DDCPoetry

  The title, "House Song with Wonder Woman" makes me think of something comic without comedy, as though I should follow the lines like a comic scene of one snippet at a time.  However, the first sentence goes against this with, "Wonder Woman came to my house to further the cause."  What is this cause?  Why is she there?  Why the speaker's house?  It's a line that catches off guard even though I know it's coming.  We have to start somewhere. " But you're not even Asian,"  is this the cause?  It's a humorous mix-up of intent.  This tells me about the speaker but the scene shifts back to Wonder Woman, "She tapped her shield and asked if I wanted to borrow her lasso. To wear it. To help with my poems. To further the cause. No Thanks. "  I put down the note that it is Wonder Woman who is pushing giving something to the speaker to help.   I wonder how many people reading this poem would know that Wonder Woman is offering the lasso o

 Original Analysis Here:  https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-plays-by-lloyd-schwartz.html This was a harsh critique of the poem.  I feel I've changed my way of looking at poems.  To me the criticism I wrote felt like I was trying to hard to make a point rather than looking at the poem.  Also, me being so self aware of myself feels like I'm still getting over my nervousness of writing anything at all. Who is "Beatrice Joanna"?  What is the "Changling"?  Who is Thomas Middleton?  Those are the first questions I should ask when reading this.  "The Changeling" Let this be a lesson to look up references in poems.  The first two stanza are exposition that tell the scene of Beatrice realizing her betrothed has been assassinated by Deflores who desires her but she finds repulsive. The second stanza sums up the rest of the play of how Beatrice ends up falling in love with her twin, the ugly assassin. Part 2 of the poem continues after the de

  Cachexia I think I looked up what the title meant first before reading the information about the poem and the poet.  Usually, the lens I look through in analyzing poems is New Criticism : close reading, focus on how technique informs the context without looking at the author or the background.   But no, not this poem.  I recommend after reading the "About This Poem" at the end of the poem.  I believe sincerity is a crux for this poem.  If you don't believe the perspective of the speaker or come to this poem with cynicism, then you'll miss out on the insight this poem brings.   Why?  This is Max Ritvo's last poems and I'm going to assume he knew that this would be one of his last poems.  It kind of reminds me of John Donne's "Holy Sonnets". The first two lines, "Today I woke up in my body / and wasn't that body anymore" encapsulates wasting away.  The mind is still present, synapses still firing, but the current wasted body isn'

 Analysis found here:  https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-reader-by-rita-mae-reese.html I was looking her up and found this bio of her on Poetry Foundation .  Her quote on Anti- got my attention: I'm against poems that aren't against anything. Poems that only have one mind (or fewer). Poems that go in one direction only. I'm even more against poems that go very slowly in one direction. I'm against poetry that's never smoked, can't take a joke and can't remember my name. When I was rereading her poem, "Dear Reader," I kept the statement, "can't remember my name" in mind because I think I missed something in my original analysis of the poem. The poem is also pretty straight forward narrative about caring for someone that's slowly losing their mind -- perhaps dementia which, weirdly enough, is also a poem with one mind or rather one complete mind that can comprehend things, the speaker's perspective. And that'

I feel this is a straight forward poem by Frost even from the title, "A Time to Talk."  The poem focuses on why it's a good time to talk from a "friendly visit" instead of whatever needs to go on in life: responsibilities and burdens. However, this poem seems the most Frost on topic, but the least on form and structure.  Unlike his other other poems "The Road Not Taken"  or Acquainted with the Night , this poem seems free of consistent rhymes and meter, but I think that's for the advantage of the subject of the poem. The poem starts with the situation, "When a friend calls to me from the road / And slows his horse to a meaning walk, " in which the speaker has to respond.  But the poem turns into a definition of what not to do, "I don't stand still and look around / On all the hills I haven't hoed," The speakers pushes away thoughts of obligation they need to continue with. Furthermore, the speaker then pushes away the id

Original Analysis Here:  https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-view-by-shanna-compton.html It's been ten years since I first started posting analysis of individual poems.  In that time span I analyzed poems everyday to not doing analysis for the entirety of a year to being spotty, and now I'm just going to try something once a week with two projects: analysis of poetry, and looking back at old analysis and just writing about it. I wanted to look up the poets and really see their background.  Since the original analysis, Shanna Compton  has published so much: four books of poems and multiple publications.  Looking at her later poems like "I wore my dress"  and "Seven Steps to Better Listening" : there's a bit more space and play with white space.   For this poem though, the first thing I noticed is that I didn't do a real good job of analyzing this poem.  I was so self-conscious on how I'd appear as a critic as I was graded harshly an

My past self wrote down for the first stanza, "Forced 2nd person perspective."  What's forced is this feeling, this "thrill" based on the action, "to lie on a road / and flatten yourself, [...]"  'Forced' may be too strong of a word, or maybe it isn't.  But the focus from the first poem is on this "thrilled" feeling through flattening which I think of letting go of contractions in the muscles and just lay there.  Flat. The next stanza is the only one where it's a single line and turns the tone toward a neutral visual, "white fur like a ball of winter,"  where the speaker continues the simile by adding another simile that moves the image to spring.  But how does relate to this kind of "thrill" mentioned in the beginning?  How the images move seasons and meaning, so does what it means to really flatten yourself. Still. "each one folded in like / the fledgling that never made it / from the nest."  Th