DDCPoetry

 Poem Found Here: "The Summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up" by Hanif Abdurraqib    How much should a reader know about a reference?  I didn't know what summer A Tribe Called Quest Broke Up.  I also didn't know what songs they were famous for.  So I looked them up.  Can I Kick It? Yes, you can!  I remember that song.  A quick wiki read showed that they broke up in 1998.  And I'm there.  At least my memory is there: outdoors in the neighborhood during the summer: chilling out with some friends or people from the neighborhood.  The music fills the backdrop as it would be on some 104.9 or 99.7 around where I lived.  But we don't start out with music we start out in color, "all them black / boys in the 'hood."  I find the color interesting and then the mention of the boys in the 'hood because it feels like we're opening up to a movie or a visual memory.  The structures of adjusted lines brings a feel that the reader ...

Darrell Dela Cruz’ new book, This Is A Love Poem, Listen , earns its punctuation mark not only as an exclamation, but in the imperative delivered to the reader: pay attention. An aching honesty shines through these poems that lay bare the complications inherent in any love, whether that of parent, lover, country, or a god. Sometimes desolate, sometimes triumphant, but always with emotional precision, Dela Cruz’ speaker navigates the losses of the past, “like a cross an altar boy struggles to hold up” to arrive at a hard won self-acceptance. “Repeat, repeat. It is one way of learning,” he says, “even through continuous endings.” Listen up. You may find you didn’t really know what a love poem can be after all. A compelling read. Sally Ashton  Author Listening to Mars Editor-in-Chief of DMQ Review Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. 2011-2013  ---------- These poems are ocean glass at dawn. They call us to wade in, slowly. We soon realize the struggle of riptides, the com...

  We start with exposition, "We were waiting for a train in the echoing underground. / I was thirteen. He was old, a family friend, a refugee from another century," Without knowing the context of the poem at first, I wondered why there was two of them on the train -- a young girl and a old family friend, until, "The Gestapo hammered at his front door with the order for his arrest" and now we're in a very specific time and a general area in Europe.  The  Gestapo is the secret police of Nazi Germany.  This brings to light some insight on the "refugee from another century" who "walked out the back door with nothing but his passport in his pocket." We return to the train station and the girl and the friend have a slight conversation: Just before our train thundered into the station, making it impossible to hear out of the blue, he said to me, memory is a paradise no one can expel you from. This morning, in another century, I woke up remembering....

  "This well-used little bag is just the right size / to carry a copy of the Psalms. It's plain-woven  / flowers and helicopter share the sky with bombs" The internal rhyme of "Psalms" and "bombs" really foreshadows the juxtaposition of reality and ideals.  The book bag being the holding prayers and from up above bombs. "falling like turnips--he who makes light of other / men will be killed by a turnip." The poem becomes a bit farcical here, but if someone dies because of their ideals, aren't they killed because of them?  If someone sees bombs as turnips, bombs are still bombs no matter the perceptions. "A bachelor. / I wear it across my shoulder--it's easier to be / a bachelor all my life than a widow for a day." To forgo any search of love because eventually you'll be a widow is a grim reality.  But again this is the reality versus the ideal.  It'd be great to fall in love, but reality, the speaker could die at any...

Charles E. Burchfield I'm not sure if this is an ekphrastic poem or not.  I also don't know if this poem is a response to the life and style of "Charles Burchfield."  But from what I read on the wiki, and just looking through some of his artwork, there's a sense of surrealness in his paintings, but there's always the ambiance of nature sketched one line at a time. The start of this poem feels expository to set-up the persona.  The lines are vivid with imagery of darkness or wanting to retreat into the dark: "I soared over darkened / fields" and  As the sun rose over the hill I plunged into the dusky woods to avoid the blinding light and become lodged between two young white pines. The speaker is hyper sensitive to the "blinding light" and hides away between pines.  And during this time of hiding, the owl and the pines start to become one as the lines continue the owl becomes more tree like as "my blood to sap / my body to wood." T...

