moving in. Contrary to Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which took me a little longer to feel a sense of the underlying “thing,” in the play, being race that Wilson wanted to talk about. In The Piano Lesson from the opening scene I could tell that there was already a plot developed between the characters and there was some issue that wasn't being brought up.

Boy Willie and Lyman show up to Doaker and Bernice’s house (unannounced) after traveling from down south and you can tell there is tension between Bernice and Boy Willie who are later revealed to be siblings. Bernice is woken up by Boy Willie and they have this interaction:                                                     Bernice: What you doing all that hollering for?                                                       Boy Willie: Hey, Bernice. Doaker said you was sleep. I said at least you could get up and say hi.                                                                                                   From this interaction on Bernice continues to be short with Boy Willie in all of their conversations and seems mostly bothered by his presence. Through much of the first act in scene one I think that Wilson is using characters Bernice and Boy Willie to give a backstory in a way of the bigger picture that he is going to set up later in the play. 

[briacampbell3]

Reading Post #3

While reading Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom one of the parallels that I always looked for was how it paralleled to Fences being that he also wrote that play. In the first act I didn’t see many parallels. There was a common ground of the underlying subject being race which is pretty common in Fences as well. However towards the end of the second act I started to see a lot of parallels between the two. 

An interaction takes place between Levee and Toledo                                                  Levee: Nigger talking about life is fair. And ain’t got a pot to piss in.                     Toledo: See, now, I’m gonna tell you something.  A nigger gonna be dissatisfied no matter what. Give a nigger some bread and butter...and he’ll cry ‘cause he ain’t got no jelly. Give him some jelly, and he’ll cry ‘cause he ain’t got no knife to put it on with. If there’s one thing I done learned in this life, it’s that you can’t satisfy a nigger no matter what you do. A nigger’s gonna make his own dissatisfaction. 

When I was reading this passage really stood out to me because it reminded me of many of the interactions in Fences between Troy and Bono when Troy would always bring up something about being at a disadvantage or something that he didn't have with the situation that he was in. In Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom I think it goes back to the idea that this play was never really about music, Wilson used music as a way for the character’s to be able to have these raw conversations about race and how it has affected their lives. But most importantly how music has given them an advantage opposed to having to have another job that other African American males had at the time.

[briacampbell3]

Reading post #2

The end of act one in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom ends with Levee having a 2 & 1/2 page monologue. Throughout much of the first act the relationship between band members is seemingly most of them have a problem with Levee because he wants to do his own thing most of the time. However, at this point a much more vulnerable side of Levee is shown. This all starts when Sturdyvant comes in the band room to talk to them and has a conversation with Levee, after Sturdyvant leaves Cutler says, “You talking out your hat. The man come in here, call you a boy, tell you to get up off your ass and rehearse, and you ain’t had nothing to say to him, except “yessir!” Resulting in Levee explaining to the rest of his band members how they really don’t know anything about him. He explains how when he was eight he watched a group of white men rape his mother and how he tried to fight them off but ended up getting cut in his chest.

Looking at the play through this point, Wilson continues to make it more than about music. He continues to use his writing to bring up race relations and how each of these men in this band are doing this for more than money. For them, specifically Levee it’s about achieving something, after explaining all that he had been through in his childhood it became clear that Levee wanted this for himself. As he goes on to explain that after his Dad found out what happened with his Mom, he went after every single man apart of that group and killed most of them until he was finally killed himself.

Wilson continues to use each character to bring out a different perspective about race. Especially looking at the time frame this play takes place Wilson wants to use this play to talk about race relations and use the characters to tell their story individually and why it’s about more than music for each of them.

[briacampbell3]

Reading Post #1

The beginning of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is a picture into so much more than music. It starts with the setting and time period of the play (Chicago, 1927) and a brief description of the music at the time and the culture of the city. This play is only two acts, in the beginning of the first act Irvin and Sturdyvant are introduced in the recording room, Sturdyvant is the owner of the record company, and Irvin is Ma’s manager both are white. The band who plays for Ma is also introduced, composed of four black men- Cutler, Slow drag, Toledo, and Levee.

While the band is waiting for Ma to arrive they head into the band room to rehearse but most of their rehearsal time is spent having in depth conversations about race and culture. Toledo who they refer to as the “philosopher” of the group spends a large amount of time trying to impress cultural awareness on Levee who is more of a laid back person is not necessarily concerned with matters of race or society but he is simply there to make music and have a good time. As the story progresses through act one many small arguments arise between Toledo and Levee because of their disagreeing viewpoints. However, it eventually comes down to the idea that Levee does care a lot about more than just making music and having a good time he has a lot of hidden hurt and pain from his childhood which is why he has put up this form of a barrier in having these conversations with Toledo and the other band members.

