DDCPoetry

Poem found here: Reading Anna Karenina More about the Poet:  Karina Borowicz I haven't read Anna Karenina.  Does this make this analysis pretty useless, most likely.  These are my thoughts and analysis of a poem, opinions not fact. I'm reading two different narratives -- the constructive narrative of the author Tolstoy, and the attempt to help by Karenina.  But something is incomplete in both their process to make a complete failure. Tolstoy's story -- middle aged man apprenticing himself to be a boot maker and the line that sticks out to me is, "Blisters, he knew, are holier than ink stain."  This metaphor intertwines physical painful but prideful badges of hard work "blisters" versus the overthought, quickened carelessness of "ink stain."  Both symbolizes, to me, the pains of creation and the happiness of the failures of it.  So when "The boots were ugly and they pinched."  I expected a contrast. But Karenina is not portrayed as a f...

Original poem reprinted online here:   "What Work Is" by Philip Levine Originally read:Years and Years ago Originally Printed for this Blog Project: January 23, 2013 More information about the Poet: Philip Levine So this is one of those poems where I couldn't pass up on when it came up in one of the daily poem places.  I read this poem years ago, and it's one of my favorite poems.  I wrote down notes here, but what I always remembered about the poem is the tone.  The tone shifts from exasperated from angry. However, when I reread this poem for this blog, I wondered where the direction of the exasperation and anger went to. So I write down for the poem, "The tone of these line brought me in, Automatically prophetic and stating --> or trying to bring the reader in."  These are the lines, "if you're / old enough to read this you know what / work is, although you may not do it."  Current me believes that the first lines solidify the "you...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Flowers" by Linda Pastan Originally read: January 4, 2013 More information about the Poet:  Linda Pastan I write this at the end of the poem: "I'm glad that the poem was only titled 'Flowers -- anything added would probably bring too much sentimentality or, I, at least, would've thought of this poem as cliche on first glance." And well it can be seen as the cliche "write an observation about nature then relate it to the personal" poem -- which has been done even before from Romanticism to the Tang Dynasty Poets to the Neoromantics to poets like Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, Maxine Kumin etc.  Nature and poetry.  Hand in hand. The poem does so little in terms of technique which is good because the focus directly shifts after a few lines of description/observation.  There's one rhetorical question, one similes, and one offbeat adjective/noun combination that catch my eye in this poem (yes there's one m...

Original poem reprinted online here:  "Everything that Acts is Actual" Originally read: November 30, 2012 More information about the Poet: Denise Levertov "The ending -- the idea of only seeing 'grasp alone; not the actual poem, idea, concept -- only the reader, the observers own need to understand is really strong because the end works well if a reading  [sic should be reader] wants to read the poem as a Nature poem or a Prophetic poem, or a 'personal poem,' or a combination of different ideas.  The writer/speaker let go of this poem.  The reader/interpreter/scholar/searcher has not" I don't know what I'm talking about here. I've reread the poem and my notes several times this morning, and I don't see how I got to that conclusion.  The introduction of the ambiguous "you" (a much favored technique by many) in stanza one is well done. Although the "you" used in stanza one borders on being a command or a simple addressin...

This blog has been up for over two years, and I haven't updated it in a year. Why? Life happens after the MFA. I'm not writing about literary accomplishments or (the multitude) of literary failures. Rather life -- you know the things you experience in person than in a book so that you can write a book about your experiences you had in person. This is not an "I'm living my life" blog -- this blog is meant to set up something that I want to do. ------------- So after I "celebrated" my 30th birthday, I decided to read some poetry everyday for various reasons: 1) I wrote and read a little bit here and there the past couple of months leading up to my birthday -- mostly during the Summer. I didn't want to be distracted by video games while applying for jobs, and I didn't want to focus on how many employers ignored my resume -- so I turned to poetry. To be honest, I don't know why. 2) Retail places didn't hire me unfortunately, but I final...