Friday, May 1, 2009

Getting to Know Each Other

I have thoroughly enjoyed our poetry class for several reasons. One of these reasons is that, although our class in large in regards to workshopping poems, it is small in regards to getting to know each other. At this point, I'm not positive that I remember everyone's first name--and I certainly don't remember last names. However, I know people based on their poetry. I don't think I've ever had a class where we concentrated and focused on workshops. There's something pretty cool about knowing that if one of our classmates forgot to write their name on their poem, I might be able to correctly identify it just based on the writing style and content. I love that we've become so familiar with each other's work that such a thing is possible. I also love the way reading poems from so many different people from so many different backgrounds has broadened my knowledge of poetry and even helped me with my own work. This is probably the only class where I will miss classmates this semester, too. This class has been fairly easy, but I feel like I've learned so much! I'm so glad I took this class. It was great to hear everyone's ideas and poetry. = )

Hope to have classes with you guys again!

Sarah Corra

Revising poems

After the last workshop day of the class, I was left with some great feedback for my poem. For the most part, my peers agreed that my work, although a fun read, was a little bit of a hodgepodge. The poem did not flow as well as it could have. So what I attempted to do in my revisions was make the poem flow better from stanza to stanza. Because I was working with the references of so many different pop culture icons, I decided the best way to connect the people I wrote of was by association using the events of their respective lives as the borameter. Initially, I started out with Lennon then moved to Ingrid Berman. In my revised version, I used sections to better represent my thought process in the poem, and to better aid the reader throug the poem. I coupled JFK with Lennon, highlighting their tragically young passings. I used Monroe, Berman, and added Judy Garland to another section, actresses that to me best represent the grainy black and white era of cinema. I also added an even more playful opening to the poem, one that uses the speaker's voice slightly more in reality, something that I think adds to my poem's idea of the cycles of being high. I think that the workshop process and Matt's comments greatly helped my work here. I knew where I was trying to go, but I didn't know how to get there. The comments my classmates gave me allowed me to see the direction I needed to be pointed in to write a sensical poem.

workshopping and portfolio

The workshopping process was something that greatly improved my work throughout the semester. At the beginning of the year, I would read my poetry to myself and think that it read well, that what I was writing was substantial and creative. But when I was able to have my peers read my work, certain things were pointed out to me that I never would have thought of if not for the workshop process. Certain things that were disclosed to me: sometimes a cluttered, complicated image is not the best one. An image that is clear, concise, and brings out some sort of emotion is usually the best. Also, poetry can be vague, but being vauge for the sake of being vague is not a recipe for good work. I have found that, although you are writing for yourself, you are also writing for the sake of the reader. The revisions I made in my portfolio reflect the work I made to make my poems more accomidating to the reader. Although the strange is welcomed in this genre, I have found that the simplest form, however strange, usually works best, as is the case for most things.
Michael McCune

Imitation Poems

I love that we've done several imitation poems in class. I think it's a great experience to attempt to write using the style of other poets. It's an interesting challenge, and I've learned a lot from it. I decided that it would be fun to try to imitate Dean Young's poem "True/False." While I kept his style of numbered statements, I also attempted to maintain a certain depth to the statements I made.

True Or False?

1. There is always a right answer.
2. He loves me.
3. Do you see what I see?
4. Robin’s Egg Blue is a cooler crayon than Periwinkle.
5. Cell phones give you cancer—all that radiation gnaws away at your brain.
6. I am a culinary genius.
7. I masturbate to keep warm.
8. Bill Gates.
9. Wednesdays are the new Fridays—you know what I mean.
10. Full moons bring out the crazies.
11. Chivalry is dead.
12. Pay. Attention.
13. My black cat really is bad luck.
14. She also has a crooked ear from where my brother squished her in the Lazyboy.
15. I am beautiful.
16. Question Mark.
17. Men go through PMS too…sort of.
18. The government hears you dirty-talking your girlfriend.
19. Why is the rum always gone?
20. You are forgiven.
21. I complain about hickeys.
22. I am proud of my hickeys.
23. He loves me not.
24. If your grandmother had seen you last night, she would have been ashamed.
25. We are made in God’s image.
26. Number twenty-nine is a lie.
27. I love my name.
28. I’ve always admired you.
29. Sixty-nineing is more fun to say than do.
30. Ozzy drools like a dog. He begs and fetches, too.
31. My ring finger is unadorned.
32. Grammar is a forgotten art.
33. Wouldn’t you like to know?
34. Your mother told you lies.
35. But she was damn good in bed.
36. Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.
37. Naps are better if you’re not alone.
38. I have issues with authority.
39. People with uniforms intimidate me.
40. People with uniforms and guns intimidate me even more.
41. Sarah can fly—but it’s not recommended.
42. A bomb in the lasagna? Great Scott!
43. This one time, I went to my uncle’s house in Louisiana. My brother & I were bored, so we went down to the bayou in a boat. I leaned over the edge of the boat to see what we hit, and an alligator jumped up and bit me in the face.
44. Forty-three is totally true, and I have the scar above my left eye to prove it.
45. Men are merely necessities.
46. Unless you have plenty of AAA batteries.
47. I want to see my landlord in the scope of my rocket launcher.
48. Then pull the trigger.
49. No one in Hollywood deserves to be mentioned in this poem.
50. I cannot ride a bike.
51. I have no desire to learn either—most the time.
52. Pacifists always get assassinated.
53. I hate being a woman.
54. I love being a woman.
55. I aspire to be a kinky old lady.
56. Some kid once mistook my birthmark for a tattoo.
57. But I’m still not telling you where it is.
58. I have a fetish for Asians…female Asians.
59. But mostly I’m totally straight.
60. Except for that cold, lonely night in Manhattan.

Sarah Corra

Waiting for my foot to ring by Bob Hicok

What a strange and interesting poem! This thing is full of awesome lines which at first glance all seem to be somewhat random (as you might be able to tell by the title) yet have something woven between them that keeps them all together to tell some sort of story. My absolute favorite line in this poem is "I have sunlight on my hands/I'm thinking of putting it in a box and sending/to the people who weight sunlight". Brilliant. That this poem seems to be doing is bringing a sort of Hyper realism (i think that's the right word) to an otherwise normal, but sad situation. The speakers father is on the operating table for what seems to be colon cancer, and the speaker in basically just showing us what he sees but in a very unique way. He then tells us about his fathers childhood, and some stuff about his own childhood as well. I suppose one line in his poem kind of shows what he is doing, and that is "Every time I write, I try to hold/the world still by noticing how the world moves". VERY cool poem.

`Brian Michael Dunar

On Being a Sonnet Snob

I think I'm a sonnet snob. First of all, I would like to say that I am not one of those few talented poets who write sonnets well. Even though this is the case, I still have a certain idea in mind when it comes to what a sonnet should be like. A sonnet should have certain qualities to it, in addition to the actual rules/criteria that defines a sonnet. It should use more formal language.--though not necessarily Old English. I also have trouble grasping "modern sonnets." For example, "Heat" by Denis Johnson does not fit my criteria. I don't deny that it is a good poem; and it certainly is interesting. However, I just prefer the more traditional sonnets. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" by Shakespeare and "Farewell to Love" by Michael Drayton are both great sonnets. I love the language used in both of these sonnets. I also like the more romantic themes. While I appreciate that we all have our own style when it comes to writing poetry, I also appreciate that we all enjoy different types of poetry. I think the types of sonnets I enjoy are the more traditional sonnets.

Sarah Corra

Response to Moment by Sarah C. Portner

Good job! I found this poem really interesting. I like how you managed to capture that "Moment" in time so vividly yet you didn't give away what happened in this moment. I think the mystery in this poem along with the strong details and imagry really brought it to life even without knowing what exactly happened. The other cool thing about it is that it is able to be related with to me as the reader even though I have not experienced this moment. It is written in a way that makes it universal and shows the value of friendships and the impact it can make on our lives, whether good or bad. The one thing I did find unclear however (if you are looking for some suggestions for revision as well) is actually the very last line. This is because it does not have a direct link to a point in the poem. I think it is talking about the colors two lines before, but I think the placement of the line makes it seem like the days are running down the face in smears and not the colors. I may have interperated (sp?) it wrong though, but if it was a little bit more clear like the rest of the poem I think that would be really helpful.

Thanks for the good read!
Brian Michael Dunar

Found

I found this poem buried within my old writings that I have stacked up in files on my computer, so I figured I would share it and do some revisions for this blog post.

Found

A nice thing,
to celebrate how
too many
hollow syllables
that, two
eyes and
two
ears, turn
into ordinary things.
Alert to the
possibilities in
ordinary unknowns.

Upon re-reading this after a long time I realized it didn't really makes sense... so I thought I should make it say something interesting, here is what I did.

Found
It's interesting
to see how
hollow syllables
can turn
into ordinary things
such as two
eyes and
two ears
which see and
hear the
possibilities in
ordinary unknowns.


I'm not sure how well it really worked over all, but trying to salvage what I could from an old poem that didn't really make sense, and make it into something useful was pretty fun I must say!


`Brian Michael Dunar

Home by Robert Winner

Home by Robert Winner is an interesting poem about his home in the Bronx in the 1930s and onward, and how he sees it. The visual details are very vivid such as the lines "driving past those small hills/blighted for miles with bleak/six-story desert-like apartments" and "in its damp and dingy streets, living my life". He then makes a comment about how it probably used to look without landfills and delapidated buildings and what not. The poem in the packet is unfortunatly not the whole thing, but I'd imagine the poem continues on with these themes where he paints a very bleak outlook on his home, and yet somehow makes the reader (me) want to visit it and see what it was like back then, since I hear it is actually fairly nice now.


