DDCPoetry

Original poem reprinted online here: "Good-by" by Ralph Waldo Emerson Originally read: June 6, 2013 More information about the Poet: Ralph Waldo Emerson So the structure is as follows: Sestet (ababcc) Octave (aabbccdd) Octave (aabbccdd) Octave (aabbccdd) I think the first two stanzas work as a reverse Italian sonnet where the  question being answered is in the first stanza, and to whom the question refers to is answered in the second stanza.  The last two stanzas of the poem work differently as though the content is for a different focus and expands in an ethereal way. But first the reverse sonnet.  The first line of the first stanza is. "Good-by, proud world.  I'm going home."  And so there's the answer.  The speaker is saying good-by in the most distanced terms, "Thou'rt not my friend, and I'm not thine/  Long through thy weary crowds I roam;"  And by setting the distance the speaker metaphorizes his distance through the image of the foam...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Mary Tired" by Marjorie Pickthall Originally read: June 5, 2013 More information about the Poet: Marjorie Pickthall Past me noted that the poem is composed of "rhymed couplets."  The majority of the stanzas have even lines with the exception of the third stanza.  The rhyme scheme dictates how the narrative works. The poem is mostly exposition though as evident with the first stanza.  The focus is on "Mary"  -- yes, the biblical Mary post birth with, "With the earliest hush she saw / God beside her in the straw."  Well, I'm assuming it's post birth.  The reference though is to Jesus as god.  I think. In the second stanza, the focus is still on the exposition, but more focus on the scene, "Drowsing Joseph nodded near, / All the glooms were rosed with wings."  The the last three lines of the stanza indicates a change of perspective, "She was tired of heavenly things / There between the day...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Plowman's Song" by Raymond Knister Originally read: June 4, 2013 More information about the Poet: Raymond Knister A song. There's an expectation of refrain and maybe even rhyme.  The rhyme happens on the second and fourth lines which adds a distanced effect that barely clings together sonically.  Also for this poem, the refrain of "Turn" adds a sense of tension because of what the turn does. 1.   Turn under, plow 2.   Turn under Griefs 3.   Turn mouse's nest 4.   Turn, plow, the clods 5.   Turn, under, plow 6.   Turn under. With the exception of 1 and 6 the phrasing is all different.  But with 1 and 6, the context changes. The introduction of the "turn" goes straight into metaphor with, "Turn under, plow, my troubles." And so when the second "turn" appears -- a duality is in play, "Turn under griefs and stubbld" where there's a a reference to burying griefs, and to the actu...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Unfollowed Figment" by Lyn Hejinian Originally read: June 3, 2013 More information about the Poet: Lyn Hejinian "This poem is one of a series, all of them elegiac in intention, and subject to the strange forces of mourning that let loose illogical developments, into impossible configurations of thought. The poem is built of non-sequiturs, because that’s what’s left in the wake of the death. We cannot follow the dead, whether they are persons or ideas. Instead we remain, but in a situation that, in their absence, makes no sense." - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23565#sthash.RvhAfdul.dpuf  "This poem is one of a series, all of them elegiac in intention, and subject to the strange forces of mourning that let loose illogical developments, into impossible configurations of thought. The poem is built of non-sequiturs, because that’s what’s left in the wake of the death. We cannot follow the dead, ...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Driving Toward the Lac Qui Parle River" by Robert Bly Originally read: June 2, 2013 More information about the Poet: Robert Bly Lac Qui Parle River What is actual is actual.  The poem is split into three sestets which chronicles the journey of the speaker through Minnesota.  If I get my geography correct, the speaker is going from Willmar to Milan to Lac Qui Parle River.  So the three stanzas sort of represent each individual journey; however, the speaker introduces little snippets of techniques that expands the poem from a simple journey. I. The usage of semi-colons in the first line, "I am driving; it is dusk; Minnesota" sets up an offsetting list, or rather, the situation is deliberate enough where the reader has to focus on these three aspects.  There is a speaker who is driving.  The time frame is dusk.  The context of the poem is within Minnesota. Yet, look at what the speaker notes on this drive, "The stubble fie...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Discrimination" by Kenneth Rexroth Originally read: June 1, 2013 More information about the Poet: Kenneth Rexroth Cocky? Pretentious?  The tone has audacity, "I don't mind the human race."  Which is then followed up by, "I've got pretty used to them"  -- a pretty awkward statement, but an intriguing one.  The focus here is the mindset of the speaker whose tone  and insight on the subject of the "human race."  And the short declarative lines makes this poem have unintentional (or intentional) humorous moments.      I don't mind if they sit next      To me on streetcars, or eat      In the same restaurants, if      It's not at the same table. These lines have a personal feel to them, the level of detail and disdain is humorous as the speaker nit picks what he can "tolerate."  And what of these situations?  Dinner, and a streetcar....

