DDCPoetry

Original poem reprinted online here: "A Grace" by Donald Hall Originally read: September 20, 2013 More information about the Poet: Donald Hall So the poem is structured as a prayer with two rhymed couplets and a tercet.  Each couplets serves different purpose: whether to strengthen a point or to counter a point. "God, I know nothing, my sense is all nonsense / And fear of You begins intelligence:"  So these lines bring up an interesting rhetoric.  The second line does overpower the first though, intelligence brings fear (also a little pun on intelligent design), but the admittance of "knowing nothing" is mixed with the play of language of "sense is all nonsense." "Does it end there?  For sexual love, for food, / For books and birch trees I claim gratitude."  Two thing, the construction of the sentence, and the use of the ambiguous pronoun.  The ambiguous pronoun sets up a continuation of "intelligence" -- a list that creates f...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Waiting on the Corners" by Donald Hall Originally read: December 25, 2012? More information about the Poet: Donald Hal l I wrote a lot of "I like" for this poem.   Funnily enough there's a lot of grammar issues within the poem that would make English majors wince.  However, grammar is a tool to standardize communication, but in a poem, miscommunications bring a sort of insight. For example the first line: "Glass, air, ice, light, and winter cold."  Even though I wrote that "this collection of verbs [they are nouns past me -- you dolt] are mundane."  There's a sense of  two things with the first line -- immediacy (the nouns are right in front of the) and disorder (without a complete sentence there is a lack of context. As we get further down into the poem there's ambiguous pronouns "They" in line three could refer to the items above or a group of people -- the line has a sense of duality ...