Brian Michael Dunar

Between the Lines

I forced myself
to take his words at face value
ignore the trap doors
i knew were there.
For the first time
i guarded my eyes
i shielded my smile.
Did my fortress crack
when i gave way and laughed?
I'll never know why
he came back
nor what it was he "enjoyed"
or will i ever know why
i took him back.

--Sarah C. Portner

Without You

One more sad song
I'll wake up again
Without you
And today won't seem so long
Without you
I'll smile for the first time
In weeks
Your memories will start to fade
I'll realize, I'm better off
Without you
The night will slip away
My body won't long
For your arms
And I'll lie here
Without you.

--Sarah C. Portner

Brush of Pain

I wanted you to hold out for me
to fight for me
to long, like I have longed
Instead we fell
Broken acts
Shattered hearts
Forgotten dreams
Walking away from you
God knows I betrayed you
Believe me, I too, am aware
of the damage I've wrought
A woman's heart
is a jealous, indignant heart
that leads to a wounded pride
We were each others demise
I was yours
And you were mine
What a cruel hand we were dealt by fate
I can't change the stars
My melancholy friend
I can only write the songs
of their fallen friends
If I could only speak
these words out right to you
I truly believe that would do more for you
than my written words
could ever dream to do
If I was only able to
spill the intentions of my weary heart

--Sarah C. Portner

Moment

I just wanted to put something that I had been working in on here. I don't know if it counts, but I figured I would give it a shot.

Moment
Dedicated to Chelsea and Travis

We defined a moment
A sequence in time
That is irrevocably ours
Irreplaceable in ways we'll never know
Somewhere, that moment lives on
In some pocket of time
That is hidden away for memories
And sunless rainy days
A reservoir of laughs that erased the night
Graffiti'd with black and blue and
That silver paint that streamed down your face
And provoked a smile
Unleashed the flood gates of laughter
Till we could not breath
Till tears ran in with the sweat and ink
Till we were lined
Lined with every color of creation
Colors that have been forgotten
Faded into a forever of endless forgotten days
And they ran in smears down the drain.

--Sarah C. Portner

Design in "Design"

One of William Olson's suggestions is to find an attitude of one of your favorite poets with which you disagree. Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets; I love his style, language, and themes. His poem "Design" is also a favorite, but I disagree with his belief that nature and even the universe was designed.

"What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small."

According to Frost, a "design of darkness to appall" - some terrifying, hostile force - colored the flower “innocent” white and guided both the predator and its prey to it so the spider would eat the moth. I would call that design “nature” or “natural selection” but not divine. He entertains the concept of a higher power such as a deity consciously creating and directing the universe but I find two problems in that perception: morality and natural order.

Frost considers nature to be a malevolent force but fails to see that nature itself is not alive. A rock does not grow from acquiring resources (ie. eating), water does not adapt to stimuli (ie. fighting, fleeing, growing a winter coat, etc.), and clouds do not reproduce to propagate their species. Without life, the forces of nature can have no consciousness and therefore no intentions or sense of morality. The weather, energy, natural selection, etc. are not malicious or compassionate but either beneficial or destructive.

As for natural order, Frost wonders if nature was designed but fails to recognize patterns that develop from natural stimuli without being planned. Ancient civilizations once considered thunderstorms to be angry gods but discovered that they develop based on certain conditions. When we acquire the technology and science to understand mysteries, we can drop the myth of design because it can be observed to develop naturally - without being planned.

Take the "invisible hand" theory by Adam Smith, the so-called father of economics. According to this concept, order tends to arise from spontaneous individual actions. His example was about free markets but the same can be applied to nature. Flocks of birds operate under the "invisible hand" concept because no single bird leads the flock and yet all birds maintain perfect order. This is because every bird acts in its own self interest. Birds have certain instincts: Maintain distance from others so as not to bump into them, but keep close enough to remain part of the flock. This individual order produces order in the flock's larger system.

This concept shows how this pattern of flower-spider-moth evolved through spontaneous individual actions, not intelligent design. The flower, spider, and moth were not placed there together by some divine hand. The flower was first a seed that grew there because the soil had enough nutrients. The spider climbed into the flower because flowers of the same color offer protection via camouflage, and moths (aka food) also visit them frequently. The moth flew into the spider's trap because moths usually feed on nectar. These organisms came together because each acted based on their own needs, not because the rendezvous was planned by some celestial being.

Robert Frost juggled the idea of design during his life, but I find it pretty simple after observing nature for only 22 years. The universe needs no designer to develop order and complex systems out of chaos. Earth itself has existed for over four billion years, certainly enough time for random events to develop patterns. Darwin's theory of evolution has naturally produced species best adapted to their environment and canyons have evolved after centuries of flowing rivers.

Even human reason and consciousness has evolved from the consistent growth of our ancestors' cognitive abilities. Even today, studies reveal the basics of language acquisition in chimpanzees, with whom we share over 90% of our DNA. I disagree with Frost that nature was designed, because when scientists discover how complex systems develop over time, the truth is simple.

--Jessica Murphy

What I Learned From This Class Cont'd...

This blog is a great deal of my portfolio introduction. Since only Matt will be looking at my portfolio I wanted to publish this for the whole class to view.

Over the course of this Spring 2009 Poetry class I have learned a great deal about poetry and myself. I have learned that poetry is in the eye of the creator. Poetry can be anything that evokes an emotion or remembrance. Often times I find that the piece of work is only good in the poets’ eyes, which is perfectly fine. As a songwriter, I write for the satisfaction of myself and most of the time I don’t even care what the listener thinks of my music, because to me, my music is the most personal channel to evoke emotion possible.

Workshopping was a very new experience to me. I have never sat in a room and had people critique my work like that. At times, I found that most people didn’t have a clue what they were talking about but the fact that their grade depended on participation meant they had to speak their mind. This is why I workshopped with a grain of salt. Like I repeatedly stated in class, I am no English major so why would I give punctuation advice. I wouldn’t and didn’t.

The mood in class was mostly very serious. As a comedian I felt that a good way to lighten the mood was to use humor in my work. Musically, my music is a great deal more serious than my life mentality. When you get screwed often in life, it’s hard to keep a straight face. With my poetry I took kindly to dry humor, which was a nice mixture of my lyrical and mental background. I always found joy in making the class laugh at an irony in my work.
Overall my work is deeply ironic. The biggest irony I used was in my poem “No Question Too Small”. Whereas everyone kept repeating that they wanted something more profound and serious at the end I confided in the fact that they didn’t see that one coming. In my mind I was successful.

All in all, my general theme is of the religious nature. As a man who is strongly bible believing, I get a lot of my inspiration from my favorite poet, Kind David. King David was a military man who wrote about a lot of the daily struggles that you and I can relate to. I guess, other than Jesus, he would be the guy I would want to have lunch with.

As I already stated, poetry focuses on an emotion or remembrance. The most profound thing I took from this poetry class was how to use eloquent words to describe how I feel. This is a useful skill for poetry and its cousin, songwriting and one that will serve me in any facet of my life. How ironic that I am a communications minor but learned how to best communicate in poetry class.

I really enjoyed this class and I want to thank everyone for their input and hospitality. Good luck in your futures.

-Jay
jaywoodward.com

Experiment in Geography by Zachary Schomburg

I found this poem very humorous, right from the beginning. The line, I'd been putting beaches in North Dakota for two months, really caught my attention and also made me think how ridiculous it would be to see a globe with beaches in North Dakota. It is just such a strange and hilarious image. I assume that is what the author was going for. I especially loved the line, I put a fairground next to our neighborhood. I thought it would help. Mainly because of how crazy it sounds. He is talking as if by putting it on the map it made his neighborhood better. It also made me think that he was implying that if he were to put a fairground next to his neighborhood on the map that some how it would appear in real life. I also really enjoyed the line, Remember when I took you to see Kansas City? That was Omaha. It added a lot to the story and showed how much the narrator cares about geography. I think it only adds to the ridiculousness by him apologizing for the mistake. The last stanza definitely had some great language but I did not completely get the meaning of it, which is fine with me because it in no way detracted from the poem.

Robert C. Carothers III

My Son the Man by Sharon Olds

I found this poem to be very moving and well written. I especially like the parallels between her son and Harry Houdini. By the second line i was intrigued. As I continued on the parallel became stronger and stronger, which I really enjoyed. I love the line, zip him up and toss him up and catch his weight. I got a perfect image from this. By reading that line it was very clear just how sad this mother is that her little boy is growing up. She had a lot of wonderful description throughout this piece, and certainly has a good grasp of language. The line, This is not what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson. What a great way to describe pregnancy and child birth. Such great images and such powerful language. I also love how she follows it with another reference to Houdini by saying he, snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains, and appeared in my arms. What perfect description, and she got across so much emotion with so few words. I also thought the end was very fitting, and also added in a bit of humor. Particularly the line, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

Robert C. Carothers III

Where I Go At Night by Zachary Schomburg

I liked the three line stanza structure of this poem. I thought it worked well even though the author has a single thought go across two stanzas. I liked the short lines, containing no more than six words. I was engaged in the poem right from the first stanza. Once I reached the end of the second stanza I couldn't wait to move on. The line, I become a huge expanding and contracting shapelessness, like a group of wild children at the zoo. What great images. The expanding and contracting shapelessness, what a wild picture that gives. It almost makes me think of the blob, but not in any sort of distracting way. Also the way he parallels his shapelessness with kids at the zoo is just fantastic. Mainly because i got a perfect image of a large group of children all moving together but in a most disorderly fashion. I also really enjoyed the idea of the author hovering over things. He states some very unique things like the fruit section of a lonely late-night supermarket, or the sleeping Japanese diplomat, and the corpses of Japanese working class. All of these are very interesting. Particularly the Japanese working class corpses. What a sad and beautiful image that is. It also added, at least in my opinion, a great of emotion to the piece. I found the end to be rather strange, but then thought about other poems that have done similar things. After rereading it I found the ending very fitting and i eventually grew to love how it flows from beginning to end.