Original poem reprinted online here: "Bloodletting" by Alex Dimitrov Originally read: June 1, 2013 More information about the Poet: Alex Dimitrov When reread this poem, I focused too intently on past me's notes, "Mockery of the divine -- Dionysian focus?  Human focus." And throughout the poem, I tried to find more cases of mockery and how it affects the poem.  Also, I spent some time thinking of what Fellini's works fit in with the reference made in the poem.  Perhaps, Fellini's Cassanova . Yet, the more and more I read the lines -- the couplets, and how the speaker views the "you" in the poem, I feel the tone and the allusion work more of a stage presence, some backdrop in order to characterize both the speaker and the "you" in this sort of world. But yet I digress, The first lines does indeed have a Dionysian effect, "The gods have no choice / but to let us live a little -- / they would die for comedy."  However, the shift...

Original poem reprinted online here: "A Silly Poem" by Spike Milligan Originally read: May 31, 2013 More information about the Poet: Spike Milligan Humorous poem.  I'm not so sure how to go about this to analyze.  I guess I'll start with the title.  The title announces that the poem is a straight forward silly poem -- so the mindset of the reader automatically looks for the following: the type of humor which is how subject and tone fails expectation. But the switch happens automatically as the point of view is revealed to be Hamlet talking to Ophelia -- yes, that Hamlet, and that Ophelia. The characters act out of character to the play when Hamlet asks Ophelia on "What kind of pencil shall I use?" to draw a sketch, "2B or not 2B?"  The reference being to Hamlet's famous soliloquy . How much of Hamlet does a reader have to know about Hamlet to understand this?  Not much.  How much does a reader have to know about pencils in order to find this hu...

Original poem reprinted online here: "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman Originally read: May 31, 2013 More information about the Poet: Walt Whitman  The poem is composed of two quatrains even though it's one stanza.  There's a sense of observation and response where the speaker in the first stanza observes, and simply states what he observed, and then the response is a little more complicated. So with the first four lines:      When I heard the learn'd astronomer,      When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,      When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,      When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room, The anaphora of "when" sets up a build up of the scene, and character.  "When" refers to a time, place, and scene, but also informs the reader that there's an observatio...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Demonstrated Melancholy" by Nate Pritts Originally read: May 30, 2013 More information about the Poet: Nate Pritts So I just read Nate Pritts bio on Poetry Foundation, and, yes, this poem harkens back to the humor and play of Frank O' Hara, but this poem has something different about it.  Not really like a sinister undertone per se, but this poem definitely straddles the line between actually saying something too serious and/or mocking the subject too hard. With the first stanza, the speaker dictates a sense of command with, "I would like to request a volunteer. / Please raise your hand" and this is normal enough, but then there are requirements that don't necessarily contrast each other, but brings new perspective on the requirements.  For example, "only if you are a lovely singer / in possession of your own voice."  There's a physical requirement, but also the idea of possession and ownership comes into q...