[briacampbell3]

Picking the Work

For my final project the literary work I chose to read was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and The Paino Lesson- both plays by August Wilson. My main thought process for choosing these was after reading Fences I wanted something similar that would catch my interest and that I wanted to dig deeper into. Both plays are dramas bringing in many aspects of the African American life in the early 1900’s. Another aspect in choosing these plays was being able to find criticism on the work of August Wilson, since he had done numerous plays throughout his career I figured that it would be a good pick as a way to look at these two plays also.

[briacampbell3]

Mentor Poet Post #7: “it began right here” -Danez Smith

From the jump this poem was very hard for me to understand. With most of Smith’s writing it’s fairly easy for me to make out a general consensus of what he’s trying to get at but I couldn’t really do that right off the bat with this poem. However, when I got to the last line of the poem something clicked. I thought that maybe he was trying to talk about police brutality but I thought that didn’t fit this piece right, but then after finding out that in some of his writing Smith wrote about an HIV diagnosis I was almost 100% that he could be talking about his HIV diagnosis. Especially when I went back to the title talking about where it all began and then the line where he says “the devils sleeps in my eyes, my tongue, my dick, my liver, my heart. everywhere blood is he sleeps.” And HIV is a disease in the blood. So, I began to look at the poem in a different light. Even when Smith goes on to talk about “it” not being a death sentence like it used to be, and dieing in the blood cell. It only convinced me more that Smith was opening up about this diagnosis. Which brought me to wanting to discuss the diction of this poem. Once I understood the meaning of this poem I thouroghly enjoyed it because of how Smith presented the issue by never explicitly saying “HIV isn’t a death sentence,” or “HIV lives in my blood,” because it promoted so much thinking within me before I was able to come to this conclusion. Ultimately, I would say in my opinion this is one of the best poems in this book by Smith because the past ones of I’ve read I’ve come to some ball park of a conclusion within seconds of reading, however with this poem I had to read and re-read, and even go to an outside source to be able to come to a conclusion and talk about the writing. I connected this picture to the poem because Smith talks about learning to become the space he needed and becoming the sun and not a light. So I thought that a candle would be representative of that because even a small candle can make a dark place light so slowly smith evolved into being more than light by occupying the space around him. (405)

[briacampbell3]

Mentor Poet Post #6: “& even the black guy’s profile reads sorry, no black guys” -Danez Smith

Reading the title of this poem I wasn’t exactly sure what the poem was going to be about. The title led me in the direction of racism/colorism. After reading the poem that’s not exactly what I got out of it but I got something along the lines of being judgmental against ones own kind. I came to this conclusion because of the first line in the poem really that says’ “imagine a tulip, upon seeing a garden full of tulips, sheds its petals in disgust,” which I took as the idea of being judgmental against ones own kind because the tulip would be disgusted at the other tulips when itself is a tulip just the same as the others. To further that, I thought about how it may connect to the tile and I thought that Smith was essentially making an analogy that people, specifically in the black community have an issue with being judgemental against other black people. I felt that in this poem there was also a lot of comparisons where Smith talked about the dark and light with the shadows, but also where he talked about the Clorox, milk, and soap suds which was one aspect of the poem that I really didn’t understand the point Smith was trying to make there. Aside from that, I feel that there was a shift in the poem towards the end where it says, “if no one has told you, you are beautiful & loveable & black & enough & so -you pretty you- am i. At this point in the writing the author was making an attempt to bring the separation he had highlighted together, that we are the same people- there’s no reason we should be against each other. That being said, I didn’t know what I would want to connect this or even more what would be right to you connect to this poem. However, I found this picture, which I felt that represented the separation among the black community- because in the picture you see there are some shadows together and the two on the end, in particular, seem to be disconnected and in their own reality not concerned with those around them that may need help. (368)

[briacampbell3]

Mentor Poet Post #5: “dream where every black person is standing by the ocean” -Danez Smith

For many of my previous posts I had flipped through and chosen a poem I could easily digest and annotate, however with this post I decided to flip to a random page and see where it got me. So I came across this poem that was rather short but I gave it a try to see what I could get out of it. From immediately looking at the title I thought about slavery because of the means of travel being the ocean for the transatlantic slave trade. I then began to notice the italicization of certain lines but more so words such as “swallowed,” and “drunk,” which I found very ironic being that the writing was referring to people. However as I kept reading and Smith mentions “Emmett,” in his writing I assumed Emmett Till, which then brought the idea of slavery full circle. When I looked at the overall tone of the poem I felt that the tone was very serious and almost somber because of how he seems to be talking to the ocean through personification. As far as a connection to this poem I chose this GIF, one because it’s a form of connection I’ve never used before and I felt that it represented the entire idea of a dream that connected to the past but now being able to see how that dream evolved into what our world is today. (234)

