DDCPoetry

Poem found here:   "Birds and Bees" by Faith Shearin More about the Poet:  Faith Shearin I love the awkwardness of preparing for a tough conversation since most of the conversation plays out in the head -- the internal monologue where the monologue can be as dramatic and hyperbolic as possible, but this internal struggle comes from an awkward question, "When my daughter starts asking I realize / I don't know which, if any, birds / have penises."  Ducks do by the way. But that's not the point.  The question is the trigger -- the talk, the birds and the bees, literally here needs to be prepared for, " I can't picture how swans / do it.  I"m even confused about bees: that fat queen and her neurotic workers."  Note, how the speaker is thinking literally about using the idomatic animals as metaphors to discuss about sex in which the metaphors spirals out of the control, "I'm worried  / by turtles and snakes: their parts hidden in place...

Poem Found Here:   "Posthumous" by Jean Nordhaus More about the poet: Jean Nordhaus The first thing I wrote about this poem was, "humorous intro."  After rereading the poem a couple of times, I feel the strength of the poem is how humor is used: from the sarcastic, to the ironic, to the hyperbolic and beyond.  Yet, there's a tinge of sadness to the lines in which humor flits in and out of. For example, "Would it surprise you to learn / that years beyond your longest winter / you still get letters from your bank,"  I find this funny.  I think it's the delivery with the first line.  I feel that the tone would be different if the first line was, "you still get letters from your bank."  What makes this humorous to me is the emotion, "surprise" playing with the idea of loss. So the poem starts out with the image of letters still being addressed to the deceased.  The awkward syntax also adds to the humor, "Though it's been a ...

Poem found here: "The Boarder" by Louis Simpson Notes about the poet: Louis Simpson There's two different versions of this poem, one that has adjustments on every other line, and then this one where it's left adjusted.  In either case, the inequity in lines seems purposeful. But first, let there be light.  When? "The time is after dinner."  The first quatrain and the first half of the second quatrain focuses on different types of light: cigarette glow, TV sets, and the moon.  All these things illuminate, and add to an ambiance of a noisy romance "Glasses begin to tinkle."  Then there's a change in the second half of the second quatrain, "love keeps her appointments--"  The dashes, to me, indicate a change.  Why?  It feels so different than the rest of the poem.  If we look at the punctuation in the first stanza there are semi-colons which brings the individual images together for cohesiveness sake, and the dash, where it only appears ...

A short narrative poem. However, this poem made me wonder about the difference between what the mind wants and what the body is willing to do.  The poem is a memory set up in the first line, "Last night when my work was done."  In my notes I wonder what "work" means in this context.  Is the work something different or something the same -- or maybe a little of both. "And my estranged hands / Were becoming mutually interested / In such forgotten things as pulses"  There's a grim sense in these lines -- a distance in which is defined by the language of "estranged" then turning "mutually interested.  The "pulses" image has a weird positive and negative connotation for me.  The comparison is a simile to "forgotten things", so there's a feeling of a second wind, a pulse that's interesting, but there's also a hidden history here of why are pulses forgotten.  Good reasons?  Bad reasons? The last four lines encaps...

What struck me the most was the title.  How paradoxical the language is of "Late Summer" and "First Day."  What the title does for me is set up a comparative interest that revolves around time -- or rather timing. The sun has burnt through That which resembled a mask was just itself: From the construction, it's not the sun that is the mask, but the what the sun burnt through.  For me the lines is a play on what to imagine because of the "that."  What does "that" refer to if it is not the sun?  "There is nothing / between the light and its source."  From the next two lines, there's an ephemeral moment that expands the discussion to what it means to illuminate -- be present -- from a source which doesn't necessarily has to be present to illuminate.  Memory is a good example of "There is nothing / between the light and its source."  How about a phantom pain, "There is nothing / between the light and its source....