May 08

I’m writing about “The Drought” by Gary Soto because I have actually read some of Soto’s poems before and because I am a farmer’s wife and my financial stability is directly related to whether or not we have rain.  Drought takes away life and in the last stanza when it is said, “And the young who left with a few seeds in each pocket, / Their belts tightened on the fifth notch of hunger—“ it is clear that those who had tried to stay the course and outlast the drought ended up leaving in a pitiful state of health.  The last line about the belt notch is interesting because it is usually used to refer to over eating and needing to “let” one’s belt out a few notches to accommodate the excess food in one’s belly.  I believe this is used here to make the decline in health more defining.  The imagery is very interesting and very relatable.  Everyone knows what a hat rack looks like.  If anyone has been in a drought or even in a place where wind blows most of the year faster than 15mph, they know what birds have a heck of a time trying to fly and sometimes the baby birds are blown straight from their nests and die.  When it is said, “But what continued were the wind that plucked the birds spineless”, I find that either it’s speaking of winds so terrifying that birds have lost the guts or spine to fly about, or literally the wind has battered the birds to a spineless state, death.  A very interesting poem and even more so considering we were just in a severe drought.

May 03

Gwendolyn Brooks wrote "The Vacant Lot".  It is left to somewhat of the imagination to interpret the poem.  It reminds me of gossip; you see an image or occurrence with your eyes and then make assumptions without knowing what is going on with the characters.  The use of vocabulary such as:  "fat little form" and "squat fat daughter" suggests that the narrator believes that these people aren't "good" in their eyes and the poem is almost a tribute to these "bad" people's house being gone.  I'm confused about why Mrs. Coley is bursting out of the basement door??  The squat little daughter is letting men come and go from the house when the man of the house is gone, suggesting there is some form of sexual acts being committed, whether prostitution, cheating, or benign I can't tell.  There may also be a racial part in this.  The poem distinctly states that the son-in-law is African.  Is the narrator's view one of a racist, or is Brooks merely adding this tid-bit of information?

May 01

Ted Hughes' "Crow's First Lesson" reminds me a bit of superstition.  Many stories that I have heard tell that a crow is a soul's guide to the afterlife and thus is associated with death and by some evil.  The crow in this poem doesn't want to be evil and is even ashamed to have let loose the things that it did from its mouth.  The things that come out, the shark, the disease ridden mosquitoes, ect... are all bringers of death.  It is also ironic that God is trying to teach the crow about love and all that is created is evil.  It is also interesting that each time something more devastating it brought forth from the crow's mouth.  It brings out the ideas in what some people see in humanity even today.  You can try and teach things and people about love, but sometimes the product of that effort bears rotten fruit.  Overall, a good poem and something to philosophically contemplate. :)

April 26

Phillip Larken wrote quite a bit about religion and sin.  "High Windows" was very interesting and got a bit confusing in the last stanza.  I get that the poem is saying that inhibition has gone out the window and that most people are doing as they please and fulfilling all their wants and desires.  He speaks of these things and relates them to "paradise".  I believe he hits home though when he writes, "No God any more,..." (12).  I am confused, like I said earlier, in the last stanza.  I find it interesting that he calls the glass "comprehending" and says that beyond that glass is deep endless blue air.  I think that the high window is high because humanity has fallen so far from grace and even just a view of heaven and the salvation that is offered there have drifted from sight.  he says in line fifteen, "And his lot will all go down the long slide".  This is saying that those who have fulfilled their wanton desires  are on the path that "[goes] down" and leads to hell and eternal damnation.  Very interesting and of course, my interpretation is based on a personal religiousness.  Others may feel very differently about this poem.

April 24

I thought "Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell would be a very interesting poem, but I chose instead to write about "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop.  This poem reminds me of what I feel a lot of people have forgotten in this age and that is to respect ones elders!!  It is also sad because the fish was caught this time without no fight at all.  The fish had given up on escaping its fate, a fate it had escaped at least five other times.  Why did the fish choose to give up this time.  The other fish lines and hooks were strong and big, but it gave up for this particular fisherman.  The fisherman realized though, that simply catching this fish was a feat in itself and that the fish should be returned so that some other fisherman may feel the rush of victory that this fisherman did.  Around line twenty-five I did get a little confused as to what the writer was describing, was in the fish or the blood and entrails or the scene of the boat.  It is all kind of mixed up in the whole mess together,  but I realized when the fish was released it was just describing how the fish appeared in that moment.

