Heat from Denis Johnson

Imageries first.

This is the initial impression of mine to this poem. The naked lover tipping the glass high and let the ice cubes fall against her teeth is undoubtedly a seductive and hot imagery to fit its title. It seems that almost nothing happens in this poem; the time seems nearly static to the readers, and what we know about are only imageries.

To set her as a character on the Album Cover is a clever choice since it easily links the poem to her beautiful image and also the subsequent dynamic melody, in which the poet also uses vivid and bright images to present. The sentence "full of spheres and zones" is kind of hard to interpret, it seems to be used to describe the month "August," but on the other hand it is on the same line with "and such a last night." However, depicting August as "an erotic hallucination" and relating it to "feverishly produced kazoo music" also connects, August, sex, music, and heat together, thus tightening the internal connections of the poem.

This poem is quite powerful and expressive, especially because of the word choice (letting nouns and verbs be stem) form and the rhythm it takes. It is also impressive to me since it contains many big words in it. Personally I repel big words as a writer; even when I am not composing a sonnet, I just find that small words are much easier to manipulate and often allows more space of interpretation to the readers since these words usually already contain multiple meanings and definitions.

After learning how to write a sonnet, small words' usage seems to me more justified. I can save the time of considering the stress of the words and focus on the other aspects of the poem. Small words seem more reader friendly also, because sometimes the meaning of the poem itself, is already deep and mysterious enough. But still I highly appreciate the skill and proficiency of the poet to be able to use such long words and fit them in a poem, and at the same time, balancing the imageries and meaning.

Chan Wing Hong