Robert Creeley

I can not believe it, but this is it! The last blog post for the semester!

I want to start off with a confession. I was really skeptical at the beginning of this semester whether this new experience of blogging would be worth it. I wasn’t sure whether or not I would gain anything from it. But I have. It has really helped a lot to have to write my feelings down on the poems we read in class. It’s helped me understand and enjoy them a lot more.

Anyway, let’s start with Robert Creeley. The poem that caught and held my attention was “The Flower”. In the first stanza, Creeley writes “I think I grow tensions like flowers…” I believe Creeley to be saying here that tension is a part of life. As someone who struggles with anxiety on a daily basis, I definitely understand. It’s hard to relax when your own brain stays tense all the time. In the second stanza, Creeley writes that “Each wound is perfect, encloses itself in a tiny  imperceptible blossom, making pain.” I feel Creeley is saying here that each of our experiences (“each wound”) is different, and affects us in different ways. When we go through our experiences, they “blossom” and create in us pain that we continue to feel throughout our lives. The most powerful symbol of the poem is in the third verse, where Creeley writes “Pain is a flower”. Pain is something that we usually think of as bad, something to be avoided. But Creeley here compares it to a flower, which is something we usually think of as beautiful. So, I feel like Creeley is saying here that pain is something that can help us become who we were meant to be.

As I said earlier, it’s been good, guys. Hope you all have a great summer!

 

 

Rukeyser and Rich

Hey there guys! It’s been a while, so let’s get right down to it.

I know we didn’t have to do both poets for this week, but there were parts of both of them that I really liked. I’ll start with Rukeyser. The Minotaur was my favorite. It left me with just a general feeling of confusion. The description of the Minotaur wandering around the cave almost made me want to root for him to find his way. It’s weird because I’ve  always thought of the Minotaur as a kind of bad guy, one to be defeated. The feeling of wanting him to get out of the cave was kind of confusing in and of itself. I also really liked the poem aptly titled Poem. Rukeyser gives a great description there of what it is a poem can do. She writes, “To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile/Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,/ Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means/To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,/To let go the means, to wake.” Rukeyser says here basically that we can use poetry to understand ourselves much better.

With Rich the first poem I noticed was Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers. Only towards the end of the poem did I realize that it was about an old lady, Aunt Jennifer, who is knitting some tigers. Rich makes Aunt Jennifer seem like a tired old lady who’s been through a lot. The description of the finished product of her knitting made me want to see what it was that aunt Jennifer had made. I also really liked a few of the selections in Twenty-one Love Poems. My favorite was selection number four, where Rich describes the day to day routine of what it is like to miss the person you love. Selection number seventeen also caught my attention, where Rich describes genuine love. She believes it is not something that people are “fated or doomed” for, as in the love story of Tristan and Isolde, but something that is still miraculous and wonderful.

That’s it for now, guys. Have a good week and a good break!

 

 

Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes struck me almost as much as Claude McKay did. The first poem in the Hughes section, Negro, caught my attention because of the first and last verse. It struck me that, in the middle four verses, Hughes mentions being a “slave”, “worker”, “singer”, and “victim”, but the only thing that he repeats is “I am a Negro.” It is as though the fact that Hughes is “Black as the night is black” is the part of his identity that he thinks defines him the most.

Another Hughes poem that caught my attention was “Goodbye Christ”. Hughes takes a really cynical view of religion in this poem. My gut reaction as a believer is to react negatively to this poem. His blasé attitude towards addressing Christ is shocking. But considering the context Hughes was writing in, it’s not that surprising that he might start to question God. Many people do in trying situations.

Hughes’ poem “Let America Be America Again” reminds me on McKay’s “America” poem. The tone of the Hughes poem is similar in that Hughes believes America can become a truly free nation again, where everyone is treated fair and equally. But a key difference in this poem vs. the McKay version is that Hughes not only includes African Americans, but “poor whites”, “the red man”, and “the immigrant”; other groups who have been attacked and oppressed. It seems that Hughes has a broader view of the race situation in America than McKay did.

Finally, the poem “Justice” sees most applicable to us today. With all the media coverage surrounding the police and the authorities today, it can be harder to discern a true meaning of what justice is.

Until next week!

 

 

Claude McKay

Reading Claude McKay this week has by far been the most powerful week of the class for me. Three of his poems in the anthology really struck me hard. The first was “If We Must Die”. McKay deals with death in a stark way here that is as powerful as a sledgehammer to the eyes. McKay does not fear death in this poem, but faces it bravely, writing that “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”

The second poem that was really powerful to me was “America”. In this poem McKay details his life in America. His review is a mixed bag. He says that although he hates the way he is treated in America, he loves the country because of the hope he feels he has there for the future. It is, in a way, the attitude of many people in America today. Though there is a lot going on that is scary, crazy, or sad, there is still something to be said for having hope that things will eventually get better.