April 17

Dylan Thomas wrote a great poem about not going out without a fight called, "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night".  The poem is full of contradictions that lead one to believe that death seems inviting like a good night, but the poem is telling its readers to fight to the end.  "dark is right" and "blinding sight" are two such contradictions.  If dark is right, then light is bad and light is the embodiment of goodness.  The dark though is speaking of death, and death must be right but isn't, so "do not go gentle into that good night".  "blinding sight" is mentioned with other lines that make it easier to understand:

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (13-15)

The end of life blinded these grave men, but even blind eyes can still "blaze" and put up fight to be happy and alive.  I really like this poem because I see myself as a fighter for the most part.  I fight to be happy and to keep those around me happy and I fight to live the full life I've always wanted to.  Good poem.

April 12

Shel Silverstein's "The Perfect High" can be thought of in two ways, the quite literal drug-seeking way, and the abstract never satisfied with life way.  I worked at a prison for three years and so the first way I looked at this was that of the literal.  Drug addicts put their high above everything else: themselves, their families, ect...  So when Baba Fats is threatened with death by the man seeking the perfect high and tells the man a lie that would leave any normal man to believe that they will never reach their perfect high without dying, the man gets excited and gives Baba Fats a high five and leaves to kill a giant, swim in a monster infested river of slime, and slay a witch to get the perfect high when the man is already near his death bed.  It really is sad what drug addicts have convinced themselves of and what lengths they will go to get what they want no matter the consequences.

April 10

I'm going to stick with writing about part three of "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg.  The poem "Howl" was actually dedicated to Carl Solomon, a fellow poet of Ginsberg and part three speaks about him.  Solomon and the narrator are both in Rockland, a mental hospital near New York City.  Ginsberg was in the mental hospital as an alternative to jail and Solomon was their voluntarily.  Some of what is written are acts that Solomon actually committed, but others relate to things they discussed whilst imprisoned together.  At line one hundred-thirty, it is written:

I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway
across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western
night

These lines are confusing, but suggest that Ginsberg feels that Solomon was drowning in that mental hospital and that Ginsberg came to him one night and offered a shelter from a deteriorating mind.  Solomon had institutionalized himself as a way of admitting defeat to Dada, or the belief in anarchy.

April 05

"To Aunt Rose" by Allen Ginsberg is a very explicit poem.  It talks openly taboo topics of the human anatomy and wants.  The poem is a little confusing on the first read, but it leaves me with the impression that the narrator is remembering his aunt Rose and a better time.  When there was a cause to support and their family was not wanting for money.  The poem comes to a bitter conclusion in the fourth stanza:

Hitler is dead and Liveright's gone out of business

The Attic of the Past and Everlasting Minute are out of print

                        Uncle Harry sold his last silk stocking

            Claire quit interpretive dancing school

                        Buba sits a wrinkled monument in Old

                                    Ladies Home blinking at new babies (43-48)

Liveright's published Aunt Rose's brother's books and silk is considered a matter of stature and symbolizes a bit of wealth.  With Hitler dead, there was no cause to support.  Life had changed drastically.

April 03

Some of Gary Snyder's poems seemed like they would be harder to write about so I am writing about "Dog" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  One thing in this poem confused me; Coit's Tower.  Why would a dog be afraid of a tower.  I googled the tower and found that it was put up at the request of a woman who began dressing like a man before it was acceptable for women to do so.  The tower actually resembles a fire hose nozzle, but it was not meant to be so.  The woman was an honorary firefighter and that is what most people believe it was designed to do.  I suppose a fire hose would hurt if put to a dog..??  I still don't understand why the dog would be afraid.  I like the little bit of comedy that is put in sort-of matter-of-factly when Ferlinghetti writes, "He would rather eat a tender cow / than a tough policeman / though either would do"(28-30).  The dog sees things that are smaller than himself and larger than himself, but he is a serious dog who "has his own free world to live in / His own fleas to eat / [and] He will not be muzzled"(41-43).  There is also a political element saying that the dog would pee on a House of Representatives' Un-American Activities Committee member and that the dog is a democratic dog who has something to say about the reality of things.  This suggests that democrats are the only ones who can express the reality of things and that some congressmen are nothing more than something to be looked down upon.

