Reader: Charley Bevill

Respondent: [Liz Sydnor]

Recorder: Jennifer Carnes

"A Black Man’s Sonata: For John Dowell"

Michael S. Weaver

Unsettling America, pp. 227-8

5a. To discover the power of poetry and fiction to help "others" hear the minority voice and vicariously share the minority experience.

5e. To emphasize how all speakers and writers may use common devices of human language to make poetry, including narrative, poetic devices, and figures of speech.

Style: What does this lyric poem accomplish that a prose narrative cannot?

The title itself suggests musicality. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a sonata as a musical composition for one or several instruments usually written in three or four movements. In this case, there are four stanzas and the instrument is the human voice. Poetry was originally done orally in song. This free verse narrative poem flowed like music, especially the ending. Using the four stanzas, the poem tells the story of the neighbor, then the neighborhood, next the young boys in the neighborhood, and finally the narrator’s story. Weaver’s use of Aretha Franklin’s name to bring in the song "Respect" adds to the musicality of the poem.

Poetic Devices/Figures of Speech:

Alliteration used all in one line: "The hip hops say, don’t dis me man."

Simile: "He threatened people and strutted/ like a tiger…" "They look for a weakness,/ like tigers in the grass."

Metaphor: Many relate to tigers, which runs throughout the poem such as "He staked his territory."

Minority Voice:

Weaver’s voice helps us to vicariously share in the narrator’s experience. In his neighborhood, young Black men don’t fear death. This fearlessness of the young prevents many of them surviving to old age. The longer the narrator lives, the more he realizes the fears he has to face. The fear "of not seeing grandchildren" I fell encompasses more than just his grandchildren. If the Black man lives long enough to have children, will they survive to one day have their own children? Will these children in turn survive the streets of West Philadelphia?

Shellie: He is old already. Maybe he already has grandkids.

Dr. White: He has already lived through what the youths in the neighborhood live through now.

Karen: There was no life left in the neighbor’s heart after jail. Perhaps he was dead already.

Neely: The anger of a generation at a younger generation rising in anger was expressed when he looks at the "hip hops" and says he’s hoping they won’t devour him.

Claudine: The description of the neighbor is a picture of a pacing tiger in a cage.

Shellie: Symbolic of a jungle hierarchy but with no respect.

Ginger: Black stripes are the old ways. Yellow is the new generation. Like a fire consumes and is evil, evil consumes.

Amanda: I don’t see fire as consuming but as rebirth.

Dr. White: The last image gives rise to a number of emotions, like music awakens a number of feelings.

Charley: The younger generation shows no respect because they feel they don’t get any. They don’t realize they haven’t earned respect. A song that popped into my head when the neighbor is described is "Bad, Bad, Leroy Brown."