Original poem reprinted online here: "I Went into the Maverick Bar" by Gary Snyder Originally read: May 29, 2013 More information about the Poet: Gary Snyder I'm actually surprised by the amount of scholarship about this poem:  Modern American Poetry , and also there are a lot of analysis as well -- not so much on the line level, but mostly what this poems about:  Poetry Reflections , Cece Poetry , and this blog . The overarching idea that the scholarship and the analysis discuss is the idea of social constructs: whether the social construct refer to Lenin with "real work" or trying to assimilate in -- the strong point of this poem is the observation and then what to do about what the speaker observes. The  first part of the poem is a narrative in which the speaker is specific about places and action.  The introduction of the speaker happens in the first stanza.  The speaker specifies where he is located ," Maverick Bar / In Farmington, New Mexico," an...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Metamorphosis" by James Richardson Originally read: May 28, 2013 More information about the Poet: James Richardson There's a little blurb on the poets.org site where Richardson explains, "'In Ovid, desire can change anyone into...anything. In the supermarket, it happened just the way the poem says: I’m afraid I met her eyes an instant too long. (When I glimpsed the same woman a few weeks later she didn’t look like my mother at all.)'" And I'm glad I read this, and in some ways I'm not so glad.  I want to refer to this article here, "Based on a True Story. Or Not" by Kathleen Rooney where I found this quote relevant to this poem in particular, "In short, if we are angered, confused, or disappointed upon discovering that a poem we took as autobiographical is not, then whose liability is that? If we feel as though we’ve somehow been cheated, is that on us? I’d argue that it probably is" S...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Heights of Folly" by Charles Simic Originally read: May 27, 2013 More information about the Poet: Charles Simic So the title foreshadows a sense of tragedy and a sense of the hyperbole.  Heights of folly relates to the idea of hamartia -- the tragic flaw.  And through the title, the flaw could be an overly naive sense of place.  The first line harkens back to a more naive person, "O Crows circling over my head and cawing!"  Two things of note here, the usage of "O" in the beginning references both the time frame and sense of the naive; furthermore, the seen punctuated with an exclamation brings a sense of importance to the scene -- the crows circling above the head and cawing isn't a great sign. The first stanza plays with this foreboding doom, "I admit to being, at times, / Suddenly, and without the slightest warning".  The understatement at the end of the line "without the slightest warning" ...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" by James Wright Originally read: May 26, 2013 More information about the Poet: James Wright "Implication mental / Physical description."  The poem reads as a physical description of a town in which seems domestic until the end and urban. In the first stanza, the name of the location "Shreve football stadium,"  brings a direct place to mind.  That, even though the poem could go general -- the location humanizes the poem in the first line.  In the second line the "I think" is a bold move since introducing the speaker in such a mundane way either emphasizes the speaker or detracts from the scene.  In this case, there's a detraction of the scene, but not necessarily in a bad way.  There's a sense of memory.  This is what the speaker thinks of, "Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville, / And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace of Benwood, / And the ruptu...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Day's End" by Tu Fu Originally read: May 26, 2013 More information about the Poet: Tu Fu At the end of this poem I wrote, "cynicism? / sincerity?"  And, although the last line is very loaded -- "and for what?"  The progression the poem takes questions the intent of the speaker.  In these two quatrains, the first stanza hints at a return, "Oxen and sheep were brought back down / Long ago, and bramble gates closed."  Note how the line reinforces two ideas -- the return and never exiting.  The animals were brought in long ago, and the gates closed behind them.  Now, this doesn't seem like much, but in a sparse poem, every image stands out, meanwhile, every action is buffered in this poem since the sentence construction is written in the passive.   Like my previous sentence. The next line, "Over / Mountains and rivers, far from my old garden, A windswept moon rises into clear night."  The images...

Original poem reprinted online here: "The Dusk of Horses" by James Dickey Originally read: May 25, 2013 More information about the Poet: James Dickey Written in unrhymed tercets, the poem plays with image of horses, but I feel the images play a smoke and mirror role, especially the color play of green and white, when the diction brings a deeper sense in the poem.  Starting with the opening stanza, the focus here is on the "green / of the field."  Why not "green field"?  The separation of the adjective and noun brings a sense of distance between color and image so the speaker could expand upon the metaphor.  This distance is further played on with the direct narrative of "something fallen from the sky. / They see this, and put down / Their long heads deeper in grass." There's an ambiguous set up with the next line, "That only just escapes reflecting them."  I assuming, "that" refers to the grass, but since there's an am...

Original poem reprinted online here: "In a Dark Time" by Theodore Roethke Originally read: May 25, 2013 More information about the Poet: Theodore Roethke The rhyme scheme for these sestets are kind of off.  The last couplets for each stanza have monosyllabic apparent rhymes; meanwhile, the abba rhyme scheme for the first four lines of each stanza are off.  Not exact rhymes, not even sight rhymes, but connected through a single letter like a strong "r" or an "n."  And even then I feel like I'm stretching the form of the poem like in the first line of this poem, "In a dark time, the eye begins to see."  The speaker isn't necessarily in the dark -- the focus here is a time frame that is described as dark in which the speaker meets his "shadow" in the deepening, "shade."  All these references allude to a direct Jungian psychology.  The speaker is meeting the hidden self. Yet the meeting in itself is framed within repetitio...

