Reflective Blog

I came into winter term knowing almost nothing about Poetry. All i knew was that Mrs. Lewis was an awesome teacher and really helped me in the library on papers. The first day I walked in the class I knew that this class was going to be awesome. I didn't know what Poetry was at all, I even wrote a poem that i explained that I didn't even know how to write a real poem yet. On workshop days I always remember asking "how long does it have to be." Mrs. Lewis just said it didn't matter, which was awesome because i didn't know exactly what to write and i could focus more on content. In the end, Mrs. Lewis is a completely awesome teacher, along with my classmates. We worked together a lot and Mrs. Lewis got graphs and charts out to show how to work together. After I took the class, I can now recall information about many poets (I even recognized one in a movie), and realized that poetry is more than just words, but a culture.

Origins of Hip Hop

Hip hop is a musical genre which developed alongside hip hop culture, defined by key stylistic elements such as rapping, DJing, sampling, scratching and beatboxing. Hip hop began in Bronx, New York in the 1970s, primarily among African Americans,and Jamaican Americans. The beginnings of hip hop are found in African-American music and ultimately African music. The griots of West Africa are a group of traveling singers and poets who are part of an oral tradition dating back hundreds of years. Their vocal style is similar to that of rappers. The African-American traditions of signifyin', the dozens, and jazz poetry are all descended from the griots. These African Americans greatly influenced our hip hop culture of today.

Miles Davis

Miles Davis is considered as one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. He was an African American Trumpeter and was at the forefront of jazz music. In 1944 he moved to New York City, the heart of the Harlem Renaissance. Davis is known as having the "birth of the cool" which has the objective was to achieve a sound similar to the human voice, through carefully arranged compositions and by emphasizing a relaxed, melodic approach to the improvisations. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Davis greatly influenced acid rock (example here) and funk artists such as Jimi Hendrix. Rolling Stone's Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll noted that:

Miles Davis played a crucial and inevitably controversial role in every major development in jazz since the mid-'40s, and no other jazz musician has had so profound an effect on rock. Miles Davis was the most widely recognized jazz musician of his era, an outspoken social critic and an arbiter of style - in attitude and fashion - as well as music

Langston Hughes

How are the Black Arts Movement and Hip-Hop connected to one another.

Langston Hughes was a Pioneer in the Harlem Renaissance. As Du Bose Heyward wrote in the New York Herald Tribune in 1926:

Langston Hughes, although only twenty-four years old, is already conspicuous in the group of Negro intellectuals who are dignifying Harlem with a genuine art life. . . . It is, however, as an individual poet, not as a member of a new and interesting literary group, or as a spokesman for a race that Langston Hughes must stand or fall. . . . Always intensely subjective, passionate, keenly sensitive to beauty and possessed of an unfaltering musical sense, Langston Hughes has given us a 'first book' that marks the opening of a career well worth watching.

Langston Hughes was criticized early for his views on black life in the 1920s. He wrote about being a poor man in the poor part of the cities, which was not how African Americans wanted to be represented, especially during a time when black people were being noticed as a people in America. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. This contributed especially to the rap music movement by showing other people that they can express what they are feeling in song rather than poetry which people didn't want to read anymore. Although the rap movement didn't start until around 1970 and Langston Hughes did most of his work in the 1950s, he became a vital factor into being a predecessor of rap music.