March 29

"The Widow's Lament in Springtime" by William Carlos Williams is about having lost the ability to see beauty in things once thought so in the aftermath of a woman's husband's death.  I am writing about this poem because I had chosen to write my poetry anthology over the different stages of death and how they are written about in poetry.  The woman is noticing the things that, "were [her] joy / formerly..."(17-18)  The end is sad and suggests that the woman wishes to simply die or "sink into the marsh"(28) near some new trees with new flowers that her son tells her about.  I liked the lines that say:

where the new grass

flames as it has flames

often before but not

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year.

Williams wants the readers to know that there is still a fire burning in this woman, but it is a cold fire, a fire that leads her to wanting death.

March 27

"Brancusi's Golden Bird" by Mina Loy is very interesting.  In the footnotes it is found that the title to the poem was abstracted from a sculpture made by an artist who used metal for making his sculptures.  The government later tried to tax these pieces of art as raw material rather than pieces of art.  I believe the poem is saying that God is an artist and he molded the earth into its shape and created all the elements thus in.  How can you tax raw materials when they are works of art from God.  And therefore how can you tax Constantin Brancusi's works of art as raw material when they are molded themselves from a work of art.  I really liked the use of vocabulary here, describing the earth as "an incandescent curve / licked by chromatic flames / in labyrinths of reflections".  I can actually see an intense scene where an artist molds and shapes and heats the work to create the work of art that is visualized or reflected deep in the labyrinth of the artists mind.

March 08

"The Waste Land" has been discussed in class now and we spoke a great deal about the interpretation of each section.  In "A Gme of Chess" there is a monologue between the two characters that was somewhat confusing, but after our discussion in class I have found new meaning.  A woman has had several children already and did not want children in the first place.  Her friend is sort of rubbing it in her face that she has done everything wrong if she had never wanted to have children.  The woman with the children married a military man who is soon to return from deployment and who is assuredly going to want to have physical exploits with his wife upon his return, which will lead to yet more children.  The woman and her friend are discussing how it is that she can keep from having coitus with her husband and not have anymore children.  All the talk is in vain though, as one can't deny their spouse physical pleasure without them possibly seeking it elsewhere.  I believe it is called a game of chess because the woman and her military husband will be playing a strategic game for both of them to get what they want.

March 06

"The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot is in five sections.  Most of the sections were okay to understand, but one section in particular was hard for me to even read through.  IV "Death by Water" is the shortest section by far and I had to read through it a good five times before I understood it all.  I think Phlebas is dead or dying and is having his life flash before his eyes as he "[Enters] the whirlpool" of death.  The last stanza is speaking directly to a higher power and asking if the higher power would consider Phlebas in a place on high.  "The Fire Sermon" was very ironic.  A woman and man have coitus outside of wedlock and then the woman looks out her window at a church where it is a sin to have intercourse outside of wedlock.  I have no idea if these poems were meant to be funny at the time they were written, but this particular one seems quite comical to me.

March 01

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was written by T. S. Eliot in 1910.  This was before Eliot was struck upon by misfortune.  This poem is about a man who is forever questioning if he should do something or not.  He want to be brave and step out and live his life, but he needs but one silly excuse to sit in his own little world and pass the time.  He feels that he has all the time he needs left to do the things he never does.  The poem goes on with the questions of what to do in life.  Starting at line 120, Eliot changes to the time of being old.  He is still questioning what he should do down to what to eat and how to part his hair, but the indecisive man mentions having heard mermaids singing, but they don't sing to him.  He is becoming a bit delusional and the last line suggests that the man finally dies, "Till human voices wake us, and we drown." (131).  It's a sad poem that is more focused on the internal conflicts that arose in this man quite literally every moment of his life.

February 28

According to our book, T. S. Eliot came from a wealthy background and was well educated.  He originally was a philosopher, but in 1914 Eliot became a poet, married, and moved to England.  In 1916 Eliot finally met with misfortune in the form of poverty and marital and literary problems.  In 1918 Eliot wrote "Whispers of Immortality".  This poem is separated into two different settings.  The first is about seeing a dead body.  In earlier times, plant bulbs would be buried with a body when it was put to grave.  The characters see death all around the dead.  The second part is fairly confusing.  It starts out talking about a woman's bust and then seems to say that because of her beauty and charm she is well kept while others are in a bad way.  Most of Eliot's poems are very confusing to me, but they were all the rage during his time.  This may be a good research topic.  "What was the world like in the 1900's to invite such a prestige upon Eliot and his poetry?"

