Ellington Was Not a Street by Ntozake Shange

There were many random names listed on just about every age, but I didn't know who they were. I was already halfway through the book and still hadn't understood what the book really was about. On some pages, there were more than one sentence, but there was no punctuation to indicate where the new sentence started. There was no punctuation or capitalization in this book at all. I had to go back and reread from the beginning. I wasn't aware that the book had started until I was on the third page. I had read a Duke Ellington book for the biography assignment and figured this would be a good book to choose.

( )Īlthough I didn't look up the summary of the book, it seemed interesting because its title had Ellington in it. I would love for my students to see this and be able to practice this as well, by writing two lines that rhyme that would depict best some moment in their life.

Each page contained two lines and that was all and in those two lines there was so much context. The book opens with a street sign 'Ellington' and the poem begins 'it hasn't always been this way, ellington was not a street.' You notice first off that not one of the sentences start with a capital letter and my second grade students would be quick to point that out, but I feel this would be a good point to pass into a segment on types of poetic meter and when not to use syntax for impact. Dubois, Paul Robeson to mention a few are beautifully depicted in such subtle but poignant illustrations that they leave a mark and tell the story with detail. In the art of poetic junction and meter, Ntozake Shange pens a poetic masterpiece that vividly tells the story of the contributions of black men in our 2oth century history.

Ellington Was Not a Street by Ntozake Shange