If you are Over Staying Woke
“If You are Over Staying Woke” is a poem written by Morgan Parker and published in 2015 with Poetry Magazine. The poem identifies as modern and contextual, giving reference to concepts specific to the United States. The poem highlights the stereotypes and social difficulties a modern black person faces in their everyday life. The author has effectively shown the exhaustion the black person goes through in their moments of intense vigilance.
The poem does not have a rhyme scheme and comprises short and simple sentences and lines. The style and arrangement of the poem symbolize life and the life timeline, showing how people undergo emotions with time. Adverbs and verbs are used in the poem to describe what is happening and motivate and impact the reader to seek their freedom. Apart from the structure and syntax, the poem doesn’t contain many other literary devices. The poem has a distinctive structure, with lines that appear to end at random. To make sense of the lines, the reader is required to connect them with the next line. For instance, the world is like/ for white people (Parker 17-18). The sentences are brief and straightforward, laughing at how simple-minded people tend to be.
The poem has a strong and passionate tone to it. The poem’s vocabulary adds to the passion, with the verbs highlighting the poem’s goal. The poem’s form and brief lines are straightforward and get right to the author’s point. The poem’s structure establishes a tempo and shows how quickly life moves. Towards the end, the author uses repetition of the word ‘funeral’ to emphasize where everything in life ends; death.
The author has used an eye-catching title intended to elicit the attention of the reader at first glance. I like how the author has made the poem simple through her word choice and form. She primarily uses verbs and adverbs to describe what is happening throughout the poem. I like how the simplistic nature of the lines reflects the idea that the men and women described are simplistic. At first glance, a reader gets what the poem is about without the need to read between the lines. I feel that the persona seems to be annoyed as if prescribing a specific way the reader is supposed to live their life. While taking a jibe at the privileged white race, the persona seems to be targeting the Black race with pieces of advice, even though some of them appear wild. The voice in the poem appears to be calling on the readers to be true to themselves and make mistakes and learn from them. While I resonate with some lines in the poem, I find it difficult to agree with others. For instance, why would I need to keep a corkscrew in my purse? (Parker 8-9). Nevertheless, I guess that was the author’s intention; to come up with a poem with many verbs and adverbs that reflects the reality of life for many socioeconomic groups. Throughout the poem, the author calls on the reader to be wary of the news out there. The reader is encouraged to refuse to hear the news, see the news, turn off the news and write their news.
Parker’s tendency to use lists as a style for her poems is also seen in the poem “99 problems.” Although the poem takes a narrative style, the events are listed as short lines that make a total of 99 lines. Just like the poem “If you are over Staying Woke,” the poem takes a simplistic approach and is not laden with many stylistic devices, a characteristic of Parker.
Work Cited
Parker, Morgan. “If You are Over Staying Woke.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58028/if-you-are-over-staying-woke
