"Friendly Advice to a lot if Young Men"

The title of this poem is "Friendly Advice to a lot if Young Men," it is an interesting poem. In the poem it talks about ridiculous ideas, for example: "Kill your dog" or "Break your head with a hatchet." There are also some mild lines like: "Grow a beard" or "Ride a camel." This poem is very sarcastic, because it's mostly saying these ridiculous things, then at the end the author says "But don't write poetry" as if poetry was something bad or something to stay away from. I believe many people think this is satire. The point of this poem was to make you look at it twice and think, "what on Earth did I just read!" And it did a very good job at doing that, at least for me.

"We Real Cool" interpretation

The reason why Gwendolyn Brooks put the enjambments in the poem is to emphasize. She specifically wanted to emphasize on We. We real cool. We left school, and she does that throughout the poem. The enjambments, in my opinion, are really only there to emphasize. She might have just made the stanzas that way to make it look better. When she says "We" she is obviously talking about a group of people. Maybe she is talking about a group of rebellious teenagers.

The difference between the speaker of a poem and a poet

The difference between the speaker of a poem and the poet is simple. The poet is the one writing the poem and the speaker is the one in the poem. The speaker lives in the words that the poet created. The speaker tells the story while the poet wrote it. Think of it this way, the speaker is the actor speaking the dialogue and the poet is the screenwriter. The screenwriter writes the movie, they make it come to life in a book. While the actor makes it come to life on the screen and in our minds.

Amazonian Tribes at HMNS

When we arrived at HMNS I did not know what we were there for. After we got the tickets we headed up to the third floor and waited for our tour guides. We were split up into two groups and then went into the Amazon exhibit. I don't remember every single detail, but I remember our tour guide talking to us about the different tribes in the Amazon. What they wore, what they used as tools, we also learned about other interesting things involved in their rituals or culture.

The exhibit is called "Out of the Amazon: Life on the River." Something I found very interesting was when our tour guide was telling us about the Shamans, who are practically their tribes doctor. One of the tools they used was to get a powder up the nose of someone, there was two holes, they put the bigger hole in the nose of the patient and blew powder up the smaller hole. It would usually make the patient hallucinate, someone would have to stay with you to make sure nothing happens to you, because there were reports of people dying by themselves after this powder being blown up their nose.

What I chose to do my research on was how the Amazonian river people shrunk heads. If I ever see a picture of a shrunken head I always wonder how they do that. I am specifically focusing on the Shuar tribe.

The shrunken heads were typically men's heads. The reason is because in their culture, the men
would do the hunting and they would typically be the Warriors. If another tribe attacks them, they would chop off an attackers head and they would then have the head. The next step would be to shrink it. They would take the skull and brain out of its head. Then they would sew the mouth and eyes closed so the spirit of the person could not escape from the head. Afterwards they would put rocks inside the head to keep the form in shape. They would boil the head in water and when it was finally shrunken to the size they wanted, they would take the rocks out and put sand in instead.

I think HMNS did a great job at with this exhibit. In my opinion they focused more on education, but they were able to make it fun and enjoyable as well. There were some televisions in there showing short movies about the culture of some of the tribes. In some tribes they would make children, specifically boys, go through a ritual to become adults in the tribe. They would pour bullet ants all over the child and if they showed any sign of pain they couldn't become adults in their tribe. They would have to take it again the next year and so on until they finally passed.