Robert C. Carothers III

Poem for Underdog by Matthew Rohrer

I loved this poem. Probably because of all the references to other things. First off i think it has a great first line. After reading it i was instantly engrossed in the poem. I also really enjoyed the things that he has seen, like underdog in full color on a black and white tv. What a great concept and image. I could only imagine how amazing it would be to see something like that. Each line made me more and more interested in the next. I also really liked how the poem sort of changed in the middle where he stops speaking in the terms of, I have seen, and states talking about random things he has seen. Like the girl at sears with no bra, what a real image and statement. Its almost as if he was just writing them as he thought them up. My favorite part, probably because I am a nerd, was the adults replaced by Replicants in 1977. What a hilarious and interesting statement to make. I could see that being taken in several different ways. Possibly the author meant that people lost a bit of there emotional sides in 1977. Or perhaps it is reference to Jimmy Carter becoming president. Implying that he lived like a replicant simply smiling and waving. Either way, no matter what the meaning was I loved it, and thought it really added a great deal to the piece. The end of the poem is odd and gives me a sort of eerie feeling. With the line, I have looked into the mirror and seen two dark pools of humility, and the following line, Others have only dreamed they've looked into the mirror. What a strange image and concept. After reading it I was unsure of what to think. The last two lines just seem so dark to me, which works very well, but nonetheless gave me a slight feeling of confusion.


Robert C. Carothers III

February by James Harms

I feel that this poem is short and sweet. It is filled with a number of lovely images and interesting language. I love how it begins, going over all the things Walt has in his pockets, especially the plastic dinosaur. I am not usually to keen on poems or stories that take place in West Virginia (mainly because that is where we are), but i thought this poem worked very well. I like the fact that there are two proper names used in this poem, Walt and Phoebe. By the author doing this I got a very O'Hara feel from it, which I definitely liked. I really enjoyed Phoebe's naming the clothes as she is folding them. This just added to the O'Hara feel and also really engaged me in the poem. One line that did confuse me was, every shirt a sort of hat. I love the sound of the line, but I am unsure of its meaning. I really liked the part about the postman and how he rings the doorbell to let them know that he's late. I found this to be very strange and intriguing. I have never heard of a postman letting you know he's late, but i do love the concept of it. After finishing this poem honestly i wanted more. I wanted to know about the clothes Phoebe was folding, and the postman, and also the plastic dinosaur. This poem had so many interesting images, that it just left me wanting more.

Robert C. Carothers III

Nocturne by Tomas Transtromer

I found the poem Nocturne very strange and interesting. The first read through, I was very confused by the language. After a second and third read, the poem became much more enjoyable. I especially like the part where he talks about the human beings sleeping. Like saying that some sleep peacefully while others have tense faces as though in hard training for eternity. I love that line. I feel that it says so much about a portion of our population. I took this as a religious reference, which might be incorrect, but nonetheless I liked how it worked. The last stanza seemed the most powerful to me. Particularly the line, I see unknown images and signs sketching themselves behind the eyelids on the wall of the dark. What a crazy image, and a wonderful way to describe it. The last line of the poem is very well written and gives a nice image but its meaning is a little harder for me to figure out. I see how it relates, but i suppose my only problem is wanting to know what the letter is.

Robert C. Carothers III

Thursday, April 30, 2009

car covered with snow

I really like the poem Car Covered With Snow. I’m really jealous too. I once tried to create a similar scene in a short story: the character sitting inside a car whose windows are blocked by dew and hesitating to hit the wipers. Needless to say, Boruch did it much better.
She really captured that safe other-world you find yourself in when you sit in that kinda car-cave. “the stillness is such/that I lose how the day works.” Shit. that line is just too much. “I lose how the day works” isn’t that true? for those few seconds you sit in that little steel cabin and forget about the school or
work you’re running late for, and it’s great.
the she brings her kid into the scene. and he’s got those great lines: it’s like “we’re/in a closed fist, Mama./Or, it’s like the car’s eyes is closed.” personally, i like the closed fist one better. I’d maybe say “yes, it’s a closed fist” cause that’s it. you feel safe and protected and sense that the snow knows what it’s doing out there, wrapping around the car.
I also love the lines were she mentions the cardinal making noises outside the car. those familiar sounds you’re now blind to that remind you that you can’t sit in the car all day. and you probably wouldn’t want to because what is perfect for a few seconds soon may lose that something special. In a subtle way Boruch gets that idea across. that those awesome moments only happen in those few seconds that you stop to take a breath and notice them.

-wes edmond

Images

The Robert Hass quotation about Images from "The Poet's Companion" handout really caught my attention. The part about images haunting one is true, I think. Also, the moment where he quotes one of Tu Fu's colleagues, who said, "It's like being alive twice," is pretty powerful. Hass also says "[images] do not say this is that, they say this is."

I think this is essential to poetry. The exploration of images can transmit so much more to a reader than an idea can. Ideas, as Hass says, have "implications outside themselves." Images simply exist; they can be more, but they don't have to be. An image gives your reader a concrete thing to cling to, to focus upon, to think about. The chain reaction that this can cause can be used effectively in poetry.

If, in a poem, one says "freedom," a dozen different readers will get a dozen different thoughts. If one says, "I've heard the lock/Come undone/And seen the paleness/Of skin once beneath shackles," then the image a reader has is of the pale skin and of the fallen shackle, and freedom is suddenly defined instead of just introduced.

Capturing images because they haunt you can be a way to make the meaning behind them clear to other people. Getting an image down is a way of making the image that haunted you become a poem that haunts a reader, and things that haunt us make us think.

-Audrey Guire

Suggestions List

From the list of suggestions we got for writing poetry, one thing that really stuck out to me was the Linda Gregg quote, suggestion number 60. She wrote: "It is not that the darkness/ must be here, but that it sometimes is."

This line really resonates with me in relation to my fiction prose and my poetry. It pretty much sums up what I want to do with my writing. I want to expose darkness for what it is, but I want to leave people with hope. I would hate to know that all someone got out of one of my poems was that darkness exists.

I don't even think we live in a universe that demands the presence of darkness to balance things out. I think that darkness in the world is imbalance, not the leveling of something. Perfect balance is found in perfect goodness. I'm aware of what a high and lofty goal this is, but the presence of a possibility is what I want to convey when I write.

As a Christian, my goal in writing anything is to glorify God. That sounds complex, but to me, it simply means to expose the darkness for being untruth, and also relate the simplicity of truth. We are a broken people, us humans, but I would be amiss to only study our brokenness. I would also be amiss to ignore it. For me, the purpose of writing is to acknowledge my own bruised and broken nature, and to acknowledge the Christ who saved me from that misery.

I think that is why the Linda Gregg quote means so much to me. What she says is what I want to convey with all my poetry and all my prose; that the darkness is sometimes there, but that it doesn't have to be, and that there is hope beyond it.

-Audrey Guire

What I Learned From This Class

I don’t consider myself a poet because I think in terms of prose (I’m a fiction writer outside of this class), but I am getting more comfortable with poetry. At the beginning of the semester, I felt like such an imposter to be in a class with so many talented students. Everyone seemed to take poetry so seriously and put so much work into it, and their poems turned out so impressively. I couldn’t even read a poem without feeling like the line breaks and rhymes were making me dizzy. Now, I am more confident in reading poetry and find writing poetry to be more and more enjoyable.

I am still working on finding an effective process for writing poems. In my past amateur experiences with poetry, I had the most success when I saved writing for when I was most emotional. They weren’t necessarily the most profound poems, but they were easier to get out and then I had something to work with. Unfortunately, I’m not generally a very emotional person so I don’t often feel driven to write poems. Half the time I am uninspired and it takes me forever to write anything, even in fiction. It is definitely a big challenge, and I think the process may be different depending on the poem. I am certainly still learning and it is thanks to this class and the people in it that I haven’t sworn poetry off, which I am really quite grateful for.

~Nicole Bartow

Random Poem

In the 418 class, some of the grad students gave short lectures on different aspects of writing, such as editing, dialogue, fantasy, etc. The lecture that stuck with me the most was Jason Freeman's lecture on adaptation; although I used to think of adaptations as being books to film, we learned that adaptation can take place in any medium; drawing, music...and poetry. We had recently played with repetition in poems in this class, so I tried to write my own adaptation poem. This is based off of the book "The Looking Glass Wars" by Frank Beddor, which is actually based off of the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, and it's very rough.

"Alyss"

The cards are shuffled
Shuffled across the chessboard
Black and red
And I stand on the mirror clock, on the five
And at eleven I have to begin.

Eyes on the edges, colors waiting to be marched
She isn’t here but the Queen’s cards are shuffled.
Black oval heads, black hands, feet
Black lips
Red eyes
Red eyes on the clock where I stand
And everything is caught in my throat.

