Walking Down Park

Free verse has become very popular in modern poetry. Most poets incorporate it to make poems sound more like natural speech, creating the feeling that the speaker of the poem is talking directly to the reader. In the Black Arts Movement, poets enhance this effect by further eschewing not only conventions of rhyme and meter but also academically “proper” punctuation and capitalization. The result is poetry that mimics the freedom of speech and informal writing. It represents a culture that had historically been restricted from attending universities and institutions of higher learning. Rather than trying to fit in to Eurocentric society, the purpose of writing without capitalization and punctuation was (and is) to celebrate a distinctly “Black” culture and elevate it to the heights of European-dominated arts and letters.

The poem’s speaker repeatedly asks, “do you ever stop / to think” (Lines 3-4). The purpose is not to elicit a response from the reader, but to engage them in thinking as the speaker does. It is also a way of calling attention to what the reader may or may not have considered. If the speaker has not stopped to think about a different world, it calls into question their capacity to imagine, think differently, or demonstrate independent thought.