At Last by Etta James Listen to this a couple times over and then come back to this poem.  Or read this poem and then listen.  They are in conversation with each other.  But how much in conversation. The opening line of this poem and Etta James song deals with time with the poem starting off with time getting shorter every year, and Etta James singing her lonely days are over.  However, after the opening line the poem goes to a surreal trip down a memory lane "and we broke into sound the slightest lash of the / feather duster and we had bricks up our sleeves".  What type of sound did the speaker and this other break into?  A cry? A laugh? Does it matter?  A unified sound.  What does the bricks represent?  Maybe take a brick as a brick -- something that is thought of weight. you can't imagine and climbed three steps at a time-- though one of the version was we never got there or one of us got there first by banging the dashboard, though I'd sa...

  When I first read this poem, I looked up the title, Arroyo : 1) A deep gully cut by an intermittent stream, a dry gulch.  2) A brook; a creek. I feel this is a persona poem where we get perspective of an Arroyo, as well as another entity there "living" through the experience. The poem starts out with a curt opening statement, "In this place we define things."  which is then followed by the fragment, "In terms of absence."  In my mind, I think both sentences go together, something like "In this place we define things in terms of absence."  But the period in the middle separates the ideas, and with being so abrupt absence is noted.  I do think the two sentences are different ideas to punctuate absence like, "No new air. No saving grace."  No salvation in place. "Our suspicion is: There are better ways of understanding. [Number them.]" The punctuation slows down each statement and makes me wonder:  Who is the "our"?  ...

 "Either he's dead or my watch has stopped."  This Groucho Marx joke puts times in a duality perspective either what he's seeing is someone who stopped and is dead or what he's seeing is time not moving.  In either case, the quote sets up the poem to have some silliness and some insight on movement of time -- it's the other person not moving, or time has impossibly stopped. And the humor is definitely in the beginning of this Elizabethan sonnet, "Away they go, with their outlandish names, / saddled with human baggage, desperate wagers--" There's a certain cynicism and snark boiling down the experience to seemingly projected judgements: "outlandish names" "human baggage" "desperate wagers".  The speaker first identifies the names on the horses and then sees jockeys as "human baggage" but also makes them symbolic as a burden on the horses, and then finally with "desperate wagers" the speaker then fo...

  "Will earth stop spinning?"  There's a certain coldness with Earth being lowercased.  It's just another planet known by designation rather than the place we live, or used to live if it's the world end.  The opening line goes from a cold grandiosity to "Will there only be hair left?" which is human.  I get the sentiment.  After we die, hair will continue to grow.  But I've read that this is a lie and hair appears to grow because we the body decays and shrinks giving the appearance of longer hair.  But this line is not about truth, it's about what a possible human leaves behind -- something personal that grow out even after death -- or rather would any physical trace of humanity be left? After these two rhetorical question, the poem makes a statement, "We are made of war--" which juxtaposes the hair line what physical makes us.  If we are made of war, a concept, then this is the psychological us, the metaphorical us, the us that's a...

 "One afternoon you fixed me" is an interesting first line and the line break foreshadows a relationship with the other in a positive light.  Will the speaker be fixed at the end of the poem?  The line also foreshadows the end, but the first stanza is the start of an anecdote and should be read all at once to make sense of where we are at and when we are at: One afternoon you fixed me lunch in your tiny apartment cream of mushroom soup from a can and English muffins We are observing a couple in the middle of eating something.  I pointed out how "from a can" points to class -- poverty, simple things.  So it looks like the speaker is being nostalgic about a past relationship and simpler times.  I'm trying to think of other stories and ideas that fit this trope.  I know there are many, but what comes to mind is past presidents like Obama and Clinton who talk about living in poverty to be relatable, but also true.   But we're observing here -- th...