The mirror reflects blue smoke over the squares.
Shuffled across the chessboard, red eyes on the clock,
I move to eleven.


~Nicole Bartow

On a "Spirit ditty of no fax-line dial tone"

Bob Hicok's poem "Spirit ditty of a no fax-line dial tone" does an excellent job of taking us through a familiar situation to get to a meaningful point. He uses emotion that is familiar and accessible to us to get through a frustrating situation and reach a profound conclusion.

The detail makes us laugh and feel at ease. Descriptions like "hula skirt of tools" and "or a taser from hair caught in the drain and the million volts of frustration popping through my body," work really well for this poem. At first, I wasn't even sure I wanted to call this poetry, but I gradually came to the realization that this couldn't be anything else. It wouldn't work as well in prose essay form.

By the time Hicok gets to the end of the poem, we're waiting to see what he will do about the lousy AT&T service and he whiplashes around into a startling conclusion: the broken line is a blessing in disguise. Maybe we've neglected something crucial about nature, about a slower pace, about patience and the steadfastness of weather.

I'm willing to accept this from him because the poem shows him realizing in a way I sympathize with. I have been drawn into this moment by his humorous approach to frustration with technology and the people who claim to fix it.

Along with these things, he also uses some poetic devices rather well. The repetition of "Up to a work order. Down at a phone jack." several times is brilliant because it's not just emphasis; it's narrating emotion in a very visual way.

After thinking it wasn't really poetry because of the conversational tone, I might end up claiming it as my favorite of the semester!

-Audrey Guire

Waltzing 'Round the Lightning Bugs

Near the beginning of the semester we looked at Theodore Roethke's "My Papa's Waltz" and another version of the poem called "His Father's Dance." These two examples were a great study in what Twain called "the right word" and the "almost right word."

In the two versions of the poem, though, it goes beyond mere words. It is the phrasing itself that is different. Roethke's carefully assembled poem says things far better than the imitation.

The very way things are phrased can increase the clarity of a mental image. For example, a line in Roethke's last stanza is "With a palm caked hard by dirt." In the imitation, this line has become "With his very dirty hand." There are two different realizations of an image here; one is still true, but vague. The other gives us not just visual information, but information about how something feels and even more detail about how it looks.

This is consistently true about the original and the imitation. Lines like, "My right ear scraped a buckle" are far more informative than "He bumped painfully into him." The comparison was a great exercise in seeing how much difference finding the right string of words can make.

The other interesting thing about the Roethke poem is that he doesn't have to use bigger words to convey a clearer meaning. He just uses simple, everyday language. The difference is how specific the language is, not how obscure it is. Also, the concreteness of his phrasing makes a big difference.

These two poems say a lot about three things important to poetry: the right phrasing, specific words, and concrete descriptions.

-Audrey Guire

WingDings: An Exercise in Nonsense

I Don't Really Care How You Send It, Just Send Me A Letter
by Audrey Guire


We briefly joked in class about WingDing poetry when we were talking about postcard poems. I scribbled a frantic note to myself to try it sometime. I thought that today would be a good day to see what happened. WingDings were rather familiar to me because of how much I played with them when I was in first grade, right after my family got our first computer.

When I started, I had to decide what I was going for. Was I going to write a poem in "normal" English and then just change the font? Or was I going to assemble a poem using the WingDing images to compose the poem itself?

I tried both. The top image is WingDings poetry using the font to convey a meaning, rather than mask it. The following is a poem I wrote in a normal font and then switched to WingDings. I made it short, for the purpose of space. Also, to make comparison more effective, I wrote the poem on the same theme as the WingDing poem above: communication. (I've also provided the translation, since image-posting was the only way to get WingDings on blogger, rendering copy/paste useless.)

I Pray For The Phone to Ring
by Audrey Guire


It just looks like a mess. In English, this poem reads:

Silence scares me.
Just let me know you’re alive
And that we’re okay.
But I know it’s my fault
I hear anger in quiet and
Your words sound like love.

It's not the best poem, but it was enough to see that assembling poems in WingDings is probably better for artistic value than just cryptically translating them. It sort of makes me want to keep trying, to see what other meanings I can pull out of well assembled strings of WingDings. I might have to try mixing it with English next.

Anyway. I think it's pretty cool, but any thoughts? Is this really poetry, or is it just modern art? Is it even that?

-Audrey Guire

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Phone Call

Tony Hoagland has written a very nice poem here. It is a great admittance of that guilt you feel when you offend someone close but aren’t ready to admit it to them and apologize.
Instead, he admits it to us. Right at the beginning he writes, “Maybe I overdid it/when I called my father an enemy of humanity.” With these lines he sets up the entire emotion conflict for the poem. we know what he did, who he did it to, and that he isn’t quite sure how he feels about what he did or, maybe, even why he did it.
Then, the next stanza gives us a great deal of information is just a few good lines. we learn that they live miles away from each other, that the speaker has been through therapy when he was younger, and that this conversation just took place on the phone. each of these points puts added distance between the speaker and his father.
The next two stanza are my favorite. he explains that there are two parts to his father. the part he is angry at/the part he also recognizes in himself, is described as some disembodied spirit that crushes and destroys. Hoagland gives us tons of action. The second part, the part which he feels sorry for treating the way he has, is described is simple descriptive terms: “standing...in Wyoming/with bad knees and white hair...”
The way Hoagland chose to describe each part of his father shows how he sees him. As a human who can’t always control what consequences his actions have, nor can he control what other project on to him. I think that Hoagland know that the second father is much closer to the real thing, and is therefore described in completely concrete terms.
I would give anything to be able to develop relationships btw characters that well.

-wes edmond

I Go Back to May 1937

When looking over the poems in the large packet of poems we received earlier in the semester, the one poem that intrigued me was “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds. I have read this poem previously, and did not understand the poem the first time I read it a few years ago. But then again, I was around 11 when I first read it. When I read it this time around I was very intrigued about how the poem revolved around time. And more specifically the marriage and break up of that marriage of the poet’s parent’s. The poet writes the poem as if she were a bystander in the meeting of her parents. She speaks in third person, and pleads in vain to her parents not to get married.

“They are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
Innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
Don’t do it – she’s the wrong woman.”

She goes through the way her parent meet, to their first date, and their “wide eyed innocence” when they rush into their marriage. This phrase is so integral to the meaning of the poem that it’s hard to over look. The speaker of the poem is trying to convey the thought that even when two people are young and “so in love” that sometimes they are not fully mature enough to understand the entire scope of their feelings.

I also like how the speaker is willing to let her parents go through future unhappiness and further traumatic events to occur just so she can be born. I also really enjoyed how she (in my opinion) thanks her parents at the end for doing all that they did wrong like getting married, doing cruel and terrible things to each other, and finally letting their marital problems affect the children of the marriage.

I thought the poem was unique in the way that the subject matter was presented.

Oh and this is my 8th blog post... Go me! :)

*Donya Botkan*

The Crowds Cheered As Gloom Galloped Away

Martha Harvey’s poem tells the story of tiny ponies who seem to cure sadness. It opens by telling us that a month’s supply of pills came with six small ponies, which are then played with by children and eventually left to their own devices. People seem to refer to the ponies manifestations of gloom. The line “people would smile & say, ‘This would have been an awful month for me,’ pointing to the glossy palomino trotting around their ankles” makes me think that the stronger and prettier the ponies look, the worse the sadness is. But the people don’t feel sadness if they’ve had anything to do with ponies and pills. The poem seems to suggest that misery is an attractive thing to the masses, and the more depressing something is, the more people will cheer for it. I can’t help but relate this to nonfiction novels, many of which tell the true hardships of the writer. You don’t read much nonfiction that doesn’t deal with some sort of tragedy or seemingly impossible circumstance. People do tend to be attracted to the sorrow of others, for whatever reason.

Because this piece reads so much like a story, and because it is formatted as one long paragraph, I wonder what makes it a poem. It seems more like poetic fiction to me, and I can’t think of how to re-format it without drastically changing the sentence structure. Generally, I like for poems to appear as poems, and while I enjoyed reading this, I don’t understand why it is written the way it is.


~Nicole Bartow

Cinquain

I took a creative writing course during my senior year of high school, which was geared more toward poetry - specifically, poems with a certain format. Although we covered sonnets, the poems I remembered and most enjoyed writing were cinquains. In the traditional style, cinquains are five-line poems that follow a syllable pattern - two syllables in the first line, four in the second line, then six, then eight, and then two syllables again. I haven't seen anyone write one in the four years since then, so I've always felt kind of bad for the neglected cinquain and favor them. I haven't written many, but this one is the only one that I halfway like.

"Picnic"

In the
road you meet it.
The bite of three choices,
sharp to the stab, not silver, but
plastic.


~Nicole Bartow

"How to" Poem

I found this exercise one of the easy and more free flowing exercises we have done in class; which is to say that I enjoyed it. When I was sitting there trying to think of something I knew well enough to describe I sort of drew a blank at first. Like the “bragging” exercise, it’s hard to find something that I know well enough to tell people that I know it well; if that makes any sense. After a few minutes of racking me brain for something I do well I came to “songwriting” While I may not be good at it, I realize that I do know the popular format and basics of songwriting. Below is the rough draft of my “how to” poem.


