Kucaj
English 10
Name: ____________
Poetry Unit – Man vs. Society
Categories and Poems:
1. Stereotypes
a. Gender
“Just Because” – Rodney Tam, Rob Cruz & Curtis Porter (2)
“Barbie Doll” – Marge Piercy (3)
“Those Winter Sundays” - Robert Hayden (4)
b. Race
“Theme for English B” – Langston Hughes (5)
“Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963” – Martin Espada (6)
“Coal” – Audre Lorde (7)
“The Certainty” – Roque Dalton (7)
c. Class
“Terrible People” – Ogden Nash (8)
“To the Pay Toilet” – Marge Piercy (9)
2. Censorship/Awareness
“The History Teacher” – Billy Collins (10)
“ I am the People, the Mob” – Carl Sandburg (10)
“I, Too” – Langston Hughes (11)
4. Individual vs. Group
“Conscientious Objector” – Edna St. Vincent Melay (12)
“The Low Road” – Marge Piercy (13)
“A Pace Like That” – Yehuda Amichai (11)
“Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night” – Dylan Thomas (14)
3. War/ Politics
“In Flanders Field” – John McCrae (15)
“Unknown Citizen” - W. H. Auden (16)
1
Just because I’m Asian
It doesn’t mean that I am a genius,
That I have a problem free life,
That I can be pushed around.
Just because I’m Asian
I don’t live with twenty people in one room,
I don’t eat domesticated animals,
I’m not on welfare.
Just because I’m Asian
It doesn’t mean I can’t play basketball,
Or any other American sport,
It doesn’t mean I can’t take you to the hole
Or lay you out in a football game.
Just because I’m Asian
It doesn’t mean my name is Ching-chong from Hong Kong.
Just because I’m Asian
Why does it matter what you look like?
And not who you are?
I’m me.
Why does race matter?
Just because I’m Asian—Don’t stereotype me.
-Rodney Tam
StereotypesGender/ Race
Just because I’m Mexican
I’m not lazy,
I’m not fat,
I’m not in a gang.
Just because I’m Mexican
I don’t live in a barrio,
I don’t drive a pickup truck,
I don’t speak with an accent,
And I don’t pick lettuce.
Just because I’m Mexican
I haven’t knocked up a bunch of girls,
I haven’t dropped out of school,
And I don’t plan to.
Just because I’m Mexican
What if I had done some tings that I said I didn’t?
Does that make me a bad person?
Just because I am what I am—don’t stereotype me.
-Rob Cruz
Just because I play basketball
I’m not dumb,
I don’t get bad grades,
I’m not a jock.
Just because I play basketball
Doesn’t mean I get drunk after every game,
It doesn’t mean I’m popular,
It doesn’t mean I’m going to get some girl pregnant.
Just because I play basketball, why do you have to stereotype me?
Why can’t you be friends with me?
Do you even know my name?
My name is Curtis.
And if you stereotype me like that—I don’t want to know you.
-Curtis Porter
2
Barbie Doll
Stereotypes- Gender
This girlchild was born as usual
and presented dolls that did pee-pee
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
Anonymous submission.
Marge Piercy
3
Those Winter Sundays
Stereotypes- Gender
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
Robert E. Hayden
4
THEME FOR ENGLISH B
By Langston Hughes
The instructor said,
Stereotypes- Race
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you--Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white--yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me--although you're older---and white--and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
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Stereotypes- Race
Public School 190, Brooklyn 1963
Martin Espada
The inkwells had no ink.
The flag had 48 stars, four years
after Alaska and Hawaii.
There were vandalized blackboards
and chairs with three legs,
taped windows, retarded boys penned
in the basement.
Some of us stared in Spanish.
We windmilled punches
or hid in the closet to steal from coats
as the teacher drowsed, head bobbing.
We had the Dick and Jane books,
but someone filled in their faces
with a brown crayon.
When Kennedy was shot,
they hurried us onto buses,
not saying why,
saying only that
something bad had happened.
But we knew
something bad had happened,
knew that before
November 22, 1963.
The Certainty
After four hours of torture, the Apache and the other two
Stereotypes- Race
6
cops threw a bucket of water at the prisoner to wake him up
and said: "The Colonel has ordered us to tell you you're to be
given a chance to save your skin. If you guess which of us has
a glass eye, you'll be spared torture." After passing his gaze
over the faces of his executioners, the prisoner pointed to
one of them: "His. His right eye is glass."
And the astonished cops said, "You're saved! But how did
you guess? All your buddies missed because the eye is
American, that is, perfect." "Very simple," said the prisoner,
feeling he was going to faint again, "it was the only eye that
looked at me without hatred."
