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Kwame Dawes

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Submitted By sunnyhi
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Kwame Dawes has a complicated life experience. He was born in Ghana, but grew up in Jamaica. He is profoundly influenced by Bob Marley, the famous musician and rhythms of reggae music. After he finished his college, He went to study and teach in New Brunswick, Canada on a Commonwealth Scholarship.Later he moved to American to work as a professor at the University of South Carolina in the United States. Dawes in currently the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. His contributions and talents in poetry have been recognized by the public. His famous poems include Impossible Flying, Rituals Before the Poem and so on. In 1994,He won the Forward Poetry Prize, Best First Collection for Progeny of Air. Besides, Kwame Dawes also acts as an actor, editor, critic, musician, playwright and even a social activist. In 2009, Dawes won an Emmy Award in the category of New Approaches to News & Documentary Programming: Arts, Lifestyle & Culture.

I. Chosen Language with Precision As different content of poems calls for different words and expressions, the skill of choosing the right words to express one’s feeling is important and necessary for poets. “Poets choose a particular word because it suggests what they want to suggest. Its appropriateness is a function of both its denotation and its connotation.” (Robert, 26) Kwame Dawes does a good job in choosing words to achieve powerful influence. As he says in his blog that “It is true that language alone...But language can be deciphered, unfolded, to reveal something close to meaning. It is the language that keeps me going, but mostly, it is the “true” of the emotion-that is clear,even when other things are not.” From his words, we can find that Dawes values the true emotion and the language which can express it very much. Many of

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