  Apologies for the gap in-between as I copied this and the rest of the poem was on another page.  This poem should be a single stanza. With that being stated, this poem works as a joke where there is a punchline at the end.  However, we start at the time "Shorter Russian Poem" which could mean that the poem is about Russia or it could also mean that the poem is a shorter version of a Russian archetype of poem.  My guess it's about the former rather than the later. So we start with natural devastations like "famine, plague / floods, rains / droughts".  The placement of "floods" next to "rain" and then "droughts" brings an interesting duality to this poem.  I would think it'd be something like "drought, rains, floods" but this set-up kind of brings a positive trajectory: drought at least there's rain.  But the disasters are separated and are added up rather than to be thought of as a trajectory.  Devastation is Deva...

  The first thing that pops up when I look up "pathetic fallacy" is this: Pathetic Fallacy Definition and Examples I'm trying to see the emotion in the inanimate, and it doesn't look like this poem deals with this concept, so I think the title, like the poem, separates the definition. Pathetic:  1: having a capacity to move one to either compassionate or contemptuous pity 2: marked by sorrow or melancholy : SAD 3: pitifully inferior or inadequate the restaurant's pathetic service 4: ABSURD , LAUGHABLE Fallacy : 1 a: a false or mistaken idea  popular fallacies prone to perpetrate the fallacy of equating threat with capability—C. S. Gray b: erroneous character : ERRONEOUSNESS The fallacy of their ideas about medicine soon became apparent. 2 a: deceptive appearance : DECEPTION b: obsolete : GUILE , TRICKERY 3: an often plausible argument using false or invalid inference This seems to fit the idea of the poem more as we get to the first idea with: Never mind there...

The title blends into the first line.  I wasn't prepared for that on the second read.  I know the title informs the poem, but I was so struck with the first line: "A real one wouldn't need one" because the construction makes sense, but the line break makes me focus on "one."   The butterfly is one The parachute is one This is followed up with further clarification of the set-up, "but the one Nathan draws surely does:" this statement make me think that Nathan is someone young and close to the speaker.  What's also important with this line is that it focuses on Nathan being a creator who has a belief that a butterfly needs a parachute in this particular drawing: four oblongs the size and color of popsicles, green apple, toasted coconut and grape, flanked, two per side, by billowing valentine hearts, In a frame of Scotch tape. Even though the picture is that of a butterfly with parachute note how the descriptions seem to revolve around food "...

  There's something ethereal about this persona poem.  From the opening lines of "The yards grow ghosts. Between the limbs of wings, / bleached street-lit things, I'm best moving on" the poem establishes that the speaker is on the move through this area with "ghosts" and "limbs and wings."  The internal ryme of "wings" and "things" brings the song element in the poem. The next lines in the poem are full of adjectives that feel amorphous: Hunt-heavy, gray, slunk overlow like so much weight got in the way, my shapes' the shape  of something missed, flash-pop or empty frame. Note how the speaker places the color gray with weighted adjectives to make a visual and tactile image go hand in hand.  But in doing so, the persona goes beyond a noticeable form, "something missed, flash-pop or empty frame." With the internal rhyme of "frame" and "game" -- "Though you could say I've made a game of th...

Furu-Ike Ya Kawazu Tobikomu Mizu no Oto 古池や　 蛙飛び込む　 水の音 In high school I studied Japanese. I took Japanese 3 twice since I failed it the first time, and got a "D" the second time around. In the front desk office, they had a list of colleges that students were going to; meanwhile, I thought "oh, college" and continued to sleep when I got home from school, and during class. I don't remember graduation. My dad forced me to go to sign up for classes at Evergreen Community College. I remember him driving me there and telling me to fill out this form and follow directions. If nothing else in my life, I can pass putting my name down on paper. One of the first classes I signed up for was in Japanese Literature. I already had college credits in Japanese culture when a teacher from San Jose City College offered a class. I passed that class with a B+, so I thought maybe I should pursue this subject. So when I read this poem the first time, I fixated on the last part...