Of course they continued torturing him.
Roque Dalton
Audre Lorde- Coal
I
is the total black, being spoken
from the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open
how a diamond comes into a knot of flame
how sound comes into a words, coloured
by who pays what for speaking.
Some words are open like a diamond
on glass windows
singing out within the crash of sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
in a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
and come whatever will all chances
the stub remains
an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like gypsies over my tongue
to explode through my lips
like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
bedevil me
Love is word, another kind of open.
As the diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am Black because I come from the earth's inside
Now take my word for jewel in the open light
The Terrible People
By Ogden Nash
Stereotypes- Class
7
People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they
want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube
and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I dont' mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
But no, they insist on being stealthy
About the pleasures of being wealthy,
And the possession of a handsome annuity
Makes them think that to say how hard it is to make both ends meet is their bounden
duty.
You cannot conceive of an occasion
Which will find them without some suitable evasion.
Yes indeed, with arguments they are very fecund;
Their first point is that money isn't everything, and that they have no money anyhow is
their second.
Some people's money is merited,
And other people's is inherited,
But wherever it comes from,
They talk about it as if it were something you got pink gums from.
Perhaps indeed the possession of wealth is constantly distressing,
But I should be quite willing to assume every curse of wealth if I could at the same time
assume every blessing.
The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure,
Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor.
Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won't buy, but it's very funny -Have you ever tried to buy them without money?
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Stereotypes- Class
To the Pay Toilet
You strop my anger, especially
when I find you in restaurant or bar
and pay for the same liquid, coming and going.
In bus depots and airports and turnpike plazas
some woman is dragging in with three kids hung off her
shrieking their simple urgency like gulls.
She's supposed to pay for each of them
and the privilege of not dirtying the corporate floor.
Sometimes a woman in a uniform's on duty
black or whatever the prevailing bottom is
getting thirty cents an hour to make sure
no woman sneaks her full bladder under a door.
Most blatantly you shout that waste of resources
for the greatest good of the smallest number
where twenty pay toilets line up glinty clean
and at the end of the row one free toilet
oozes from under its crooked door,
while a row of weary women carrying packages and babies
wait and wait and wait to do
what only the dead find unnecessary.
Marge Piercy
9
The History Teacher - Billy Collins
Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million
years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel
Age,
named after the long driveways of the
time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing
more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"
Censorship
The War of the Roses took place in a
garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny
atom on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their
glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and
walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that
soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling
stories
designed to make the enemy nod off
I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB – Carl Sandberg
I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
world's food and clothes.
I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons
come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And
then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.
I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand
for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
makes me work and give up what I have. And I
forget.
Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
drops for history to remember. Then--I forget.
When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world
say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.
The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.
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Individual Vs. Group
A Pace Like That
Yehuda Amichai
I’m looking at the lemon tree I planted.
A year ago. I’d need a different pace, a slower one,
To observe the growth of it’s branches, it’s leaves as they open.
I want a pace like that.
Not like reading a newspaper
But the way a child learns to read,
Or the way you quietly decipher the inscription
On an ancient tombstone.
And what a Torah scroll takes an entire year to do
As it rolls its way from Genesis to the death of Moses.
I do each day in haste
Or in sleepless nights rolling over from side to side.
The longer you live, the more people there are
Who comment on your actions. Like a worker
In a manhole: at the opening above him
People stand around giving free advice
And yelling instructions,
But he’s all alone down there in his depths.
I, Too
I, too, sing America.
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed-I, too, am America.
-Langston Hughes
11
Individual Vs. Group
Conscientious Objector
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the
clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the
Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he clinches the girth.
And he may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell
him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the
black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death;I am not
on his pay-roll.
I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends nor of my
enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route
to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver
men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe
with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.
Individual Vs. Group
12
The low road
-Marge Piercy
What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover. They can do anything
you can't stop them
from doing. How can you stop
them? Alone, you can fight,
you can refuse, you can
take what revenge you can
but they roll over you.
But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.
a committee, a wedge. With four
you can play bridge and start
an organization. With six
you can rent a whole house,
eat pie for dinner with no
seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own
newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own
paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know you who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
Two people can keep each other
sane, can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation,
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Individual Vs. Group
Do Not go Gentle into that Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
-
Dylan Thomas
14
War/Politics
In Flanders Fields
By John McCrae
In Flanders field the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
Though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
War/Politics
15
The Unknown Citizen
By. W. H. Auden
(To JS/07/M/378/
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)
He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an oldfashioned word, he was a
saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every
way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it
cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace; When there was war,
he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of
his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their
education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
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