Three Legged Chairs By Zora Neale Hurston Analysis

What makes a poem a Black poem? The question at first blush seems absurd because of the obviousness of the answer. Understood more fully, however, this question is deeper than it appears. The heart of this query is determining defining characteristics or essential elements of African American poetry. One small sampling of college literature professors found that the most common definition of African American literature was “African American writers who wrote about black characters and the black experience” (Gibson 77). This definition does not provide an adequate delineation of the crucial properties of Black poetry. Zora Neale Hurston, novelist and folklorist, observes that the following are some of the characteristics of African American …show more content…
Hurston asserts, “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized [sic]. No matter how joyful or how sad the case there is sufficient poise for drama” (294). “Today’s News” by Elizabeth Alexander illustrates this penchant for drama by juxtaposing the concept of writing poetry with a brawling incident involving heavyweight champion Mike Tyson (Rampersad 1). Lamont B. Steptoe’s “Three Legged Chairs” is replete with images of staggering trees, “bullets in the back,” and people going to their “graves/embittered, enraged, unknown/and screaming” (18). Ray Durem portrays “a black woman working out her guts,” as well as “a black boy, blacker still from death” in “To the Pale Poets” (5). Audre Lorde describes the poetry inside her as “screaming” and “beating about for exit or entry” in “Bloodbirth.” The bringing forth of this internal “that” is compared to an explosion with “bits…flying out in all directions” and to a “birth or exorcism.” The writing of poetry, then, is represented as a high-pitched drama that leaves the poet “lying exposed” …show more content…
The most commonly noted language feature is the use of dialect. Hurston points out that the true writers of Black dialect differ markedly from the White writers who attempt to write it (307). The key difference is authenticity. Hoagland provides one of the best examples in the first section of the use of dialect. While the entire poem is not written in the Black dialect, some of the expressions reveal peculiarities of it. The beginning line, for instance, “Is my shit correct?”, shows the influence of the dialect. Asking about “my do” also evidences the same (Rampersad 7). Word choice is distinctive in African American poetry. Words such as “grooving” and “blues” occur in Rodgers (17), while Hoagland uses typically Black words and expressions, such as, “happenin,” “where it’s at,” “all that,” “my kicks,” and “Word” (7) and Cortez, “jive” (3). There is also a unique use of metaphor and simile (Hurston 295). Cortez, for example, speaks of the “salty dust devil winds/spitting in to silver helmets/through shit splattered wings” and likens a dream to a nail (Rampersad 3). Rita Dove in “Nexus” depicts a praying mantis outside the window as having a “monkey wrench head,” “pale eyes,” and “ragged jaws” as well as being “absurdly green” (4). Jackson speaks of the “pimped belch of Detroit” (14). Steptoe portrays “trees [that]/stagger like human drunks,” inverting the conventional order of the comparison