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.