Coming Up, Ani Difranco

In Ani Difranco’s Coming Up she talks about how the lower classes are coming up because they are tired of the life and the way they are treated. She is trying to convey the message of how unfair it is that only some people are able to enjoy the penthouses and luxuries in life and how it is those people who are taking advantage of everyone else. She starts the poem with the line “our father who art in a penthouse,” in order to begin to relay her message from the very beginning. By starting her poem in such manner, she is making it seem as if the man who is in the penthouse is like some kind of God. However, as the poem goes on, she begins to deconstruct this figure by showing the bad things that he has done and telling him that he had better open his eyes and watch out because the lower class is coming up. Difranco uses a mixture of short and long lines, in no particular order, to convey her massage. By using this strategy she is in effect conveying her message in a clear, and rhythmical way. Difranco also uses many different rhyming devices throughout her poem. She uses a mixture of end rhyme and internal rhyme. She also does not use a particular rhyme scheme; she alternates between rhyming every two lines to rhyming every other line, to not rhyming at all. This in effect makes the reader concentrate on the emphasized words.
This poem relates to the world today because of how society is unfair toward certain people and cultures. This poem reminded me of Noel’s SRI topic which has to do with environmental racism, and how many toxic waste factories are placed in low-income, minority filled communities instead of rich areas. The other day I was watching television and saw a clip about an actress fighting for a toxic factory to not be placed in her community. In a way I thought that it was good that she was doing good by trying to fight something bad, but then as I thought back to Noel and even East Palo Alto, I realized that by those rich people fighting against those factories being in their community, they are instead putting some other low-income, minority-filled community at risk of having to have a toxic waste factory in their community simply because they might not have the means to come together and fight against it. The simple fact is that, sadly, as things are going now, the rich will simply keep getting richer, and the poor will indeed keep getting poorer, until someone comes around and changes this fact. I just wish that that someone comes soon.