DDCPoetry

More about the poet:  Ellen Doré Watson (Unfortunately, can't find poem on verse daily) A personal time piece poem.  After rereading the poem and my notes, I think I was overthinking the poem.  This poem is specific, but vague.  There's no direct flow from one idea to the next, but there is a connection with all the events.  This is a poem where the speaker has to buy into this ride of untamed experience. And that's where the title comes in, "That was the summer" which feels like a retelling of an event in a casual.  You know, "That was the summer when [...]"  but for the speaker, the summer started out where "real life go loud." Oh okay, I get it.  Loud -- probably a metaphor of big life changing events.  But the poem continues with "peonies, squirrels, teapots screaming / in my ear."  The image contrasts sounds so innocuous on the outside, but personal loudness in the inside."  From here, I'm thinking to myself, "okay,...

Poem found here:  "Long Finger Poem" by Jin Eun-Young Is this an Ars Poetica poem?  Most likely.  But first let's talk about what's actually happening, "I'm working on my poems and working with / my fingers not my head."  This is what the poem is all about.  Or rather this is the thesis statement in the Ars Poetica.  When writing poem, don't think to much and let the fingers do the writing.  The poem then continues to explain how the fingers work for poetry. "Because my fingers / are the farthest stretching things from me."  Creating distance. "Look at the tree. / Like its longest branch / I touch the evening's quiet breathing."  What this distance creates is sensation, experience, something tactile.  If the work came to from the mind, would the speaker still experience the "evening's quiet breathing" or "Sounds of rain The crackling heat from other trees." "The tree points everywhere. The branches...

Poem found here:  "Green Tea" by Dale Ritterbusch Below is Pan Long Ying Hao, the green tea that this poem is about: I feel this poem is straight forward in meaning.  The green tea being brewed is a metaphor for how "you" wake up in the morning.  Everything in this poem depends on the understanding of comparative physical imagery. But first, exposition, "There is this tea / I have sometimes, / Pan Long Ying Hao,"  The tone of the poem is casual, very conversational.  It's like I'm talking to a friend over breakfast and I asked about the tea and the speaker has this magically knowledge to pass down. "so tightly curled / it looks like tiny roots / gnarled, a greenish-gray" what I like about these lines that it's not a metaphor.  This is literally what Pan Long Ying Hao looks like.  This type of description continues this casual conversation until: When it steeps, it opens the way you woke this morning, stretching, your hands behind your...

Poem Found Here: " In My Long Night" by Charles Simic An outsider living in the same place.  This poem plays with the symbolism of images regarding fealty to the church, the same church, and not fitting in.  Note how each stanza is end-stopped as thought to encapsulate an idea or time.  After rereading this poem a couple of times, it's difficult to break up individual lines since the each stanza is powerful as a whole. However, the poem starts with a small image that expands outward: I have toiled like a spider at this web In the dome of a church Where only the upraised eyes of martyrs In their torments could see me. The initial simile compares the speaker to a spider in a web which is subsumed by "the dome of a church" and then moves to tormented, upraised eyes of a martyrs.   For me, the expanse of it all gets to me.  The church being such an overwhelming visual and emotional figure.  This sets up the speakers viewpoint. Where one cold spring da...