DDCPoetry

Original poem reprinted online here: "A Song" by Ghassan Zaqtan Originally read: February 18, 2013 More information about the Poet: Ghassan Zaqtan  So I keep thinking in my head war poems are really hard to do. I once was asked, "do you know any Vietnam War Poems."  No, not really.  Yes there's been poems about World War I and II.  But nothing too recent, and I wonder why.  It's not like poets have stopped writing about wars -- all topics are on the table. Yet this poem doesn't address the casualties of war.  What this poem does is take away that emotional sentimentality line that (the emotional suffering of war) -- yes, I think by now that most people will agree that emotionally speaking -- war is bad, and instead shows the aftermath of war in a non-Hollywood fashion. Note -- I'm referring to the concept of war being written in poetry rather than the individual stories  like "The Death of the Turret Ball Gunner" by Randell Jarell  where th...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Undecided" by Hal Sirowitz Originally read: February 13, 2013 More information about the Poet: Hal Sirowitz   Past me wrote this about the last line of the poem, "The last line might be too sentimental, but I feel that this end is strong due to the ambiguous way to read the end: dismissive, genuine, desperation."  I reread and reread this poem and I understand what's going on -- a father telling his child (son) that they got him a gift of a shirt and, even though the parents has bought his son a shirt for the last three years, the father still cares.  Yes, this is where past me saw this poem as a bit sentimental because the "plot" of the poem is one of those after school special bonding moments, but for this poem, there's something else to it. The difference in the poem is this, "Father said."  This is a small big point.  The perspective of what is being said by the father is the product of the speake...

Original poem reprinted online here:  "No Return" by William Matthews Originally read: February 10, 2013 More information about the Poet:  William Matthews Three stanzas sestets.  When I think of sestets, I think of Freytag's theory of Narrative -- exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement.  Even though there's five parts to the theory, my mind thinks this way probably because of all the sestets I've read (including Italian sonnet form).  Now what does this mean to the poem that isn't narrative (the last half of the poem is narrative in a sense). Exposition -- "I like divorce"  In the first stanza the speaker drops a pretty loaded word, "divorce" into the poem; however, the speaker redefines the term rather quickly by not dwelling on the definition of the word rather focus on the tone.  "I like divorce," the full first sentence reads a bit sarcastically for me.  I think it's the brevity that punctuates the...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Audubon Ate His Birds" by Kristin Robertson Originally read: January 30, 2013 More information about the Poet: Kristin Robertson The first sentence, or rather the first six and a half lines in this couplet form, is pretty humorous because of the hyperbolic acts compared to how Audubon is imagined (an animal lover who drew pictures); however, upon further inspection what the speaker writes of is true , well technique wise anyway. The speaker inserts the sense of humor through the first simile "feathers splayed like pick a card, / any card "  and  "he roasted and swallowed / the loves of his life."   What this sets up is a kind of authority behind the speaker.  The speaker doesn't hide his/her bias of a feeling of disbelief when stating the truth -- however, the speaker, no matter how hyperbolic it seems, is writing the "truth." Then the shift in the narrative -- or rather the comparison to Audubon where t...

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: "Child" by Sylvia Plath Originally read: January 18, 2013 More information about the Poet: Sylvia Plath This poem is unlike any poems I know of Sylvia Plath. Daddy , Blackberrying , Ariel tend to have a dark (sometimes hyperbolic) overtone filled with personal emotion (Daddy), dark situations (Blackberrying), and/or viscera (Ariel).  All these aspects in her poems, I won't necessarily say resonate, but rather defines her work for me in my mind -- kind of an association (Sylvia Plath = list above). When I came across this poem in my daily reads, I thought hmm interesting -- I'm pretty sure Sylvia will fall back on one of those three techniques. The beginning of the poem starts out so innocent, maybe a little overboard from both the perspective of the speaker and the subject:, "Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing."  Noticing the line after rereading this, there's something awkward with the construction...

Original poem reprinted online here:  "Beauty" by Elinor Morton Wylie Originally read: January 16, 2013 More information about the Poet: Elinor Morton Wylie So I read this poem after "She Walks in Beauty" by Lord Byron ; however, I don't remember if I analyzed them at the same time.  Judging by the line marks, I'm pretty sure no.  Anyway, reading the poem and then thinking about what Byron wrote brought a new perspective for me. Form first, this poem is written in quatrains with an alternating rhyme scheme (rhyme scheme similar to Byron), and still the technique.  There's something separate and off in the poem. Let me write down what I first thought about the poem: "Summary time!  If stanza 3 was put in place in stanza 1 -- I think the poem would be less of a definition of beauty but how beauty is defined." Although I don't agree with past me, I do see the point.  If I looked at this poem as a definition poem (title being the word to be def...

Original poem reprinted online here:  "Soldierization" by Jane Satterfield Originally read: January 13, 2013 (hole punched the date :-/ ) More information about the Poet:  Jane Satterfield What's the difference between prose and poetry?  Hell that I know?  This is just a guess though. The difference between Prose and Poetry is expectation.  The automatic response when reading something in prose is information -- whether it be an article detailing something, or a finding out the plot of a story -- prose has that long tradition of a useful tool for information. Can you imagine a poem constricted to information like an article?  Meh, maybe, just not there yet.  Poetry plays more on a language level (or at least has more leeway).  And although sound accounts for some the distinction, this poem distinct itself through does other poetic techniques. So I paused after writing the last sentence.  I wanted to be specific about the poetry techniques th...

Original poem reprinted online here: Analysis of "Ministry Today" by Steve Davenport Originally read: January 5, 2013 More information about the Poet: Steve Davenport                                                     His Website Here After reading this again today, I created a narrative of the speaker.  Although the poem is lyric, the tone creates character.  I've been thinking about tone, and I ask myself -- is tone like accents on the page?  It's not exactly transferable, but I'm thinking of this.  There's an image that pops up with a Southern drawl, maybe of a southern Louisiana gentlemen, and then from the accent (voice) I envision a person. Now, in this poem, I really start to envision a person with the rhetor...

Original poem reprinted online here:  "Glass Corona" by Brian Henry Originally read: December 19, 2012 More information about the Poet: Brian Henry "The ending  denies [?] a certain coldness to the poem -- but there's [sic] a little hiccups of motion here and there but it's hidden within the language." I think this thought (if I remember old me) from this line "as if angle could produce / what sight announces as visitor,"  I think that's what I look for in a poem that reads like a flow chart (read: poem).  I look for a sense of emotional standpoint.  Not the whole "weep for me because..." blah blah blag (I will weep for you unknown bad poem, I will) rather how the speaker feels about the subject. The way the speaker sees his subject is different than the previous poems I covered. The closest I believe is "Panoramic View" by Shanna Compton (looking back at my first analysis -- yeah still in that 15 minute mark) where the sub...

Original poem reprinted online here: "Life in a Love" by Robert Browning Originally read: December 8, 2012 More information about the Poet:  Robert Browning I'm not one for love poems, however, I wanted to reread this one (look at my notes) to figure out something.  The end is vastly different from the beginning in terms of tone.  In the beginning, I note the sequence as, "a brief sussinct [sic] conversation -- or monologue -- which kind of disavows argument.  Partly romantic...partly stalkerism [sic]"? That last word, hmm nah.  Anyways, that's how I read love poems mostly -- kind of romantic, kind of stalkerish.  It's not that the love poem is bad or anything like that -- but the poem (usually) is confined to one perspective, which usually, pines, laments, honors, worships, wants, desires.  I'm cool with reading something like that once in a while, but poems that are too lost in the moment are lost within themselves -- there's no room for a read...