She seems to be blending together different moments of time. The song she's weaving is for her entire culture. Hughes and Brown often seem to be looking solely to the future, and laying the groundwork for people to come. Bennet is aching for a more timeless joy.

There's a switch here, from formal poetry to phonetics, which changes the tone very quickly. She says she weaving a song, and I think this switch is the moment the tapestry starts to come together for her.

A lot of these poems revolving around am attraction to Africa and Black history are very focused on the desert and the jungle. Even know, Americans tend to know very little about what life is like in different parts of Africa. It's the biggest continent in the world, with major metropolitan cities, and dozens of countries, but we still only ever hear it discussed as so much sand. It makes you question whether the poem is fantasizing about Africa itself, or just a vague sense of the past.

I think people love to find excuses to laugh, to meet new people, to spend time with friends. A concert like this is exactly that kind of opportunity. The people aren't just coming all this way for Ma Rainey, they're coming for each other.

There's this sense of catharsis; people come from miles around, but not just for a party. They came to be vulnerable, to share their vulnerability, to trust someone else to express it in song.

It seems like the most important thing about Ma Rainey is that she and her audience are on the same level. The people respect and admire her because she's been where they are, she's singing about the things they feel. She isn't condescending or telling stories no one can connect to. She's not raising herself above anyone. She is a part of her culture.

The choice to rhyme here evokes a sense of musicality. Someone could take a guitar to this poem; it wouldn't be hard to turn it into a song. Though, I don't know many songs, even metal ones, who mention rotted meat. As much as this poem could be a song, it doesn't need to be.

This section makes me wonder if he sees America as a house, a family, trying to deny its own makeup. It's Hughes's house too, it's his kitchen. He has as much a right to the table, to the American identity, as anyone.

I think a huge aspect of towing the line between blues and poetry is the choice to be loyal to the way blues music sounds. Hughes doesn't white wash the song, he doesn't force spelling or grammar onto it. He does his best to capture the sound and the feeling, instead of trying to perfect it.

Children are often told from a young age to "ignore bullies, and they'll lose interest and go away." Studies upon studies show that this isn't true; if someone enjoys tormenting someone else, and is never stood up to, they'll just keep going and going. Adults are told the same thing in social cause, "Just ignore them, be the best version of yourself, eventually they'll see." Not only is this a meaningless call against acting as a collective, but it is a strategy that always fails.

It's such a strange idea that racism is a Black man's problem. It's like saying hit-and-runs are a pedestrian's problem. It's a ridiculous way of shifting blame, and avoiding reparations. We hear similar things aimed at victim's of assault; "a women's issue." Why is it for the hurt party to solve? Why can't the perpetrators be the ones finding solutions?

A lot of the concepts he's bringing up here are as central to the alleviation of class struggle as they are to racial struggle– two indivisible concepts. He's talking about collectivism and crowdsourcing, which are increasingly prevalent ideals in today's culture.

Nowadays in academia, I hear a lot of artists/writers of color talk about how their writing only ever seems to gain recognition or favor when they discuss their racial trauma– "trauma porn." White academia seems to have made something of a switch, from ignoring Black voices altogether, to only appreciating them when they perform pain. His dream still hasn't come to fruition. The game has just changed.

I find it interesting that he focuses on the word "Nordic," as opposed to "Aglo," when discussing white or white-adjacent culture in America. I've always perceived and read that American culture values British culture more than any other, by nature of imperialism. What makes him look North?

Black people have always been so pressured to "act white" in America, but we also frequently see white people stealing and misappropriating aspects of Black culture. Recently, there's been a trend of white women actively pretending to be Black online ("blackfishing"), that is particularly disturbing. Tweet about blackfishing

This sense of natural phenomenon hiding the dark reality of pain reminded me of Henri Julian Rousseau's Horse Attacked by a Jaguar. We often think of nature as innocent, but when artists remind us of the dangers hidden within, I think some part of early human nature will always kick in, and we know they're right. ![Horse Attacked by a Jaguar] (http://wayback.archive-it.org/5005/20141108063005/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryP/P_242_382.b.jpg)

It always bothers me how, in literature, men in poverty can be presented as free, or down on their luck, but impoverished women are almost singularly derided and dismissed as "slatterns," without the empathy afforded to men ("railroading out of sheer lust for adventure"). This drew me to the piece White Slave by Abastenia St. Leger Eberle, which still only offers empathy to white sex workers, still excluding BIPOC. ![White Slave] (http://wayback.archive-it.org/5005/20141107142312/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/galleryA/A_90_673.b.jpg)

This brought to mind a book I read as a child, where the protagonist must cross a field of poison-covered spikes. The comparison between the image of a flowering meadow with one like this is bold.

Up to this point, this poem was a eulogy, but here it becomes apparent that this person hasn't died just yet. Earlier, the speakers is grieved that the man has been silenced, yet she hushes him herself in the end. This hushing isn't harsh though, it is out of camaraderie. Someone is here to mourn him, and mourn with him, in the end.

Isn't the act of setting a bone or cleaning a wound an act of love, though? Before we had organized medicine, humans still tried to keep their loved ones alive through whatever care they could think to offer. It is only through acts of love that humanity developed the study of medicine at all.

This phrase, while somewhat ominous, still makes the woods feel very tempting. Readers are called by the woods almost as strongly as the speaker.

"True" here probably means an honest living, but the double meaning of the word gives me pause.

This is such an interesting moment of irony where the speaker is arguing that they are a good neighbor, while referencing [what I assume is] a saying claiming good neighbors have cows, and they have no cows.

Within this rhyme there's such a contrast of an image of wakefulness/awareness with one of breaking/death

Lucinda seems to be the speaker of the poem. Was she real? Or is she just a character?

He's referencing older poets but his own work greatly contrasts with the epic poetry of Homer, and the long lines of Whitman. This poem is largely about the music of the earth-- Homer was originally sung, and Whitman spoke of the earth. Is that the connection?

She finally accepts her prison and only then does it occur to her loved ones that her deterioration is being caused by her imprisonment

The wife is more infantilized than the actual infant

Flagrant signs of abusive husband from the beginning, why do so many adaptations for this story in film present the protagonist as the villain?

Black men are still today stereotyped as "deadbeat dads," this legacy continues

Black people were denied formal education then critiqued for ignorance in a miserable self-perpetuating cycle, and this cycle still continues in any place where low-income people are forced to look for knowledge outside of (white) institutions

There's a sense of self-preservation in accepting and even encouraging estrangement from those who reject him, but it's somewhat short-lived against what he loses through that rejection

So, to Adams's and Langley's minds, this new science is blasphemous to the God of science, or at least the science they've come to live by. As much as Adams admires it, does he hate it too? Or just fear it?

What is this new morality that he's creating that is analogous to the "moral force" of the cross?

Is this literal, like about physics? Is it some artistic term I'm not familiar with?

Trotters could be horses if glue is being made from them, this is a pretty violent image if so, despite the benign-sounding language

Sharpened and whittled animal bones have been used by some cultures for divination, could this be related?

Tar as in something that preserves dead bodies (candor about what creatures used to look like?), or as in something used for torture/execution?