February 23

W. H. Auden’s poetry was very confusing to me.  The poem that was easier for me to understand was “The Shield of Achilles”.  This, I fear, is only due to my knowing a little bit about the history of Achilles.  Achilles was a demigod son of the goddess Thetis who was a sea nymph.  The shield of Achilles was lost when a friend wore it into battle and was slain.  The first two stanza’s are speaking of the beach near Troy where Achaeans were stationed before the siege.  The “She” in the poem, I believe, is Thetis.  She is trying to get her son new armor from the god of fire, Hephaestos.  The mother is worried because she has seen that her son has defiled a temple that worships the “gods” and has given no offerings to the “gods” for favor during the battle and with good reason.  Having seen these actions, Hephaestos is displeased with Achilles and decides he is not worthy of his armor.  In the last stanza, Thetis is watching her son most carefully because she is certain he is soon to die.  Her assumptions are proven, if I remember the story correctly.

February 21

I found “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes very interesting.  Hughes was the only Harlem Renaissance writer to remain productive long after the Harlem Renaissance’s end.  Hughes was also the first poet to bring the blues into literary verse.  Hughes muses included black urban poor and working class.  In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, Hughes basically says that the colored middle class is taught to be ashamed of his heritage whereas the poor working class still hold true to themselves.  This can be seen in two separate passages where it is written, “One sees immediately how difficult it would be for [a colored middle class poet] to interest himself in interpreting the beauty of his own people…He is taught rather…to be ashamed of [that beauty] when it is not according to Caucasian patterns” and, “[the so-called common element] furnish a wealth of colorful distinctive material for any artist because they still hold their own individuality in the face of [Caucasian] standardizations.”

February 16

Sylvia Townsend Warner was a very interesting woman and was actually very hard to research unless one buys a book.  There are a few internet sites about her, but none go into detail about her life.  In Sylvia's day, poets were mostly men and women wrote un-noticed.  Sylvia was actually studied to be a musician and stated that she became a poet and writer by accident.  Sylvia simply saw a piece of paper one day and thought it so beautiful that she had to write on it.  It was also lucky that a friend introduced her to yet another friend who gave her work to some publishers.  Sylvia married a man, but later separated and became a lesbian.  She wrote about the dark nature in people and often took historical events and gave them the dark twist that she was famous for.  I liked reading Sylvia's poems, especially the ones that were founded in history.  It is truly the greatest insight into how Sylvia thinks when one reads those poems based on fact.  It shows that she sees mostly the honest a raw nature of events and shows that life honestly doesn't always have a happy ending.

February 14

D.H. Lawrence wrote a Preface for a book that had already been out and in circulation.  His reasoning was that it gave readers a time with the book to figure out for themselves what exactly the book meant.  It is almost condescending that he is writing this preface later.  It is as if he is saying, "for those of you who weren't smart enough to figure this out... here you go."  This preface is very interesting in that most of it sounds like a free-verse poem.  The words used and comparisons made are very interesting.  The word nude is used several times.  It is referring to honesty and openness.  Free-verse is compared to birds and fire.  When a bird is in the wind and in flight, it is in that moment free.  Free-verse allows writers to be spontaneous and flexible like a flame.  Walt Whitman is introduced in this preface.  It is said that Whitman is so close to that urgent moment that he is so neat the quick that poets that strive to make a proper free-verse fear his ability to be so close to this "perfection".

February 09

I am writing today's blog about the poem Mid - Day by H.D.  This poem is very interesting and seems to actually be talking about a man who is having a Mid-Life crisis.  There is an interesting correlation with the title.  There are several references to seeds and different types of trees.  The first stanza is an acknowledgment or opening to the fact that the man is in crisis.  he is "anguished"(4).  The poem seems to be working backwards in time.  the black seeds are dead and can no longer give life to something, suggesting that the man is old.  Then it speaks more of the conflict and being "scattered in its whirl"(10).  I am assuming that "its" is life.  Then the seeds are shriveled and things that are alive begin to bend and fall with age.  The memory of childhood is looked upon and symbolized by the poplar tree sitting up on a hill.  These memories are cherished and put up on a pedestal / hill.  The tree has deep roots and has a long and healthy life ahead of it.  The man gives one last lamenting note in remembering his childhood says defeatedly that he is perishing on his current path.  This poem is very interesting and I thought the comparison of life to that of plant life very interesting.

