18 pages • 36-minute read
Poem about My Rights
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
The open form of “Poem About My Rights” is part of the speaker’s resistance to history and violence. There is no distinct rhyme or meter, and the poem is written as 114 consecutive free verse lines with no stanza breaks or consistent line beginnings or ends. Even the many repeated phrases are intentionally embedded in such a way as to defy uniformity and conventionality. Jordan’s explicitly free verse poem builds upon ideas presented by the speaker through a structure that resists dominant US modes of reading, writing, and even thinking.
While the poem lacks traditional form or meter, it does contain important sequences that rhythmically build to create a lyrical, self-contained narrative. For example, Jordan uses similar phrasing to describe the speaker’s dissatisfaction with being seen as wrong: In Lines 8-9 and again in Lines 94-97, the speaker lists ways she is perceived as “wrong” in an unpunctuated stream. Similarly, the same oppressing forces in the speaker’s life are twice listed (albeit with some differences), in Lines 68-73 and in Lines 104-108. These repetitions, among others, help build narrative cycles to hold the reader’s attention and construct meaning over the course of the poem.
Lack of Punctuation
Lack of punctuation is a key grammatical feature of “Poem About My Rights.” Despite being a lengthy single stanza poem with varied line lengths, Jordan never loses grasp of the narrative flow, using line breaks, some slashes, and repeated phrasing to help the reader make sense of the structure. Given the number of references to history and who “set things up / like this” (Lines 21-22), one interpretation of the poem’s lack of punctuation is that it is a direct rejection of standard English, and the ways language is “set” up by dominant forces. This is supported by mentions of “teachers” (Line 71, Line 104), who are included in lists of people the speaker feels are violent or oppressive. Another way to understand the lack of punctuation is as an expression of this speaker’s voice; this is a Black woman telling the reader a story that doesn’t need to follow rigid structures to be understood.
Anaphora
Jordan uses anaphora—the repetition of a word or phrase across lines—multiple times over the course of “Poem About My Rights,” which both increases the intensity of the speaker’s thoughts and creates cycles of meaning over the course of the poem. Some of the anaphora is more traditional, as in the repetition of “I am the history of” (Line 77, Line 78, Line 79, Line 81), but other anaphoric phrasings are embedded within lines, like the repeated “I should have” in Lines 59-62.
These echoing clauses are critical to the overall structure of the poem, especially as they establish what the speaker is intending to communicate to the reader. Each of the anaphoric sections is a place where the speaker bluntly describes either the ways she experiences or resists oppression and violence. Over the course of the poem, the multiple repeated phrasings also build so that the narrative contains cycles of meaning, whether about the problems the speaker faces, the ways the speaker is perceived as wrong, or the ways that the speaker represents history and innocence.
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