What's Genocide Poem Analysis

Throughout our weeks reading, there were many poems that caught my attention. However, there is one poem in particular that I would like to discuss in this journal because it accurately depicts the flaws in our current educational system. The poem is called, “What’s Genocide?” by Carlos Andrés Gómez. The poem begins by Carlos’s speaker addressing the fact that the school principal is trying to censor his use of profanity in the classroom because it is not appropriate for students to hear vulgar language. The speaker continues by asking his students if they heard of the Holocaust, which majority of the students did at one point in school. He then asked them if they have heard about the Rwandan genocide, nobody knew what he was talking about. The concept that is taken from the first lines of the poem is the fact that schools nowadays are trying to shelter students from the reality of today’s world. This is an upsetting matter because schools are essentially wasting students time. How can students not be informed of what is going on today? How is it that schools are successfully sheltering students from the messed up world we live in? Of course, it is useful that students …show more content…
As the poem continues, the reader can see the format of the quote change by font, style, and length. The repetitive use of this quote adds an intensity to the poem that carries out all the way to the conclusion. A factor that I did not understand from the structure of the poem is why did the author decide to keep all of his lines lowercased and just capitalized the quotes. I could be overthinking it, as quotes usually are capitalized but why make the rest of the poem lowercased? Is there a purpose to it, or is it just his style? Another component that I enjoyed from the poem is the use of many examples as it gave a better perspective on the problems that we are faced with