Writing a Song

Start with a subject
the subject could be a feeling or observation
Recall a specific moment
when the subject’s intensity is at its greatest
Write it down like a Jesus parable
concise.
The fewer the words
demonstrate a better understanding of the material
The story is told in verse
The moral is told in chorus
Digress at the end
with a prelude to another planet
Bringing it back with the chorus
shows the listener you are serious
Your song is a journey
like being John Malkovich
it puts another in your place
A common tactic of escaping life
For 3 to 5 minutes.

Like I said, I really enjoyed this exercise and once I found a topic, it flowed like the Nile. Again, this copy is just a rough draft but I figured since I wasn’t going to workshop it I might as well post it here. The hardest part about writing a “how to” poem for me isn’t the fact that I know how to do something, its describing it to make sense to someone else who has never done it. For example, have you ever tried to describe a pie to someone that has never seen a pie before, it comes out just awkward. The trick is that you have to use descriptions that other people have felt of heard before. That is why I threw in the “Being John Malkovich” movie reference.

Have a nice day,

Jay
Jaywoodward.com

Brandy Leigh Hoover's poem "God at the Fruit Stand"

This year's Calliope magazine features Brandy Leigh Hoover's poem "God at the Fruit Stand." I was part of the poetry staff and got to evaluate this poem before it was published, and I considered it exceptional from start to finish.

"Every time I spend a dollar I cross
off your name. It offends me to see it, like faith
is something we can trade for California oranges
on a hot highway shoulder."

The first line break severs the phrase "cross off" so the reader ends on the word "cross," which can also mean the symbol of Christianity. The second line connects the two words and the reader goes from a symbol of Christianity to removing something, in this case the name of god.

The second line ends on "like faith" and without the rest of the clause, it connects faith to being offended. It reads: "...it offends me to see it, like faith." This sets another tone about hostility toward religion.

The description of trading California oranges on a hot highway shoulder gives a powerful visual. My boyfriend Bryan and I went to Disney World in Florida this Christmas/New Years, and we bought the most delicious hot dogs and fries on the planet at a little shop off the side of the road. This image reminds me of the sun searing my shoulders and brings me into the poem.

"When I was nine, Sister Sandra cut
an apple in half and said that your story was there
in a circle of seeds. I almost believed her - except

fragile flesh, rigid core, small round infants deep inside,
and a skin speckled brown with the sun.
An apple is the fruit of a mother."

Hoover describes an apple and its seeds but she separates it from the prior stanza. Therefore, the description seems to stand on its own and when I read it, I associate the imagery with a pregnant woman: flesh, small round infants, and skin speckled brown can all describe a human as well as an apple. Hoover affirms this with the third line, connecting an apple to a mother. Hoover doesn't believe Sister Sandra's explanation of god creating life like the seeds in an apple because "an apple is the fruit of a mother." Hoover might not have considered many goddesses or dual deities many religions worship.

"You can burn a bush or part a sea, but you can never know
how it feels to grow a universe, to feel him curled
asleep in your middle, pressing your hand from inside, to weep
and curse and part like the sea to bear him"

This stanza makes two references to the Bible: the burning bush and Moses parting the sea. Hoover connects the latter with delivering a baby in the fourth line. I also consider this stanza the poem's center because it is the only one with an extra line. The second line compares the creation of a universe to the birth of baby: "...to grow a universe." In the fourth line, Hoover criticizes the Christian god for having never suffered to create life.

The third line presents an image where I find a deeper meaning. A baby presses the mother's hand from inside, which is feedback. Most people never receive direct feedback from God, and those who claim to hear voices actually suffer from psychological disturbances.

"How can I trust you with eternity when you've never
felt agony in creation, never risked
your existence for the sake of bringing forth?"

Hoover questions why she could trust god with everything when he hasn't suffered the same way as other mother's do. In her mind, god has never risked his life - his "existence" - to create new life.

"How can I do anything but cross you off
every time I spend a dollar
and buy a roadside orange?"

The last stanza brings the end back up to the beginning, providing closure. I like this poem's themes and how it uses line breaks and imagery to describe such an abstract concept.

--Jessica Murphy

Line Breaks and More...

I’m sort of going to hit on what Jessica was talking about with line breaks and my interpretation of poetry formats. I am a big fan of line breaks for two main reasons. One, I’m not very good at following the strict rules of punctuation, and two, I think creative spacing and lines breaks make the piece of work more appealing.

First I’ll talk about how I’m not very good at punctuation. I’m no english major so I am still trying to figure out when to use commas and apostrophes. Like most people I put them in wrong places and end up saying what I don’t mean. Creative line breaks and spacing takes care of this problem. When I want the reader to take a break from the subject without completing the sentence I can just put in a nice size line break or even throw in a space to make them a page apart. This way it takes the reader some time and a brief break in thought to get to the point. I could throw in a comma or a . . . to do the same but is it really the same. If it were up to me I would use this kind of creative page spacing for every written work I do, but my teaches and some environmentalists probably wouldn’t be very happy.

The second reason I like creative line breaks and spacing is for its artistic appeal. Lets be honest, when you are scanning through 20 poems and you come across one that has a nice border around it or has a unique look due to spacing you are more apt to like it. Like when eating food, half the taste is in its visual appeal. I don’t know about you but I get bored reading the same line after line format. Creative spacing is like jazz music; Jazz music takes your mind to places its never been before, it’s a stimulating journey through someone else’s mind. After all that is what poetry is, isn’t it? Well we could argue all day but the fact is
spacing is good.

Love,

Jay
Jaywoodward.com

CREATIVE LINE BREAKS

A line break does more than separate lines and start new ideas. It can emphasize meanings, change a reader's first interpretation, alter a poem's tone, and form a visual picture.

Emily Dickinson's poem "Parting" uses line breaks and rhythm to emphasize the word "parting" and it's reference to death. All other lines begin with an iamb: "My life," "it yet," "a third," "so huge," "as these," "and all." The first syllable is unstressed while the second is stressed. Then comes the "parting" line and throws off the rhythm because "parting" is stressed-unstressed. This discomforting change, a "parting" from the set pattern, drives home Dickinson's theme of death.

Line breaks can also change a reader's interpretation. In his poem "Intimations of Codependence," the poet Matt DeVore describes Demeter's tears but splits crucial words between the third and fourth lines: "As she wipes the sweet/Red juice from her fingers." We assume the tears are saltwater at first but realize they are blood when "sweet" is followed by "red," which offers a startling change of interpretation.

Normal line breaks occur at the end of a complete phrase or idea, which gives the reader a feeling of comfort and harmony. If they interrupt a phrase or disrupt the flow of a poem, it can emphasize discord or chaos. Matt DeVore also wrote a poem about panic attacks and sickness in which he uses disruptive line breaks:

"like chai tea and whiskey at 2:
00 am and the sheetsticking
humidity of fever dreams at 4:
00 like pneumonia churning
in pitch with the tea
kettle like dementia...
view like a vein tinged tunnel
vision spiderlegs...
gasping through the psycho
somatic tension..."

DeVore splits hours, adjectives that describe words on the next line, compound words like "tea kettle," and even whole words like "psychosomatic." The line break that severs that last word is fascinating because it ends the line on "psycho" and emphasizes the meaning of that separate word. This use of line breaks creates a sense of discord.

(In his own words: "I was trying to break the lines in such a way that the reader's eyes would have to slant back to the left more drastically than usual. Hence breaking up times, words, prepositional phrases, etc. I wanted to make it sort of jagged...")

Line breaks can create a picture, a form of poetry called either picture, concrete, or graphic poetry. The poet arranges line breaks to form a picture, usually relating to the poem's theme or meaning. Here is a picture of George Herbert's poem "Easter wings" which Herbert printed sideways to reveal 1) the shape of a pair of wings, and 2) the rhythm of beating wings: http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/EasterWings.jpg

I like experimenting with line breaks. Hopefully other poets will read this post and experiment too, using line breaks to emphasize meanings, change initial interpretations or tones, or paint a picture.

--Jessica Murphy

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

First Line Poem

DR.FARNSWORTH, A CHIROPODIST, LIVED IN OHIO, WHERE HE WROTE ONLY THE FIRST LINES OF POEMS is another extremely abstract poetry form, similar to True/False in a sense. My initial reaction to this poem is to despise it; in all honesty, I was planning to write solely of how much I disliked it. But as I began writing the title, a certain interesting quality struck me. The title is truly crucial in making this poem, because it gives the reader a peek into the life of Dr. Farnsworth. It shows that he is the type of man who can never get anything finished, and who abandons projects the second he is presented with an obstacle. And truthfully I find that fascinating, and as I’ve said it didn’t dawn on me until I began writing this. I guess that initially I more or less ignored the title, because although a title can do a lot to enhance a poem, typically the body of the poem is where the true information lies. But in this case, the title is the poem, and the body only enhances the title. The body shows how sporadic Dr. Farnsworth’s thought process is, and shows his attempts at poetry, but the title holds all the important information. I don’t know about anyone else but I was rather unclear about the true definition of a Chiropodist. Apparently it’s the Canadian/ U.K. term for a podiatrist, or someone who is concerned with the care and treatment of feet. This fact also plays a crucial role in deciphering this poem because, in my opinion, doctors tend to be a bit spacey and bizarre, especially a foot doctor. So thanks to this ingenious title I have created Dr. Farnsworth in my mind, and I can perfectly picture him sitting at a desk writing first lines of poems, then quitting, only to begin a new poem.

