Climbing the Poet's Tree: Challenges #21 and 22

[poetree_admin]

alee_grrl

Announcement: Climbing the Poet's Tree Challenges are going to shift to a bi-weekly rather than weekly schedule. This gives everyone a bit more time to work on challenge responses.

Congratulations to primeideal who won Challenge #19, the QUILTBAG poetry challenge. There were no entrants for Challenge #20, the readers challenge. Since it has been so long since our last challenge, no one is precluded from winning this round except for jjhunter and alee_grrl who are the community admins and thus always ineligible.

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For Writers:
Challege #21: In the United States the first Monday of September is celebrated as Labor Day, and is meant to be a reflection and remembrance of the Labor movement as well as a reminder of how important worker's rights and the Labor movement truly is. This week will be looking in depth at Julia Stein's Downtown Women. So your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to write a poem relating to the Labor theme. It can be a historical piece reflecting on the movement. It can be an piece on the need for modern day labor reforms. It can also be on one of the many issues connected to the Labor movement, like immigration and women's rights. As Downtown Women shows us, many of these concerns are deeply interwoven with one another.

For Readers:
Challenge #22: Poetry has long been a form of expression within the Labor movement. Share one of your favorite poems using this theme. What causes it to resonate with you? Are there particular word choices or rhythms in the poem that appeal? Answers can be posted as a reply to this thread and do not have to be long. You can also post on your own blog and share a link here in the comments.

This week's prizes:
Winner of each challenge gets zir choice of 30 dreamwidth points (the equivalent of one month of paid time), or a icon or poem (any format, though some make take more time than others, and on a topic of your choice) by alee_grrl.

The winner for each week’s writing challenge will be chosen by a rotating volunteer from the community. (This week’s volunteer judge is alee_grrl.) The winner for the reader’s challenge will be chosen randomly among all those who successfully complete the challenge. While anyone is welcome to accept and complete either or both challenges, the following people are not eligible for winning: this week’s judge (ineligible for Challenge #21; eligible for Challenge #22); last week’s winners (ineligible for whichever challenge they won last week) [see note at beginning of post]; the winner of Challenge #21 (ineligible for winning Challenge #22); and the POETREE admins, jjhunter & alee_grrl (ineligible for both challenges).


Note that you do not have to be a member of POETREE, or even Dreamwidth for that matter, to participate. When you complete one of the challenges, please comment at this post with links to your poem or comments; if you complete both, please comment separately for each challenge. Deadline for challenge is Friday, September 21, 2012 at 11:59 EDT. Winners will be announced that Sunday.

Comments

Challenge 22

[untonuggan]

I realized I wasn't familiar with too much labor poetry, so I started reading some...then I realized for me no labor day poetry fest would be complete without a poem that mentioned slavery.

So here is the rather epic Freedom's Plow by Langston Hughes, which is too long to post in its entirety here.

An excellent excerpt, however, is:

Free hands and slave hands,
Indentured hands, adventurous hands,
White hands and black hands
Held the plow handles,
Ax handles, hammer handles,
Launched the boats and whipped the horses
That fed and housed and moved America.
Thus together through labor,
All these hands made America.

As for the song mentioned in the poem ("Keep Your Hand on the Plow, Hold On!", here is a version sung by Mahalia Jackson accompanied by Duke Ellington's orchestra)

Challenge 21

[untonuggan]

NSFW bc of language and I suppose sexual innuendo? I dunno

It's a poem. It wrote itself. Have a gift from the universe.