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Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and
today we're going to discuss the poetry of Langston Hughes.
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So the Harlem Renaissance was an early 20th
Century movement in which writers and artists
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of color explored what it means to be an artist,
what it means to be black, and what it means
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to be an American, and also what it means
to be all three of those things at the same time.
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MFTP: Mr. Green, Mr. Green! Does the Harlem
Renaissance have anything to do with that
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renaissance with, like, Leonardo de Vinci,
and all of the other... Ninja Turtles?
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Kind of, but the Harlem Renaissance happened
a lot later than the European Renaissance,
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also on a different continent, and there was
much less plague and much more jazz.
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[Theme Music]
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OK, so one journalist described the Harlem
Renaissance this way: "What a crowd! All classes
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and colors met face to face, ultra aristocrats,
bourgeois, communists, Park Avenue galore,
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bookers, publishers, Broadway celebs, and
Harlemites giving each other the once over."
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What's the once over? Is that a dirty thing,
Stan? Apparently it is not a dirty thing.
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The Harlem Renaissance began just after the
First World War and lasted into the early
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years of the Great Depression because it turns
out it's pretty hard to have a renaissance
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when no one has any money, as they found out
in Venice. And like the European Renaissance,
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it was a social and political movement, but
also an artistic one. I mean it inspired literature
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and poetry, music, drama, ethnography, publishing,
dance, fashion, probably even some novelty cocktails.
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As Langston Hughes wrote about
this time: "The negro was in vogue."
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Oh, it must be time for the open letter. Oh, look,
it's a floating dictionary. An open letter to language.
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Hey there language, how's it going? Don't say it's
going good, language; say it's going well.
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So Langston Hughes often used the term "negro"
to refer to African Americans, and when we
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quote him or his poetry we're also going to
use that term. But we won't use it when I'm
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talking about African Americans or the African
American experience because these days we
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understand that term to be offensive. I would
argue that this is a good thing about language;
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it has the opportunity to evolve and to become
more inclusive.
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In short, language, I love you and I am amazed
by you every day. Sorry if that sounds creepy;
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I feel I might start singing the song from The
Bodyguard, so I'm just going to stop right now.
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Best wishes,
John Green
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Right, so, the poems, essays, and novels of
the Harlem Renaissance often discuss the so-called
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double consciousness of the African American
experience, a term coined by W.E.B. Dubois
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in his book The Souls of Black Folk, and which
you might remember from our To Kill a Mockingbird
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episode. Some writers like Countee Cullen,
and Claude McKay used poetic forms historically
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associated with European white people, like
the Shakespearean sonnet, the Petrarchan sonnet,
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and the villanelle, which is like a very fancy
sonnet, but other writers, including Langston
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Hughes, chose forms based on African and African
American folk forms, you know, fables and
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spirituals, children's rhymes, and blues songs.
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This is actually part of Modernism generally,
as artists sought to mix high and low culture
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in an attempt to reinvent art. Like, see also
Marcel Duchamp putting a toilet in an art gallery.
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I should clarify: there were already toilets
in art galleries; he was putting it there as art.
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Anyway, let's go to the Thought Bubble for
some background on Langston Hughes.
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Hughes was born in 1902 in Missouri to mixed-race
parents, who divorced early. He grew up in
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Kansas and began to write poetry in high school:
mostly because white students chose him as
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class poet. In his autobiography, he wrote:
"Well, everyone knows -- except us -- that
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all Negros have rhythm, so they elected me
class poet. I felt I couldn't let my white
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classmates down and I've been writing poetry
ever since."
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Hughes' father wanted him to become a mining
engineer so Hughes went to Columbia University,
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but he left after his freshman year, in part
because other students have snubbed him, and
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in part because actually he didn't want to
become a mining engineer.
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So he signed on to work on a boat, going more
or less around the world, returning a couple
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of years later, this is true, with a red-haired
monkey named Jocko. He didn't enjoy the trip
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very much but that might actually have been
a good thing because as he wrote in his autobiography:
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"My best poems were all written when I felt
the worst. When I was happy, I didn't write anything."
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Which stands in stark contrast to all
the happy poets, you know:
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Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
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Hughes aimed to write in accessible, familiar
language, and in that he was influenced by
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poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, and also
people like Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman,
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all of whom wrote in vernacular, everyday
language in the hopes that their work could
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appeal to a larger audience.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
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So, as Hughes wrote in a 1927 essay, classical
forms didn't support the work he wanted to do:
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"Certainly the Shakespearean sonnet would
be no mold in which to express the life of
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Beale Street or Lenox Avenue nor could the
emotions of State Street be captured in rondeau.
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I am not interested in doing tricks with rhymes.
I am interested in reproducing the human soul, if I can."
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And this is what makes Hughes such an important
poet. He brilliantly combines formal poetry
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with the oral tradition, and he refuses to
draw a bright line between fine art and folk art.
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OK, in order to have a better understanding
of Hughes' approach to poetry, let's look
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at an early manifesto he wrote called "The
Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
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In this essay, he criticizes other black writers
for being too interested in white culture
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and white forms. He writes: "This is the mountain
standing in the way of any true Negro art
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in America-- this urge within the race toward
whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality
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into the mold of American standardization, and to
be as little Negro and as much American as possible."