Daniel Pilla

true/ false

True/False has proved to be a rather controversial poem amongst our class, therefore I felt obligated to give my opinion on it as well. My feelings are extremely mixed in regards to this poem. I feel the concept is brilliant; he’s trying something never done before. As a result of this fact I find I am a bit more sympathetic with the author. By this I mean that I can’t just write it off and say “this isn’t poetry,” or “ He took the easy way out,” because if this was truly the easy way out, why hasn’t anyone done it before? Therefore I applaud his originality and the effort he put forth. But, although I do commend the uniqueness of this poem, I cannot honestly say I am a huge fan. I find the majority of the “poem” consists solely of random thoughts, which are impossible to group into a solid idea. I believe I would have been far fonder of this poem if it had come to a plausible conclusion. Not to appear overly contradictory,(as I said I have mixed feelings on this poem) but there are quite a few lines which I was rather fond of. The ingenuity behind certain lines was unparallel to any author I’ve ever encountered. For example: “there’s a number missing,” this was such a brilliant maneuver, it truly sparks the readers interest. Another great example is “sometimes I get feelings of déjà vu.” In all honesty when I read this poem the first time, and I encountered the second “sometimes I get feelings of déjà vu,” (number 71) I did get a feeling of déjà vu, and I had completely forgot that I had already read that line (number 10). Therefore in regards to this poem I can’t come to one solid conclusion, there are pieces of it I like and others which I dislike.

Daniel Pilla

instructions to the director of an unfilmable film

Tom Andrew’s poem is incredibly interesting. I like how strangely abstract the content of the poem is, while at the same saying things and describing scenes that, if we really think about, are almost perfectly tangible.
each line describes what a shot in a proposed film should be like. and, as the title states, a film made up of such shots would be impossible to make.
one line: the fifth shot is like swimming in the open sea and remembering you have to make a phone call.
another line: the eleventh shot is like a sudden precipice.
I like to spend my time soaked in film— whether watching, reading, or writing. The problem that always comes up however is when I realize that the perfect shot in the perfect film may be impossible because it is something that can’t be expressed in words or pictures, but the weird and often unexplainable feelings we get.
like the line: the second shot is like a name overheard in a restaurant. when we overhear a conversation in public, or simply just the mention of a familiar name, for a second it feels like we are part of some fleeting narrative that only exists in someone else’s world. but how do you convert that to the screen or the page.
or how do you properly relay that awkward feeling of part shame/part disconnect we get when we hear our own disembodied voice: The twelfth shot is like hearing your own voice played back on a machine.
Andrews does a great job of taking those odd moments that are usually gone before we even process them and make them familiar. each shot contains those feelings that move like ghosts in and out of us and he asks us to questions what it is about moments like that which make them so weird and enigmatic and special.

-wes edmond

Sean Penn Anti-Ode

After reading through True/False over and over again, I became curious about Dean Young’s other poetry. I went searching through the Poetry Foundation’s website that was posted on the blog and found this awesome poem by Dean Young:

Sean Penn Anti-Ode
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178396

Although the Sean Penn Anti-Ode does not structurally resemble True/False in any way, both poems have that same “preachy” (could not think of a better word) tone to them; the “this is what I am saying”, and “this is how it is” attitude.

Let me start out by saying that this is the funniest poem I have ever read. I have always thought of Sean Penn as rather “pompous,” so I had to see what this poem was like. Right off the bat, the first three lines immediately made me think of Sean Penn’s face. When I read Young’s interpretation of Sean Penn’s face and imagined what his face actually looks like, I chuckled due to the surprising accuracy. It does have that “scrunched up” look to it. This particular line is very comical but it is also wonderful image. He then pinpoints Penn’s very whiney and uptight personality by connecting him to a child who looks as though he is about to explode if he does not get “the first whack of the piñata.” He also states that there is enough pressure in his pinky finger that could kill a gorilla. I really like how Young used the “pinky finger” concept because people usually associate the pinky finger as being weak and useless; but in this case it is capable of killing a gorilla. The lines that talk about the young brat growing up to be Sean Penn to “straighten us out about weapons of mass destruction” made me think of every celebrity who tries to be an activist of some kind. The lines that almost seem as though they are trying to give advice, such as making sure you never bump your car door into Sean Penn’s car, are trying to say more than what is on the page. When I read these lines, it made me think of Penn as an activist but also a man that is too self important to ever be bothered.
This poem seems more like a story the more I read into it.
I definitely feel the best lines of the poem are:

The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch.
Some architectural details about Batman’s cape.

I found it funny that he comments on the video by saying that only the bored can watch it, yet he knows what the movie is about. One of my favorite things about poetry is unique randomness; how much more random can you get than “architectural details about Batman’s cape”. This is also where the poem begins to go in another direction, steering away from ridiculing Sean Penn and almost seemingly begins to discuss how mundane and ordinary life is. The second half of the poem may still be discussing Penn, but it is too subtle for me to pick up on. For me, I wish that there would have been more descriptions of Penn himself, perhaps introducing what his hair looks like in a silly way.

In general, this poem is a unique interpretation of a person. I found this type of poetry to be much easier to interpret because you already know the subject matter; ridiculing Sean Penn.


----Albert Sementa

first line poem

"Dr. Farnsworth, A Chiropodist, Lived in Ohio, Where He Wrote Only The First Lines Of Poems" what a title that is. It's about as specific as you can get, and I found this poem (if that's what you even call it) by Tom Andrews to be weird, but interesting. The first line of a poem is pretty important. Well, every line is important. And when you think about it, every word, even, is important. But I think the first line is especially important. It lets the reader in on the tone of the poem, it allows the reader to get a feel for the language, the rhythms, the beat, everything. Also, a first line of a poem can just grab the reader by the shirt collar and demand their attention. "April is the cruelest month" is a great example, in The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. Why is it the cruelest month? Because that's when Lincoln got shot? Or because the weather is a tease? Easter? I don't know; I want to read on. So this poem, made up entirely of first lines is a great idea. Even though it really doesn't read too well (I tried finding some strange connections between the poem, but I just couldn't make the stretches), the poem isn't about that. It is about the need for a strong first line, and it is about, I think, the need for each line of a poem, especially the first line, when the reader's brain is fresh and his/her idea of what the poem entails is not at all conceived. I thought the best lines were the fifth, "The smell of God in wood." and the twelfth, "Say of me that I am living still." These two stuck out for me, for some reason. Maybe because they have more finality because of the periods at the end makes them concrete statements. Some of the lines, like number 9, "The sun, lost" seem just a little too vague for me, though I understand their nature as a first line, I am looking for a little bit more than a three word ambiguity. This poem overall, though, is quite interesting, and it shows how even the first line, or first two or three words of a poem can entice a reader to keep on reading.
*Michael McCune

Sharon Olds "I Go Back to May 1937"

This poem is great. Somethings I enjoy about it: 1. It is a lot more clear than a lot of the poetry we have read in class, yet it is extremely interesting nonetheless. 2. The poem has a narrative that includes setting, time, weather, characters, and a narrator. 3. The poem contains, at least the way I read it, a really weird, frightening, but ultimately reassuring idea behind it. If anyone has seen Sean Penn directed film "Into the Wild," I think you will recognize that this poem is read by the main character early on in the movie. In that movie, the images in the poem are shown on the screen as the poem is read in the background: "red tiles glinting like bent/plates of blood behind his head" (I love that line by the way), "the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its/sword tips aglow in the May air;" maybe it's cheating, but seeing the images of the poem shown on screen in the movie really allows me to visualize this poem. The poem works with characters, a girl and a guy eventually to be husband and wife and mom and dad. The narrator is there kid, warning them about the "things/you cannot imagine you would ever do,/you are going to do bad things to children,/you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,/you are going to want to die." This is a very strong warning from their kid. He or she is seeming to say that the guy and the girl in the story has hurt them, that they have dome something, be it divorce, abuse, whatever, that makes this kid question if he even wanted his parents to meet in the first place. This poem is different from a lot of the work we have read this year based on the work it does on a narrative that invites a lot of speculation and questions. The idea I mentioned earlier that, for some reason, I attach to this poem is the idea of me, and everybody else in this world, being born. Are we only born because, over the history of mankind, random men and women met at random times and places and ended up having a kid, and this kid met someone of the opposite sex and produced another one of my ancestors (I know, confusing and weird)? But, more simply put, are we only who we are because of who each and every one of our ancestors met and reproduced with over the history of man until it led to our parents? The speaker in this poem says he doesn't stop them from marrying: "but I don't do it. I want to live." For some reason that line makes me think of that very, absurd digression I just went on. I'm not crazy, am I?
*Mike McCune

Mary Ann Samyn's "Beneath Speech"

I really like Mary Ann Samyn's poem "Beneath Speech," which is contained in the thick packet of poems Matt gave to us quite a while ago. The first line hooks you right away: "--She lay very still, looking up at the undersides of words." At first, I thought this was very strange. I was thinking about words written out on the ceiling in block letters and turning my neck up and I was kind of stuck. But then I continued. I think sometimes with poetry we have to read all the way to the end before we start asking questions. Something that always kills me when I'm watching movies with my dad: whenever anything remotely vague happens and he is stuck for a second, he will start asking questions, "What was that?" "What just happened?" I find myself doing this a lot with poetry. But I have found it helps to read to the end; a good poet won't leave any stones unturned, no questions unanswered. Mary Ann Samyn adds clarity to "the undersides of words" phrase in the second stanza. "Pink was pink all the way through, like any organ might be,/plucked from the body and held quiet on a little tray--" Here I get an idea of where the poem is going. Something I learned in a linguistics class is the arbitrary nature of words, that is, there is no real correlation between the word and the thing in the world that it signifies. But when you really think about language some words just seem better tailored to the thing in the world they represent. I think, as Mary Ann Samyn writes ("Pink was pink all the way through") pink is a word that just seems like it represents the color somewhere between red and purple, and that match is perfect. On the flip side, I always thought the word "koozie" was a weird one; it sounds way to exotic for something to keep your hand warm when drinking a cold beer. I can't be sure, but I think this is the idea that Mary Ann Samyn is trying to get at in this poem (another example "Night was a starry dish."). I really like this poem because she does such a great job of intertwining a really cool, interesting idea about language wit striking images, "like any organ might be..."
*Michael McCune