February 07

I found it very interesting that Lowell and Pound had such a hard time working together or should I say working within the same group, the Imagists.  The conflict was so great that Pound actually left the group for another similar movement called Vorticism.  The only said difference in the Vorticism and the Imagist was that Vorticism insisted on dynamism.  Pound stated that Lowell had degraded the name of the Imagist and renamed her works in the movement as “Amygism”.  Pound is very interesting and has a somewhat blackened history from his time supporting Anti-Semite actions.  I’m thinking that Pound tried a little too hard to be at the cutting edge of ideas and ended up making a mistake that he later claimed to regret.  The indictment of treason being rescinded was very surprising.  How can a group of poets claiming his poetry is of such importance get Pound off the hook?  I may have to look a little more into Pound’s life.  It is very interesting.  In a Station of Metro isn’t much of a poem, but when you read the notes behind it, it is very interesting.  It took him a year to decide on these two lines to explain what he saw and felt.  It goes back to Pound’s determination to create an image exactly as it was seen, felt, ect…

February 02

Siegfried Sassoon 's two poems were very interesting.  They both made you imagine a tragic scene that Sassoon is making slightly comical.  In Blighters, Sassoon is wishing that a tank would come down the aisle of the theater that a group of soldiers was in and make them stop their inappropriate jokes about those who had died.  He makes is slightly comical by saying that the tank would come in "Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, sweet Home," (6).  In The General, the General is actually making the scene slightly comical.  He's all cheery and telling soldiers good morning while they march off to possibly die.  This is nothing to be cheery about and yet the general is being so.  I really didn't get the last like of the poem though.  "But he did for them both by his plan of attack." (7)  I'm thinking that it's irony.  Maybe it is referring to the General having done a "favor" for these boys by sending them off to a good morning at the front lines of the war.  Either way, his poems show the attitude that several soldiers shared, a disdain for the things happening around them but the grit to continue on.

January 31

Today I am choosing to write about Reuben Bright by Edwin Arlington Robinson.  I found the poem very interesting in that a butcher, who dismembers animals for a living, finds out that his wife “must die” and breaks down.  After her death, the butcher keeps a few keepsakes from his wife and tears down his slaughter house.??  I am really curious as to why his wife had to die and in what manor it was done.  Does the author mean that she was going to die no matter what so she must or did she commit some sort of crime and must be put to death??  Either way, the butcher’s actions are understandable from a point, but I like to have a whole picture of what is going on.  Whether she was put to death or died, the butcher was tired of being surrounded by death and having a constant reminder that she is as dead as the meat he is dismembering and decided to tear down his labor in death and live as peacefully as he could.  I love that the author touches on the fact that most tough guys have a certain image, but are capable of loving just as deeply as others.  So deeply in fact, that the man breaks down into tears that make other women cry.  Anyway, good poem. J

January 26

Yeats poems are quite interesting.  They often have contradicting ideologies within a single poem and he seems to write about love quite often.  After reading Yeats Biography, I began reading his poetry and trying to decide which poems were about his one love Maud Gonne who became a political extremist and was said to have been written about in some of Yeats poetry up to the end.  "He Wishes for the Cloths" is a poem that I feel explains what happened with Maud and Yeats.  He offered up his dreams and love to Maud and hoped that she would accept him and all that included and "tread lightly", but in real life she does not tread lightly and takes an action that severs their connections completely.  Another poem, "The Song of Wandering Aengus", could be interpreted as being before Maud took her politicality to the extreme and when Yeats was endeavoring for her hand in marriage.  There was "fire...in my head" because he couldn't get her to accept the proposal, but he kept searching for that "glimmering girl" in hopes of her accepting him.  If these assumptions are correct, then it is quite an insight into a man's mind who was tormented by a woman who could have cared less.

January 24

All three authors, Hardy, Housman, and Thomas, wrote about God not existing or not caring and death.  All three had troubling lives and it showed in their poetry.  I am going to focus on Hardy for this entry.  One poem in particular caught my attention because this is a fear that a lot of people share, if it is interpreted as I interpret it.  "Neutral Tones" is about a woman who has long since stopped loving her husband and is grinning bitterly as she remembers how her smile trapped her man who she used to love.  She roves over the tedious riddle of how her life came to be such a cliché.  This whole while, the man is still madly in love with the woman and is still smitten with her smile, but when he notices the bitterness in her grin he realizes that his love has blinded him to the truth of her indifference to him now.  He has awakened from his love-struck stupor and realizes that it is plain to see in her face and the dead gray winter scene before him that his wife is completely neutral to him and thus he shall be now.  No one wants their marriage to fail and wants their spouse to be their one true love, but oft that is not the case as the growing divorce rate will tell you.