Post Tagged with: "poetry"

COMMENTARY, Brack:  Alexander offers a lesson of poetry’s power

COMMENTARY, Brack:  Alexander offers a lesson of poetry’s power

Kwame Alexander was the keynote speaker of Saturday’s Black Ink, a gathering of four dozen writers celebrating African American writing in a six-hour book festival that filled the main library.  The festival, now in its second year, reportedly did very well, with writers selling two or three times as many books to hundreds of attendees.

In a poignant talk about memories ranging from a boyhood spent selling books for his father to his mother’s recent death, Alexander kept his audience spellbound with his passionate, strong voice.

But an extended version of a relatively new poem, “Take a Knee,” cut to the core.  It showed how a rat-a-tat-tat of common-day phrases starting with the word “take” can generate real emotion and lead, perhaps, to new ways of considering issues.

by · 09/25/2017 · 2 comments · Andy Brack, Views
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivering a speech.

FOCUS: Poetry, politics, Dr. King and our beloved community

By Marjory Wentworth, poet laureate of South Carolina | I am guessing there won’t be a poem at this week’s presidential inauguration. Too bad, because now is the time to think like a poet.

Through empathy, precise language and imagery, poets connect us to the things of this world and to one another. No one understood this better than the late Winston Churchill, who hand-wrote his speeches in iambic pentameter. This five stress line of verse is essentially the length of the average sentence written in the English language and can be said in one breath. Churchill had to inspire a nation under attack, and he accomplished this in ways that will be remembered forever.

by · 01/16/2017 · Comments are Disabled · Focus, Good news