How to poem

I saw that Rachel blogged about the "how to" poem, so I'll take a stab at it. I actually had a little trouble with this exercise, not from a writing standpoint, but because when I started thinking about it, I couldn't come up with anything of any particular interest that I can do that would make a good poem. Honestly, it frightened me at first. It had me thinking: gee, are you really that uninteresting that there is not one thing you can do that is worthwhile to write about? When I cook, I microwave hot dogs, so I couldn't write about any cool family recipe like the example we read in class. I really don't have any particularly cool talents like juggling or flipping my eye lids inside out or anything of that ilk. I settled on how to hit a baseball, which is probably as vanilla a topic as I could have come up with. But when Matt read his accidental how to poem aloud in class, it opened up the exercise for me. Just because it was a how to poem didn't mean it had to be something people would understand, like cooking, in fact, it didn't even have to be something real. I could have written it about how to walk on water, how to disappear, how to hook a mermaid. So, coming away from the "how to" poem, at first I felt a little nervous, but after some further thought, I was able to convince myself that just because something isn't real doesn't mean there isn't a way to do it. That is invention, isn't it?
*Michael McCune

Dean Young's "True/False"

Two things stick out to me in Dean Young's "True/False." The first is format. The second is the line to line content of the poem. First the format. By numbering his lines 1 to 100 (although one is missing (its no. 25, by the way) as he notes with no. 54), Young gives each line its own self worth. Each line is introduced with a number, its own little title, and I think this, along with the title, allows the reader to grasp the gist of the poem a bit more. I think if these seemingly random lines were thrown down on paper without an organizational tool, such as numbering, that the poem may seem quite disjointed. But by using numbers, Young helps the reader along and gives the poem a playful vibe, something that is also aided by the title. And I love the line to line content of this poem. So much of the content seems like throw away material. But too often I think we look for the profound in poetry. I think this stuff is supposed to be fun. So when I read "2. I want to break things," it just makes me want to laugh. Plus, I actually have broken things, and it is a blast. Young also throws in a little John Donne, or it could be Marlow, I forget which one, on "64. Stay with me and be my love." I remember a line Matt talked about in class that is rather striking is "68. We are shadows thrown against a cave wall." It sounds good, seems mysterious and glib, but at the same time, I feel like I can't take this guy seriously because he also writes "35. I like sponge cake," and "44. I would have been a good cowboy." The point is I think, this poem is fun to read, it is interesting, the format makes it playful, but, more importantly, it is good poetry when I read it, I'm having fun.
*Mike McCune

The How To Poem

So I really enjoyed writing How-To poems. I wrote mine on optical illusions. When I was little, I used to have optical illusion books,(the kind where the pages were filled up with little dots, and an image was supposed to pop out in 3D) and neither my parents nor siblings could understand how-to see them. I remember the trick was to cross your eyes a little and stare at the page, but with your eyes unfocused. They just couldn't get it no matter how I tried to explain it. For some reason writing How-to poems reminded me of that, so I went with it. (I am aware that other normal people probably have no problem seeing optical illusions)

Anyway, once I was at the last stanza, and two lines before the ending, it hit me. This poem could be about open mindedness. The word "Slow" was repeated a few times, and that indicates patience. When I revised it, I tried to play up this element by working with pace.

Taking it a step farther, I then re-read the poem with its open mindedness theme in mind, and made some other connections. Symbolically, the term optical illusion really conveys a lot of meaning to the topic of being open minded. Also, having to force your eyes to stretch in a direction that feels uncomfortable or "abnormal" (Crossing them or un-focusing them) connects to the topic well too. Lastly, the fact that it is a how-to poem really brings about some meaning and makes a statement about those who are less open minded or who try to be more open minded.

It was cool to make these types of connections after writing the majority of the poem. I was really happy with the outcome, so that makes me a big fan of How-to poems. If anything they are a great starting point to generate ideas get really concrete detail from the start.

-Rachel

Monday, April 27, 2009

The Class Poem from A WHILE Back

Here is the class poem we did when everyone wrote one line and folded it up to cover the previous lines...

My hair is soaked and I found
An evil eye bracelet enclosed on my wrist
Then, to my surprise,
the downpour of the ice and quiet
on my way home they sit laughing
like knives, the yellow eyes cut through
the night, the trees,the soft lamplight.
It's a perfect day for singing a song about Obama,
Or anything else,
I stop my words wishing for
the sun, and trees and flowers,
that i seemed to have misplaced,
That I learned from Shakespeare, who
screams with sorrow, "I am fortune's fool"

*Donya Botkan*

Poem for Underdog

Matthew Rohrer
This poem is really great. After the first line where Rohrer sets up the strange scene by writing that he has seen what other people “have only dreamed they’ve seen,” he writes one of the best lines of the poem: “I have seen underdog in startling full-color/on a black and white TV.” The structure of the line works very well to state an impossibility as a matter-of-fact situation that creeps up on the reader.
The poem is filled with references and allusions to drug use, some more obvious than others, but the poem stays away from being dopey (no pun intended, kinda). Even with the specific mention of “illicit mushroom activities” Rohrer keeps the poem grounded and interesting.
Some of the reasons this poem stays solid and accessible are the lines which deal more with issues of the everyday and are placed effortlessly in the mix. Like the line which references the cashier at Sears. This line presents a tangible scene and a person who everyone can picture if not remember even.
The line that follows gives the poem a personal touch. It relates an image of an odd cloud hanging over the house of the speaker’s grandparents. This is unsettling and a little foreboding. It makes the reader wonder about the speaker’s connection to his family and what happened at the house.
The last stanza is very comforting and ties the poem together. It references back to the first line by repeating the idea that he has done what other people have only dreamed they’ve done. and the fact that the line refers to looking in a mirror ties in the idea of a better sense of self-awareness and inward perspective that is often found through psychedelics.

-wes edmond

Writing Suggestions

We got a packet earlier in the semester with suggestions to keep in mind while writing poetry. Some were fairly simple bits of advice, others were a bit more complex, but for the most part I understood and agreed with many of the suggestions.

One that I had a harder time accepting was “Don’t worry about approval from a workshop. Imagine, instead, wining approval from professional poets.” I am not typically a poet and intend to revert to nearly full-time fiction after this semester (although I have enjoyed poetry and will likely still try it from time to time!) so I had a tougher time looking beyond the workshop. Although I think it’s true across all genres, professionals aren’t the only ones with opinions. Even though it made me feel that much more justified to hear that Stephen King thinks Stephanie Meyer “can’t write worth a damn,” I already knew that and didn’t need to hear it from him. I have a friend who writes amazing fiction and has never been published or otherwise recognized, but I don’t need someone well known to tell me that what she writes is good. And I don’t think I should gear my writing to the liking of “professionals” just because they are who they are. If I can write a poem that somebody can enjoy, who ISN’T a professional poet, or a poet at all, or maybe they have a particular distaste for poetry as some people do, then I think that would be more rewarding than pleasing some higher-ups. Not that I can’t be a terrible suck-up, but I would rather write something for a larger audience to relate to and enjoy. Besides that, my experience in workshops so far have been fairly serious, especially in this poetry workshop where everyone else is really quite good at what they do; I’m quite content trying to write something pleasing there.

~Nicole Bartow

Poem for Portfolio

This poem is quite a bit different than when I first wrote it, thanks to a very helpful friend, but I think it could still use some work. I was quite frustrated and annoyed when I wrote it, and I was hoping it would sound sarcastic but I'm not sure if it does.

"Phases"

Blunt, scratching
Paper clips bite;
Etching suicide letters
On limbs.
Arms and legs
Grafted onto sickly wraiths.
You wanna pity them?
The ones who just love to hurt?
The Dark, the Reclusive, the Bitter -
Drenching their bodies
In a new war paint,
Crying for salvation - understanding -
Through the sunlight.
Through makeshift wire knives,
They carve superficial please for attention.
Writing their own obituaries,
While humming joyous madrigals of sorrow.
Don't you want to hug them?
Dry their Visine tears?

Then succumb and join the thriving cult;
Carve the mantras into a leg.
It's the cool thing to do.



~Nicole Bartow

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Waiting for my foot to ring

After reading and commenting on Grooming and My New Neighbor, I have definitely gotten used to Bob Hicok’s style of writing. I know I have said this before, but if his poems are not a great representation of a stream of consciousness then I do not know what is. Waiting for my foot to ring is no exception. If I had to describe this poem as a whole, it almost seems that each line represents a different reaction to an ink blot test. It may sound strange, but I have no other way to describe the sheer randomness of this poem. Although I feel this way, the first fifteen or so lines actually produce a remarkable image. The first two lines depict a man worrying/thinking about someone having surgery on their stomache. Instead of making this image simple, Hicok makes the voice of the poem wonder whether his stomach is being held by a nurse or placed on a table “built to hold the stomach.” A strange image for sure, but it definitely held my attention. The next two lines read:

The operation began an hour ago when an eastern blue jay
landed on the gate that belonged to a fence years gone.

