Soupy Childhood

Revolution of the Rain drops
Now we are free to do as we please
There in the field a stone lies.
It reads: don’t follow where there
are no
There are no exits open

Open the door
before I take a hammer to these walls around it
Toys littered the floor like candies from a pinata
And the cotton candy skies with balloons for clouds
smiled down upon
in soupy warm sunlight
and he promised her eternal life
Illuminating her path are lightning bugs, paper dolls
filled with saw dust like all my favourite childhoods.

Like the time we
ate all the poetry in that class

* Chan Wing Hong*

Purple Girl

Their eyes follow me
always watching the girl with
the blue umbrella.

There is a red-headed girl
carrying a blue umbrella.
Red-heads are making me lonely.

Scubagear is what the hell is that
to a perilous heart, oh, save my soul.

What makes
a bad person wake up
and start over like a pinball game.

I am a wizard when
I turn the rain to wine,
then drink the drops
near the bottom.

Tipping back the
second hand of the clock
fighting against the
oppression of gravity.

-Albert Sementa

Escape

The beach is filled with beautiful women
And the sand falls slowly
through the walls I heard him
whisper of the wind rustles leaves
the air
distorts the world my sights
impaired my senses leaving me
to scavenge their meals.
Our breath, your touch, how can
I escape?
I hope one day, to all my dismay, I escape
Hope is enlightening

Fear the long icy fingers of death

whisper to the darkness

my body
slowly unwinds.

~Nicole Bartow~

However you look at it.

However you look at,
the truth
is everywhere
Like dew on a wet morning my sorrows keep on getting
worse
My girlfriend just broke up with the earth
And she is slid back in step
I asked again But heard no answer
the silence
Is maddening, horrible,
frightening fights within these walls
I've built, a home,
a life, a death, a need to have
so much more!

Sarah C. Portner

surrealism

Nature

I'm longing for warmth
Like a fireplace,
The smokey scent of wood
and leaves fall and lay.
Truths are found under rocks, in bubbles.
Puddles of rain seep into my jean cuffs.
The feeling is
like a predetermined spontaneous act
I buy flowers.
These Roses wilt faster than an old man's eyes.
Stony eyes and coarse voice disrupt my sleep.

This was the surreal exercise poem that I ended up with in class today. (with some minor editing) I thought the constant use of Earthy words, and references to weather/ nature was interesting so I entitled it "Nature." Something simple to maximize possibility for interpretation. Also, the progression of nature words is interesting here too. It starts with fire, to dead wood and leaves, to water, rain, then flowers and roses. Kind of representative of Fall through Spring. Cool.

I especially like the line "Truths are found under rocks, in bubbles." Next, I find it interesting to compare water from puddles seeping into jean cuffs, to a spontaneous predetermined act such as, buying flowers. When in the rain, it is true that the bottoms of your jeans will get wet. It's inevitable, and apparently buying flowers, for some, is too. Also, the ending that eludes to a dream is appropriate for this type of poem.

-R. Alberico

Inspiration

I was particularly interested in the Ekphrastic writing style. The style has various things you could do to give you inspiration for a poet. The hardest feeling in the world is wanting to write while you have nothing to write about. Yes inspiration is a great thing…when it happens. The likeliness of being inspired constantly is very slim. In all honesty, it just doesn’t happen that way. It takes a spark of something, but what that spark is is different for each poet, and someone’s muse may not be the same for other people. But regardless when the muse does come and visit each one of us, it is one of the best feelings in the world. But the Ekphrastic writing is the inspiration, which is the great thing. It helps you get a starting ground for somewhere to write. This inspiration “inspires” more inspiration. Yes what you start to write may not be good or up to your own standards of expert writing, but you can take your preliminary work and turn it into something that you can eventually say you like. I particularly enjoyed the writing assignment of picking a picture and writing about it. We were given the ability to decide the “who, what, when, where, and why” of the picture. It gave our mind’s the opportunity to expand on what we saw, and make a story of it. Also, I enjoyed reading the 1st person styled Ekphrastic poem, Not My Best Side, by U.A. Fanthorpe, because you got a clear visual of the painting being described. You get the illustration through the 1st person almost-like-a-soliloquy dialogues of each of the main figures in the painting. But you also get more than that. You get a personal touch to the voices of the character. The poet gave a different, more eclectic spin on the situation. Instead of the Princess wanting to be rescued, she looked at it as a prospect of what would be in her best interest. The question of leaving the only thing she knew for something that might not be good for her future frightened her. I believe if one is looking for inspiration, this method of writing for either poetry or anything else is beneficial for all to try at some point or another.