Original poem reprinted online here: "At the Archaeological Institute of America's Annual Meeting" by Ernest Hilbert Originally read: May 25, 2013 More information about the Poet: Ernest Hilbert So I didn't know this was a variation on the sonnet form until I read his bio.  Then I scanned the poem, and saw how the variations fit with the idea of the poem -- a sort of befuddled chaos of a colony of academics trying to figure out their place in history, "O, ungrateful hordes! Archaeologists / Mill through the hotel lobby".  Well, maybe not as grandeur, but the form (which I think resembles an Elizabethan sonnet because of the couplet at the end) shows the attempt to contain the humor and seriousness of the situation of "metaphorical action to stay in Academia, parallel to the work Archaeologists should be doing." Past me put down basically, "archaeology should be doing" because their action is compounded with the accenting verbs to create a...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Teach me I am forgotten by the dead" by Ralph Waldo Emerson Originally read: May 25, 2013 More information about the Poet: Ralph Waldo Emerson This poem is a set of rhetoric lines that interweave, counter, and support each other.  Now, why am I not reading an essay?  Well, this is sort of an essay in a way due to the overly rhetorical nature, but there's some play in here that kept me interested on the rhetorical strategies as though the speaker is logically trying to argue with a concept. The first two lines "Teach me I am forgotten by the dead, An that the dead is by herself forgotten" is a play on logic where both sides forget each other, but have the knowledge of forgetting each other. These lines are curious though -- the logic is referencing the dead or a conflict of the "soul" The speaker lays out his argument by casting away the big reasons, "murder, steal, or fornicate, / Nor with ambition break the p...

Original poem reprinted online here: "The Young Husband" by Marianne Boruch Originally read: May 24, 2013 More information about the Poet: Marianne Boruch  The poem is written in couplets which is quite fitting because the scene of the poem has to deal with a husband and wife having conversation with his wife. But I do want to note the title first, "The Young Husband."  While husband is defined as is in the poem, "young" in all its denotations: like age and lack of experience gets explored in the poem.  But the first couplet, "All vision is / peripheral: sideways, and under eave" comes off as didactic like the speaker is pointing out "though this is how you should read this poem -- this is the core of the poem."  The following is more of an exposition  -- "the young husband / on his cell to his wife, talking, smoking." Here's where the poem starts to focus, "not talking, no longer waiting / to tell the strange part. /...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Muffin of Sunsets" by Elaine Equi Originally read: May 24, 2013 More information about the Poet: Elaine Equi The poem opens up with the humorous line, "The sky is melting. Me too."  Furthermore, what the opening line does is create a hyperbolic analogy which the reader accepts when going forward with the poem. Therefore, the suspension of disbelief is stretched in the poem. "Pink between the castlework / of  buildings."  The image has a strong sense of color but also note the "castlework" in which the word brings a sense of structural aesthetic to the building as well which is thrown off balance with the next stanza of, "pensive syrup / drizzled over clouds" which brings a humorous tension.  All these aspects brought in: hyperbole, humor, structure, image, foreshadows the split stanzas. The stanzas are in couplets up to this point with the single line, "It is almost catostrophic how heavenly...

Original poem reprinted online here: "In Portraits in Seasons" by Danielle Pafunda Originally read: May 23, 2013 More information about the Poet: Danielle Pafunda One of the notes I wrote for this poem was, "Eckphrastic -- look up."  I wanted to figure out if this poem related to an image; however, rereading this poem, the fragments construct the emotional impact of the poem, but I'm still curious on where the emotion is directed. The opening couplet  starts out with the fragment "As a feral thing would."  Usually, I would try to connect the title in with the fragment, but their doesn't seem to be a logical syntactical connection between both.  Rather, there's two different moods going on. "In Portraits in Seasons" brings a more relaxed, visual mood; meanwhile, "As a feral thing would," contrasts the mood through tone -- a feral thing would do...what?  The speaker already has made a judgement on something. The next line sort...