These two lines, for me, were my favorite of the entire poem. First off, they depict a clear image of an eastern blue jay perching on a gate. But these lines also reference back to the operation in the first two lines. I was unable to connect the operation to the timing of the blue jay on the fence, but then I realized how simple it really was. Instead of saying the operation began an hour ago, the voice of the poem linked the timing of the operation to an event he remembers happening an hour ago. This may be too simple to comment on but I could relate to this phenomenon quite well. How true is it that when something memorable happens, we can remember even the most subtle of details. I could imagine that the voice of the poem would not have remembered this bird if he would not have had the operation on his mind.

It’s interesting because as I write down my thoughts about this poem, it seems to be making more sense to me. The multitude of strange images may represent the strange things we notice when we are worried about someone or something. This point is even further strengthened through the line, “It could be true that most operations are common;” this shows that the voice is obviously worried about the operation and is convincing himself that it is common surgery and it will turn out fine. The ending just seems too perfect now, “This is the working hypothesis of my waiting.” After placing all of the pieces together, you learn the person having surgery is his father.

The title obviously points to the line in the poem that says the voice of the poem has his foot on the phone he stole from the University of Michigan. The phone is described as black with a dial; like it wants to be a safe. This is why I have taken a liking to Hicok’s writing; he does such a fantastic job of turning the mundane into the extraordinary.

-----Albert Sementa

The Progress of my Poetry

I don't usually sit down to write a poem; I develop it over time. I can write a rough draft during a class and return to it every few hours, days, or weeks. I've even returned to poems written in high school and revised them because my knowledge of poetry and style of writing changes constantly.

When I get an idea for a poem, I plan it in four stages: brainstorming, outlining, writing the rough draft, and revising it into a “final” draft. No poem is ever "final" though, and I agree with my Nonfiction Workshop professor Ethel Morgan Smith when she says, "writing is rewriting." I revise essays, poems, and stories months or even years after I supposedly finish them.

Brainstorming is scribbling words, phrases, or ideas. I'll use one poem as an example. The brainstorming started out with the following scribbles:

"Firestarter, Rainbird?, watching when life dies from eyes, follow back to start, Frankenstein, kill to save."

It reads like garbled shorthand but I understand the gist of it. Next, I elaborate this brainstorming with a paragraph:

"Murderer, narrator, strangle, watch eyes, (describe irises, pupils, gleam, motion), want to see where life goes (like water/drain, follow, black hole?), follow to root/source (discovery), like finding heart of death and run it in reverse, kill to save; consciousness fades with oxygen but death occurs below the surface out of sight."

With brainstorming over, I begin forming my outline in either a journal or the Notepad program on my laptop. I use the typical essay format to develop an outline that looks like this:

"I. Description
A. Strangled (eyes - emphasis)
1. Fingers (iron wires, press hard until arms shake)
2. Neck (flushes red/hot, then purple)
3. Face (Swells, lips purple, nose bleeds, eyes bulge)
4. Blue irises bright like crystals, quiver, darken to indigo hemorrhaging)
5. Pupils dilate like pools, want to plunge deep into their darkness, to the bottom out of sight.

II. Theory
A. Life (flares up in front)
1. When life drains, I want to follow it
i. through channels (crimson) that echo a pulse (feel in self, echoes own life force, parallel/repetition)
ii. to source/root and discover the "fountaining" heart of death, which lies in life.
2. I want to take that flow and run it in reverse.
i. Kill to save.

III. Death (contrast hot/active/life with cold/still/death)
A. Man (dies)
1. But consciousness fades with oxygen while death seizes beneath the surface.
2. Bloodstream frozen on whiskers, eyes fixed and glazed.
3. Don't get to see last drop of life drip down the drain inside
i. My stomach sinks. I missed it."


After I finish this general outline, I have an idea of how to start my poem. I write my rough draft by following this outline without any revision, just writing while I am on a roll:

"My fingers like iron wires
press against the man's neck
hard enough to shake my arms.

I focus on his eyes, even though
his neck flushes red and fever-fleshed,
then turns a bruised, throbbing purple.
Tighter, and his round face swells further.
A red ribbon of blood runs from his nose
and eyes like eggs bulge from their sockets.

Crystal blue irises quiver and darken to indigo
and his pupils open into pools with no end in sight.
I want to plunge into them when his life drains,
follow it through crimson channels
that echo the pulse in my veins,
follow the life flow to its source.
The heart of Death lies in life.
I want to take that flow and run it in reverse.

But consciousness fades with oxygen
while death seizes beneath the surface.
The ruby stream freezes on his whiskered lips
and his twitching eyes grow fixed and glazed.
I don't get to see the last drop down the drain.
My stomach sinks with the cold corpse in my hands.

I missed it."


Not the best rough draft but I consider that the hardest part: Finding the motivation and time to put an idea into words. The only thing left to do is revise and name this poem.

I choose titles based on their meaning and sound. This one should have to do with the source of life/death for the purpose of reversing it. Maybe intentions that are opposite of an action like killing to save lives in the end – an idea that came from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Stephen King's Firestarter. The scientist in Frankenstein searches for the source of life in order to achieve immortality, and Firestarter features a character named Rainbird who looks into people's eyes when he murders them.

At first I consider a few titles for my poem, such as "Kill to Save," "From Frankenstein to Rainbird," and "Finding the Fountain." The title "Kill to Save" sounds cliché and "From Frankenstein to Rainbird" too cluttered, even though the latter references my two inspirations. Over the weekend, I revise my poem several times and get this "final" version:

"My fingers wrap like iron wires
around the man's neck
and press hard enough
to shake my arms.

I focus on his eyes, even though
his neck flushes like a fever, red and hot,
then turns a bruised, throbbing purple.
I hear crackling and feel vessels pop inside.

Tighter, and his round face swells.
I focus on his eyes while
a red ribbon of blood runs from his nose
and eyes like eggs bulge from their sockets.

I focus on his eyes:
Crystal blue irises quiver and darken to indigo.
His pupils dilate to the size of quarters,
opening into deep black pools
that seem to sink forever.

I want to plunge into those pools as his life drains,
follow the flow through their crimson channels
and feel them echo the pulse in my own veins.

I want to follow the flow to its source
because Death drains
from the fountain of life,
and I want to take that flow
and run it in reverse.

But his consciousness fades with oxygen
while death seizes beneath the surface.
The ruby stream freezes on his whiskers
and his twitching eyes grow fixed and glazed.

I don't get to see
the last drop
go down the drain.

My stomach sinks
with the cold corpse
in my hands.

I missed it."


I think "Finding the Fountain" is the most meaningful, aesthetically pleasing title. I'll continue revising this poem for weeks, months, and maybe years. I might enter it in a writing contest or a magazine because it never hurts to try.

This process - brainstorming, outlining, making a rough draft, and revising - takes me from an idea in my head to a creation on paper. The best part about writing poetry is bringing something to life, like painting a picture or giving birth. You create something with a life of its own.

I hope this helps anyone who finds writing poetry difficult.

--Jessica Murphy

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Oranges

Oranges by Gary Soto is pretty awesome. There are many things I would like to talk about as far as this poem goes, so I am just going to talk about them in no specific order.

First are the very interesting uses of rhyme. One of my favorite lines in this poem is a line which just sounds awesome because of this rhyme usage, and it starts on the fifth line. It reads...

"December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then done,
As I walked toward
Her house"

I'm not completely sure what is so captivating about that one simple line, but just the way it sounds and is presented is very moving for some reason.

The use of images in this poem (well it is in the packet about imagery after all!) is also pretty amazing. The last six lines about him peeling his orange and how bright it is compared to the gray atmosphere around him, and how someone might have thought he was making fire in his hands is very interesting. It captures exactly how my memories of my childhood are recalled to me. Some details are so extremely vivid that they seem unrealistic, and yet others are just gray and barely retained.

I could go on and on about little things such as this, but I think that anyone who reads this poem will have to make their own discoveries about what it holds, because there are tons of cool things happening here.

`Brian Michael Dunar

Farewell to Love

Farewell to Love by Michael Drayton is quite an interesting sonnet. It draws an interesting parallel between the death of love, and perhaps the death of a lover. Or at least so it seems. The speaker in the poem talks about not being able to stop the inevitability of love ending by using some morbid thoughts that link it to death. Yet being able to get over the feelings he/she is having is not impossible.

For instance about half way through the poem the speaker says "Now at the last gasp of love's latest breath, when his pulse failing, passion speechless lies, when faith is kneeling by his bed of death, and innocence is closing up his eyes;". These images, while somewhat beautiful are quite sad and morbid in some ways.

The entire poem's meaning does not seem to be sad or morbid in the slightest however, as it seems to be dealing more with the fact that if love is strong that it persists even after death, and that the feeling the speaker has toward whomever the poem is referencing can stay, even if the other has moved on, and that the speaker will get through it. This can be seen a few lines before the last quote where the speaker says "And when we meet at any time again, Be it not seen in either of our brows that we one jot of former love retain." and the last line "From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.

Over all this is a very interesting and meaningful poem about getting over a former love, and that all is not hopeless... yet it is presented in a somewhat depressing manner which makes it much more emotional than it would be otherwise.

`Brian Michael Dunar