*Donya Botkan*

Creating a Vivid Image

I have been learning quite a lot from the handouts, each one delivering new and insightful tips on how to improve your work as a poet. In my opinion, I feel that the most important thing that every poet should continually work on is the importance of creating an image with words. In the poem “Snow”, I found David Berman’s description of a snowy day to be simply incredible; “A room with the walls blasted to shreds and falling.” Berman could have just simply given a very vague description of a snowy day but that would have made “Snow” very weak and ordinary. If you think about it, a bland poem that “just says” instead of creating an image ends up being a dull short story. In my opinion, if you aren’t feeling some type of emotion, either confusion, sadness, happiness, etc., then it really shouldn’t be considered poetry. Chapter 1 had great supporting evidence behind this when it stated how images themselves such as Salvador Dali’s, The Persistence of Memory, were a lot more powerful than words; “Memory alters our sense of time.”Even the most subtle imagery helps as well. Even though not much abstraction was used in the following quote from James Tate’s, “Consolations After an Affair”, the quiet phrase “I have quilts on beds and walls” did a fantastic job of forcing me to imagine a house full of quilts. Lastly, Chapter 1 also mentioned to avoid using excessive amounts of abstraction when depicting an image. I have always stereotyped poetry as excessively abstract but after reading through many of these poems, I found that even the simplest words can be very beautiful and descriptive when strung together in the right way. For me, I don’t have much of a background in poetry, so trying to depict these images in a very unique and interesting way has been quite challenging. I found the best thing to do, like the readings have mentioned as well, is to write “blandly” if necessary and then enhance your work at the end.

*Albert Sementa*

About the poetry 'Snow'

Personally I find this poem quite interesting for the skills and techniques the author uses. I don't think it is a kind of poem that you can understand its meaning (if there is one) right after reading it once. But still, the beauty of the imagery, the way they are put together, the dialogue and the sentence structure make it a deep and appealing poem to me. Though everyone has different definitions for a good poem, and it is hard and unncessary to persuade the others about it, still I am going to share about some elements that I personally appreciate in this poem below.

Connection
To me, a good poem should have some kind of internal associations, some of which maybe actually quite obvious, whereas others can be shown in forms of symbols, or metaphor, etc.

In the second line of the poem, it writes 'I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.' The children may be making snowman, or the like. But the words kids, angels and snow are somehow linked closely to me. Like kids are always likened as angels because of their innocence, while snow and angels are both white in colors and come from the sky.

'For some reason, I told him that a troop of angels had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground' can be interpreted in a way that, these angels were shot because they had 'invaded' the land of the human beings, in other words, a conflict between the nature and the human. While it may sound a little bit overinterpreted, for the second half of the sentence, it is quite striking and clear that the imagery of angel and snow have been fused and mingled together by the word 'shot and dissolved'.

There are also other connections, for examples, ice, photograph and water; ice, water and snow;
room, neighbour, property; voice, acoustics, blast and many more. The poem is developed by these connections of symbols and imagery gradually. Or, at least, it can be said that the linkages make the meaning of the poem more understand and acheive a beauty of unity from the perspective of views.

Contrast
The difference between indoor and outdoor; the narrator and Seth; the angels and the farmer; all resulting in an increase in the conflicting surface of the poem, though it is usually found in novel and stories, it can be regarded also as a kind of linkage between the imagery, and makes the content more vivid and readable.

*Chan Wing Hong*

Within the reading, Sleeping on the Wing, the author mentions the stream of consciousness at the end of work. In my opinion I feel this is the best method of writing, but not writing poetry. If you were writing in this fashion a book, the stream of consciousness would be more comprehendable as opposed to a poem written in the stream of consciousness form. I believe a poem can not be well written if it is written in this form because it is my opinion that a poem should have some had some thought put into it if it is to be a "good" poem. A poem is meant to convey some deeper message the poet wants the reader to understand. Stream of consciousness writing is very difficult to make comprehendable in a few short stanza's with unclear messages being portrayed. When J.D. Salinger wrote Catcher In The Rye, he used the stream of consciousness route in writing. Because it was Holden's talking the entire time to the doctor he was able to digress on tangent thoughts and express his feelings better that way. If a poet wrote in tangent lines, all the while trying to convey a simple message to the reader, the meaning would be lost because all the reader would see is incohesive sentences strung together and called a poem. Also, within this reading, the author mentions the possibility of a poem just being as it seems. In other words, the author was trying to explain when a poem seems very simple, there might not be a deeper meaning, that it may very well just be the poet reflecting on something and being straight forward about their response. I think this is a valid assessment. I believe some poets do not have a deeper meaning to their work. I feel they are simply writing, in what is their opionion, a beautiful combination of words. But contradictory to what I just said, I also believe the majority of many works written have a deeper significance for the poet, and they are trying to explain that meaning to the reader.

*Donya Botkan*

Welcome!

Welcome to the English 213 Spring 2009 Blog.

It's going to be a fun semester!

--MB