[briacampbell3]

Mentor Poet Post 4

“you’re dead, america” -Danez Smith

When I began to read this poem, the initial thought that popped into my head was that Smith was trying to make this an allusion to slavery and police brutality. Especially when he says “I fed your body to the fish traded it at lunch for milk,” what I took away from this was the time period from the slave trade where slaves would be transported on ships for purposes of being traded. With that, I feel like in this line Smith reverses the roles of white American and black America to get his point across. Smith also goes on to let ion “the man from the TV,” in his poem which I wasn’t exactly sure how to interpret because I thought in a instance of police brutality it could’ve been the victim of the attack, but it also could’ve been the police officer who was the attacker so I wasn’t exactly sure of what Smith was trying to say with that. I found the title of this poem to be very interesting, first of all in all of his wiring smith uses lower case letters, never any capitalization which I think is to almost keep his writing uniform displaying a deeper message in his writing. However with this I feel that this title carried a lot of anger and rage towards America from a racial perspective almost as if he wanted to “white” America everything that had been done to “black” America. Smith uses many different writing styles but I noticed in this poem a stanza was never longer that two lines it was either one line or two lines, I think this is because Smith really wanted to get his points across clear cut, without much room for interpretation. With connecting an outside source to this poem I’m going to try something new- connecting a person. The person I’m choosing to connect today is Kanye West. This is because it has been know that Kanye is a very controversial person on many fronts and this piece of writing is controversial, but Kanye also says what he wants and makes sure his opinion is known without worrying about what others will say about the matter at hand- all aspects I see in this poem.

[briacampbell3]

Cheat Poetry Blog

When I was thinking of a poet to choose for my cheat assignment I immediately thought of Eve Ewing. She was one of the poets I had looked at before choosing my Mentor Poet and I thought that she would be a great poet to go back to. None in my class chose Eve Ewing for a mentor poet, but I do remember coming across her work in our poetry mixer because she was the mentor poet chosen by our humble instructor. From the start I wasn’t really familiar with Ewing’s work or her style of writing, but I came across a poem called Shea Butter Manifesto. It drew me in because she touches on aspects significant to the black female community like hair, and skin- also the title in itself, Shea Butter being a cultural feature of the black community. Something that I connected to this poem was a drawing that I found, I imagined this being the words of the poem transformed into an image. Displaying confidence and culture while expressing aspects of the black female community. Overall, I am really glad that I chose Eve Ewing as my cheat poet allowing me to take a deeper dive into the work of Ewing as a poet.

Eve L. Ewing is an essayist and poet. Her first collection of poetry, essays, and visual art, Electric Arches, is forthcoming from Haymarket

[chrisburke3537]

Poetry Blog Post 2 “Unexplored Unexplored” by Nathan Wade Carter

The unexplored is always something that people are willing to spend the most time with, this is due to the fact that people are scared of that they don’t know and to be honest it’s just a human trait that we can’t really seem to break. But here in this poem I feel that Nathan Wade Carter is trying to change that stereotype and say that people should just let the unexplored stay unexplored. In the poem Nathan says “I vote to leave the unexplored unexplored. Let us not cultivate the world to death”. This quote stood out to me because it is essiantially some of the best advice that we could get as a society today. Due to the fact that most of the world’s hatred and fear is based upon certain things that people explored so I thought this was a great way that he showed that in this poem.

A song that I felt went well with this poem is control by Aaron Taos. In the song he talks about how things aren’t the same when you’re not in control of things and how his life is a complete mess if he doesn’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but to look deeper this song definitely relates to this poem because people want to be able to control what they are doing and what the outcomes of certain thinks might be so they explore the unexplored even though some things shouldn’t be explored.

To wrap things up some stuff that I thought this poem did well was not being to direct about the topic it was getting at or the deeper meaning of the poem, but I did feel that it was a little short and that the ending could’ve been better explained or some how gone back to the title in some way. I think in this poem Nathan’s persona is a lot more hidden and you can’t really notice it as much because the topic doesn’t really call on him to be more vocal and show himself as much as the last poem I did of his which was “Pit”. I also wanted to talk a little bit about a shift that I noticed towards the end of the first stanza I noticed a shift he went from describing things and possibly saying stuff that was related to the unexplored to just describing the way things felt and personifing these items. This was noatable for me because it brought up many questions for me to think about while I was reading and it gave me a way to think deeper about the poem. (302)

[briacampbell3]

Christian, I really like your take on this poem and what it means. I have never thought about the idea of leaving the unexplored, unexpkored, but after reading the poem and your analysis of the poem, I now have an opinion on that. I like the song choice you put with the analysis I find it interesting how you paired this song with your analysis especially because it’s not a song you think about or hear everyday. This gave me a deeper understanding of your poet and his style of writing!