  Fort he longest time, I thought threescore and ten equaled seventy-one.  I asked ChatGPT and it stated:  "Threescore and ten" is a phrase that is often used to refer to the number 70. In modern English, "threescore" is an archaic term meaning "three times twenty," or simply 60. So when combined with "and ten," it becomes 60 + 10, which equals 70. This phrase is commonly found in literature, poetry, and religious texts, and is used to express the number 70 in a more poetic or traditional manner. It is worth noting that this phrase is not commonly used in everyday modern English language and is more commonly encountered in historical or literary contexts. Would that make me two scores if I'm forty?  In any case, the poem laments in a poetic way of what happened in those pat 71 years: "With all their chances, changes, losses, sorrows"   From the second line, the speaker goes specific, "My parents' deaths, the vagaries of my ...

  This poem is written with hindsight in mind, "I was a boy in a bookstore, 'a bathhouse,' I'll joke when I am / older."  I noted in the very beginning line that the reference to "a bathhouse" was to a "gay bathhouse" where men go to hook-up.  But through the comparison, the speaker is looking back trying to make light of the situation, "but then, I wasn't." The poem continues to go a little explicit along with the pun of hooking up in a bookstore, "I was in a gallery of things to be / cracked open; all their spines & mine."  And so there's this blur of allusions -- hooking up and reading so the innuendo shows a passion for both, "I tell you, I was hungry / pickpocket, plucking what language I could from books & men / who stood hard before me."   There's a sense of control, a focus on taking and taking.  "This is what it means to be / astonishing; to thieve speech and sense from the underse...

  I asked Bard what "Sissy" meant and here's the response: Sissy is a derogatory term used to describe someone who is weak or cowardly, or who acts in a stereotypically feminine way. It is often used to insult boys or men who do not conform to traditional gender roles. Sissy can be a harmful word, as it can make someone feel ashamed of who they are. It is important to be aware of the negative connotations of this word and to avoid using it. The word "sissy" comes from the word "sister," and it is thought to have originated in the late 1800s. It was originally used to describe a boy who was weak or cowardly, but it soon came to be used to describe anyone who did not conform to traditional gender roles. Sissy can be a hurtful word, as it can make someone feel ashamed of who they are. It is important to be aware of the negative connotations of this word and to avoid using it. If you hear someone using the word sissy, it is important to speak up and let th...

 Original analysis here:  https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-elegy-by-jose-maria-hinojosa.html Another self-conscious post by me. Anyways, Looking over the poem again the rhetorical questions about failing to get to a destination: "Alone I sailed, / Where will I arrive?  "If the hot air balloon were lost, / on what land would it fall?"   "If the ship were to wreck, / it would sink in what waters?" there's a sense of place, especially with the line "what waters?" Should that matter when someone is going through a traumatic disaster?  But this is all metaphorical.  The important part is at the end "Alone I started / No one knows why. / But, I, yes I, Know!" The exclamation at the end refocuses the poem to the resolve and the purpose of the speaker, regardless of possible metaphorical disasters happen and places to be.  It's the spirit of adventure and a tongue in cheek feel to the "possible elegy." It's be...

  In my initial reading of this poem, the volta struck me hard.  The tonal structure in the poem reminds me of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience in the way how the allusions to religion hit hard -- looking at religious symbols in another, but ethical light through strong images. The poem starts out like something from the songs of innocence, "Nature's first green is gold / Her hardest hue to hold."  With each end-stopped line every line feels important.  I feel there's a sense of reverence with these lines as though to show how hard "Nature" works. "Her early leaf's a flower; / But only so an hour." I think the key word in these lines is "early." The beginning. The Songs of Innocence. The joy of creation. Something beautiful created.  The rhyme scheme is so pronounced it harkens back to hymns.  However, with a semi-colon the poem adds a temporal component -- how long can this flower last.  The Songs of Experience. ...