DDCPoetry

Original Poem Reprinted Online Here: "Happy first anniversary (in anticipation of your thirty ninth)" by Bob Hicok More Information about the Poet: Bob Hicok Past me wrote, "move to a different narrative," and even though this poem feels like a Best Man's speech, there is a move to a different narrative -- the singular to the plural and, perhaps, to the singular again.  The single stanza forces the connections between everything with no breaks.  However, the poem has a sense of speed due to the syntax and the language. The first person perspective in the first introductory lines has a sense of humor behind them, "I don't have much time.  I'm an important person / to chickadees and mourning doves, whose feeder / was smashed last night by a raccoon." Here the language is too real, as though to define importance by building something that was once destroyed -- and how to fix this, "Soon / I'll be wielding duct tape, noticing the dew, / wa...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Elegy with lies" by Bob Hicok Originally read: May 13, 2013 More information about the Poet: Bob Hicok Past me wrote about the title, "Elegy with lies -- but it's honest about the elegy having lies -- focus how the lies operate."  So with an elegy, a poem honoring a dead person, there's bound to be overstatements and understatements. The first line deals with overstatement, "This lost person I loved.  Loved for a hundred years."  The overstatement is a personal view that continues to develop as the narrative continues. Narrative elegy?  Well, the story is the speaker is searching for her "in a forest."  And the speaker tries two different things to find her -- "call her name," and "build a machine that believes it's God to call her." The first attempt where the speaker tries to call out for the person.  Note how the  call is qualified with a parenthetical response of "noth...