{"id":3164,"date":"2008-11-03T09:09:28","date_gmt":"2008-11-03T16:09:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2008\/11\/03\/maybe-im-being-too-literal-with-my-poetic-metaphors-but-with-all-due-respect-to-langston-hughes-ive-never-seen-an-exploding-raisin\/"},"modified":"2008-11-03T09:09:28","modified_gmt":"2008-11-03T16:09:28","slug":"maybe-im-being-too-literal-with-my-poetic-metaphors-but-with-all-due-respect-to-langston-hughes-ive-never-seen-an-exploding-raisin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2008\/11\/03\/maybe-im-being-too-literal-with-my-poetic-metaphors-but-with-all-due-respect-to-langston-hughes-ive-never-seen-an-exploding-raisin\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe I’m being too literal with my poetic metaphors, but with all due respect to Langston Hughes, I’ve never seen an exploding raisin."},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years back a woman was on NPR, probably All Things Considered, who gave a commentary which, when I have a spare minute I’ll go ahead and look up.\u00c2\u00a0 She was teaching creative writing to a group of elementary school students, I think but am not positive a group of girls.\u00c2\u00a0 She handed to the class the Langston Hughes poem about spontaneous raisin combustion<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 And, naturally the class then all turned in variations of a theme: their dreams encapsulated in the metaphor of baked raisins.\u00c2\u00a0 Her point was that this was not writing, and that true writing does not come until you get past this imitiative stage — which happened when a student turned in\u00c2\u00a0something about dreams being squashed, buried, and dying.<\/p>\n

As always, I have a similar anecdote which is both the same and very, very different<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I always have that disconnect in comparing similar childhood and adolescent anecdotes, which is all sentiment is thrown out and where she has Langston Hughes, I have a crudity.<\/p>\n

Tomorrow we are likely to find one deferred dream explode.\u00c2\u00a0 I suppose we almsot could get it either way, except that a female vice-president is still one away, and I’d like a better woman, please.\u00c2\u00a0 So prepare yourself for a hefty load of purple prose, as pundits of various stripes know they need to say something to mark this occasion, but can’t quite come up with anything.\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe they’ll start yammering on about raisins?\u00c2\u00a0 Maybe they should start yammering on about raisins.<\/p>\n

It is worthwhile to root through the comemnts left at this post<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Surely other reposataries of similar sentiment exist, and I’ll leave it to you to wander around and find them, but something needs to be stated.\u00c2\u00a0 Barack Obama may end up being a major disappointment, unable to fend off the multiple spiraling messes America has right now — previous presidents of relatively competence have found themselves in a state of inertia when confronted with complicated troubles.\u00c2\u00a0 Or Americans may end up demanding his face be plowed into Mount Rushmore.\u00c2\u00a0 But whatever thc case, in one important respect, and beyond a merely skin deep level, America will be a fundamentally different and better nation — assuming what we assume is about to happen tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years back a woman was on NPR, probably All Things Considered, who gave a commentary which, when I have a spare minute I’ll go ahead and look up.\u00c2\u00a0 She was teaching creative writing to a group of elementary school students, I think but am not positive a group of girls.\u00c2\u00a0 She handed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3164","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}