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Now, some black writers, like Countee Cullen,
accused Hughes of being TOO black. Like in
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a review of Hughes' first book Cullen wrote,
"There is too much emphasis of strictly Negro
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themes." But, then again, later on, James
Baldwin would condemn Hughes for not diving
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deep enough into African American experience;
like Baldwin wrote that Hughes poems "take
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refuge, finally, in a fake simplicity in order
to avoid the very difficult simplicity of the experience."
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It's hard out there for a Langston Hughes.
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Anyway, let's make up our own mind. I think
the best way to get a sense of how Langston
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Hughes expresses himself is probably to,
like, actually read a couple of his poems.
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Let's begin with "The Negro Speaks of Rivers":
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"I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and
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older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
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My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were
young.
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I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled
me to sleep.
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I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids
above it.
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I heard the singing of the Mississippi when
Abe Lincoln
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went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its
muddy
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bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
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I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
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My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
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Here's a bit of news that will be discouraging
to most of you aspiring writers out there:
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Hughes wrote that poem just after graduating
from high school. He was riding a train to
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see his estranged father and he passed over
the Mississippi. He writes: "I began to think
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about what that river, the old Mississippi,
had meant to Negros in the past... Then I
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began to think about other rivers in the past--the
Congo, and the Niger, and the Nile in Africa--and
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the thought came to me: 'I've known rivers,'
and I put it down on the back of an envelope
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I had in my pocket, and within the space of
ten or fifteen minutes, as the train gathered
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speed in the dusk, I had written this poem."
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Are you even serious? "Ten or fifteen minutes"!
What? Really!
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So "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is in the
lyric mode: it's poetry trying to capture
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an internal emotional state. He uses the vision
of these rivers to transcend his immediate
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relationships and to connect himself instead
to all of his African forefathers, trading
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the immediate for the immortal. The repetition
of "I've known rivers" at the beginning and
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"my soul has grown deep like the rivers" at
the middle and end, gives the poem the feeling
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of, like, a sermon or spiritual, in keeping
with Hughes' use of folk forms.
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And then, there's the catalog of active verbs:
"I bathed", "I built", "I listened", "I looked."
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Those show people actively participating in
human life and having agency; that even amid
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oppression and dehumanization, these people
were still building and listening and looking.
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And then, in the latter part of the poem,
there are adjectives that in other poems might
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be used pejoratively, like "muddy" and "dusky",
that are linked with other adjectives, "golden",
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"ancient", that encourage us to perceive them
in a far more positive light. So, darkness
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and brownness are seen as lustrous and valuable
and revered.
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And I know that some of you will say, oh,
you're overreading the poem: Hughes didn't
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mean any of this stuff. To which I say: it
doesn't matter. These are still interesting
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and cool uses of language. Although, as it
happens, I'm not overreading it.
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Anyway, let's look at one more poem, "Harlem",
written in 1951:
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"What happens to a dream deferred?
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Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
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Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
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Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
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like a syrupy sweet?
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Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
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Or does it explode?"
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The dream here is likely a version of the
American dream, a dream that at the time Hughes
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wrote the poem was still denied to most African
Americans. And in that sense, it's kind of
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optimistic that Hughes uses the term deferred,
rather than, like, destroyed or forbidden.
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There's also a great moment earlier in that
same book of poems in which Hughes writes,
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"Good morning Daddy, aint you heard, the boogie
woogie rumble, of a dream deferred", which
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uses the conventions of blues music to associate the
deferral of the dream with, like, a boogie-woogie rumble.
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But the imagery in this poem is very negative:
it often takes things that are sweet and then
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makes them horrifying. You've got dried raisins,
running sores. I guess sores aren't that sweet,
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but you do have crusty sweets. Even the verbs
are negative: "dry", "fester", "stink", "crust",
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"sag". And that works against any real optimism.
This is made even more interesting and complicated
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by the fact that the poem sounds like a nursery
rhyme: it has neat, perfect, one-syllable
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rhymes like "sun" and "run", "meat" and "sweet".
But then you have the layout of the poem,
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which resists conventional stanzas, and that
troubles the simplicity here. Also, the rhythm
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of the poem is always changing. Like, this
isn't straight iambic pentameter or anything
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like that, and that makes it hard to build
into a comfortable pace as the reader. And
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then there's that last line, "Or does it explode",
which from a meter perspective is totally
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fascinating because there's a stress on every
single syllable: Or. Does. It. Ex-plode.
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I don't want to get too Lit Crit-y on you but
it's like the last line itself is trying to
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explode because there's no break, no relief.
So the rhymes make it sound harmless, like
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it's from a children's book, but the imagery
and rhythm tell another, much more barbed story.
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And this is definitely one of Hughes' more political poems: He's warning that if circumstances don't change,
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there might be dangerous consequences. This poem proceeded the bulk of the Civil Rights Movement,
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but it suggests that withholding true equality has
real risks and real costs to everyone in a social order.
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There's so many other great Langston Hughes
poems that we don't have time to discuss like:
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"Dream Boogie", "I, Too", "Dream Variations",
"Theme for English B". I want to share just
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one more with you, no lit crit or anything,
just the poem: "Folks I'm tell you, birthing
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is hard and dying is mean, so get yourself
a little lovin, in between." See, sometimes
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literature is just in the business of proving
good advice.
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Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.
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