The third poem, and my favorite of this week, was “The Lynching”. McKay really makes you feel the true awfulness of what is going on in the picture he creates. He writes about the death of the victim in such beautiful language (“His Spirit”, “ascended to high heaven”, “gave him up at last to Fate’s wild whim”), then turns your stomach with the description at the end of those who have come to watch the lynching. It is almost as if they are all gathering to watch a sporting event (“And little lads, lynchers that were to be, Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.”)

The first thing I noticed about McKay and Billy Collins’ “Sailing Alone Around the Room” was that the way most of the poems are structured on the page is similar. Collins uses a different number of lines from McKay, but the poems are written in very plain language to form a clear image in the mind of the reader. It may be something created in Collins’ mind, such as in “The Lesson” where Collins personifies the subjects of English and History, but the language makes it easy for the reader to picture what’s going on.

Hope everyone had a great Easter. Until next week!

Some Other Favorites

I thought I would make up for not doing a blog post last week by sharing my thoughts on some more of my favorite poems. The first is “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Most people at least have heard of this poem and are aware what it is about. I love it because it reminds me that decisions we make in our daily routines,  some of which might seem insignificant at the time, can affect the way our whole lives turn out. I have seen this theme in other places as well. My favorite was in an episode of one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who. The episode was called “Turn Left”. In it, the main character is at a street corner with her mother and they are arguing over which way to turn. In the first half of the episode, she turns left, and her life goes one way. In the second half, she turns right, and her life turns out entirely different. It’s a bit too literal of a manifestation, but it made the point nonetheless.

Another favorite of mine is “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe. I have always loved scary movies, stories, songs-anything to send a shiver up my spine. “The Raven” is the only poem to really do that for me. “The Raven” is also quite the love story, with the narrator longing for Lenore. It is also responsible for my fear of blackbirds, ravens, and crows that I still have to this day.

What about the rest of you? Are there any poems that we’re not going over in class that you love? Why do you love them?

William Carlos Williams

Hola, peeps! I’ve been away for a couple of weeks sick, but I’m back!

Anyway, William Carlos Williams. I think he is one of my favorite poets so far. The first thing that struck me was in some of the first poems, “Portrait of a Lady”, “Queen Anne’s Lace”, and “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”. Williams seems to really like comparing and contrasting things. In “Portrait of a Lady” he writes “Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky”. Doesn’t seem that romantic to me, but that’s beside the point. A more specific comparison happens in “Queen Anne’s Lace”, where he writes “Her body is not so white as anemone petals nor so smooth-“. My favorite though is in “The Widow’s Lament”- the widow contrasts her feelings of sorrow to the beautiful yard she has.

Williams also had two of my favorite poems that we’ve read so far this year. The first was “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime”. The widow in the poem is sad because she has lost her husband, and nothing seems as beautiful to her anymore. She wants to get lost somewhere beautiful so she can feel that way again. It feels that way after you lose someone-like nothing will ever be the same again. In a way, nothing ever is, but if you’re lucky, you gain back some of your appreciation for life. My second favorite poem was “The Red Wheelbarrow”. It is so simple. It tells me that we take for granted sometimes things that we might use everyday, like a wheelbarrow. I also like the shape on the page of this poem. It reminds me of a raindrop. I picture a farm where it has just rained, and the wheelbarrow is leaning up against the barn, slightly wet from the rain.

The first thing that “The Red Wheelbarrow” made me think of was the examples of concrete poetry I studied in high school. These poems are deliberately shaped like the thing they represent. This is an example:

That’s it for this week. Hope everyone has a great week!

 

T.S. Eliot

First of all, after Stein, Eliot was a much easier read. Not to say that it wasn’t difficult. It was that. But after trying to untangle the knot of Patriarchal Poetry and Tender Buttons, this week was a breeze.

I’m really glad I read the introduction to Eliot in the anthology. Placing Eliot’s poem in the context of WWI helped me to understand him a little better. The first thing that caught my attention when reading through Eliot was how much he writes about death, despair, and aging. For example, in The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock, Eliot writes “Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets/ And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes/ Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows…”. This phrase put me in mind of a post WWI city like is mentioned in the introduction. Gerontion is full of examples of his writing about aging. Gerontion is listed in the footnotes as “a Greek term for an old man”. Eliot writes in Gerontion about the effect that age has on the body and the mind. The Waste Land is also full of examples.

I can also see some of Eliot’s influence on popular culture today through his poetry. For example, the poem Burnt Norton begins “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable.” Eliot’s presentation of time in this poem reminds me of the popular show Doctor Who. In Doctor Who, time is treated not as something linear and fixed, but, in the words of the Doctor, “wibbly wobbly timey wimey”. Another example is in the last verse of The Hollow Men. Eliot writes here that “This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper.” This is the beginning of one my favorite movies, Steven King’s “The Stand”. I don’t know if these influences were deliberate or not, but the influence is definitely there.

