1. The visual images in the excerpts from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely serve as reinforcement to the messages that the poems are trying to convey. For example, in the excerpt about the American flag, where Rankine inquires about the whereabouts of another person’s American flag, the image with the excerpt reinforces this idea of total patriotism. In the image, a man holds a flag that covers most of his face and his body, perhaps capturing the idea of the excerpt; that a person must no longer be an individual and that they must be an total “American”. Rankine also uses the image of a blank TV screen throughout the book, perhaps symbolizing the disillusionment that American felt over what they had just witnessed with 9/11. By using these images, Rankine reinforces her poems messages with her readers.
2. Rankine portrays the dominant emotion in the post-9/11 world as paranoia. In almost all of the excerpts, Rankine conveys the panic and fear that New Yorkers were feeling at this time. For …show more content…
My reading of the material and the video really differed in tone and then in turn how I interpreted the piece. When I originally read the poem, I read it in a sort of angry tone. I thought that Rankine intended the poem to be sort of an angry outburst, which was how I also interpreted the incident based on the tape-like pictures included with the poem. Then, listening to and watching the video made me reinterpret the poem in a completely different way. In the video, the poem is read slowly and with minimum inflection- it doesn’t sound angry. Also, as the video image combined with the poem was reduced to a very slow frame speed, it made the incident easier to understand and the viewer can see that the player who is headbutted said something to the player doing the headbutting, which changes the way the viewer sees the players. Overall, my interpretation of the poem’s tone did differ without the video accompaniment, but the message about the harmfulness of years of racism
2. Rankine portrays the dominant emotion in the post-9/11 world as paranoia. In almost all of the excerpts, Rankine conveys the panic and fear that New Yorkers were feeling at this time. For …show more content…
My reading of the material and the video really differed in tone and then in turn how I interpreted the piece. When I originally read the poem, I read it in a sort of angry tone. I thought that Rankine intended the poem to be sort of an angry outburst, which was how I also interpreted the incident based on the tape-like pictures included with the poem. Then, listening to and watching the video made me reinterpret the poem in a completely different way. In the video, the poem is read slowly and with minimum inflection- it doesn’t sound angry. Also, as the video image combined with the poem was reduced to a very slow frame speed, it made the incident easier to understand and the viewer can see that the player who is headbutted said something to the player doing the headbutting, which changes the way the viewer sees the players. Overall, my interpretation of the poem’s tone did differ without the video accompaniment, but the message about the harmfulness of years of racism