I also read this week through Colander by Michael McFee. Some of the poems deal with similar themes as Eliot. One example is Haunt. In it, McFee talks about the influence his dead father had on him. But the main difference I noticed between Eliot and McFee was that McFee’s overall tone is not nearly as dark as Eliot’s. He seems much more positive, more hopeful than Eliot.

That’s it for now. Everyone have a good week!

Gertrude Stein: Part Two

I have made it through a second dose of Stein! Yay for me!

Surprisingly, even though Stein did a lot of the same things with language in Tender Buttons that she did in Patriarchal Poetry, I actually enjoyed Tender Buttons a lot more than Patriarchal Poetry. The first thing I noticed about Tender Buttons is that there seems to be a lot more structure in Tender Buttons. Even with the difficult language, it is easier to read than Patriarchal Poetry. I was able to articulate much better how I felt at the end of reading sections of it than I was before. One example of this is under the section “Eyeglasses” where Stein writes, “A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the center of an alley”. I have extremely bad eyesight without my glasses, and this phrase reminds me how I feel when I’m not wearing them. I can’t see anything, and the world makes little sense. There were several other phrases just like this where, while the phrase itself didn’t make much sense, it still evoked an identifiable feeling in me.

Another difference I noticed in Tender Buttons is the structure of it. It’s written more like prose, so it was a different experience than Patriarchal Poetry. It’s written in paragraph form, so it read more to me like a story. It flowed differently, more easily. Maybe that’s why I liked it better.

There were some similarities with Patriarchal Poetry. Stein repeats words, sounds, and phrases all throughout Tender Buttons. In “A Piece of Coffee”, she repeats the “S” sound. In “A Drawing”, she repeats the word “best”. There are many more examples throughout the book. The other similarity that struck me was Stein’s use of language in the poem. The words are arranged in a way that simply don’t make sense. Stein seems to be playing with the language, maybe to try and make the point that language is not important.

Stein is definitely the most difficult of the poets I’ve encountered so far. In the end, however, I actually enjoyed her more than I thought I would.

Next week, my thoughts on Eliot.

Gertrude Stein Part One

Hey there! Hope everyone had a great week this week and no one had too hard a time in the bad weather.

Anyway, I have spent the last week or so buried in the poetry of Gertrude Stein. First, let me just say that I am very thankful I read the introduction to Stein. Nelson writes in the introduction that the technique used by Stein in her poetry “isolates and decontextualizes words and phrases, seeming at first to turn them into unstable echolailic nonsense, but thereby severing them from their syntactical functionalism and making it possible to see them as counters in a very different semantic game.” (55) I could think of no more perfect way to describe Stein.

After I read Patriarchal Poetry, I googled “Stein Patriarchal Poetry” to see what I could find. In almost all the results, those analyzing Stein seem to try to find some pattern in the madness of Stein (I say madness in the most affectionate of ways, I promise). I disagree. I think Stein is actually making a point by not making sense. I feel like she is trying to show us her point by being deliberately nonsensical. I feel like she is trying to show readers that there is no set pattern to poetry that has to be followed in order for it to be considered poetry.

As for the emotion in the poem, all I could feel as I tried to read it was anxiety. The lack of a cohesive message was hard for me to deal with. It was only once I tried to stop finding a pattern that I began to be able to take in Stein.

I’m going to skip a comparison to Stein this week, since I’ve yet to come upon anything remotely like her. I’ll save that for next week when I review Tender Buttons. Until then, hasta la vista!!

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

The first poem that caught my attention this week was Sea Rose. In the first line, Doolittle calls the rose a “harsh rose”. That is an interesting description here. A rose is not something generally thought of in a negative way. To describe a rose as harsh invokes a sense of bittersweetness. It makes me wonder what it is that the poet is dealing with when she writes this. The first thing that comes to my mind is of knowing a relative or close friend is about to leave. Maybe they are moving. Maybe they are close to death. I don’t know, but while the person is dear to the heart, it is hard to watch them leave. I think this is by far my favorite poem so far this semester.

The second poem that caught my attention was Helen. This seems to be the opposite of a typical poem about Helen of Troy. Instead of celebrating the beauty of Helen and the attention she captures in the imaginations of everyone, Helen is someone who is hated, perhaps for the trouble she caused with the start of the war. This poem actually made me laugh, something I very much needed this week.

It was the feeling that the Helen poem gave me that made me think of some of the poems in Sommer Browning’s “Backup Singers”. These poems tickled me so much! My particurlar favorite of hers was untitled, but I will call it Chrissy. The poet is addressing Chrissy, and continuously calls her name. It reminded me of everything I have gone through the last few weeks helping my sister prepare for her wedding. I feel like my name has been called over and over and over again when it comes to dealing with things for this wedding.

Alright, that’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! Hope everyone has a great week.