I loved the poem “Together and by Ourselves” by Alex Dimitrov, specifically in the way so many different images were woven together so deftly. Reading it felt both discombobulated and coherent, but it communicated the emotions of the poem so effectively. The use of sentence fragments and how they shift between different perspectives and voices feel so much like being in someone’s brain and their experiences of remembering (as well as at times speaking to someone else), and I think that the free verse structure lends itself very well to creating that atmosphere.
I focused on “A Story About the Body” this week. I enjoyed the poem and its frequent use of commas. It made me wonder what makes something a poem specifically. The structure of this piece is different from what I’m used to for poems in the sense that it resembles a paragraph. Why is this a poem instead of just a short piece of fiction or nonfiction? Is it just how the writer identifies it? Are there different types of poems? I think the fact that it is titled based on the body, instead of “A Story about Love” is significant because what the male character describes resembles lust more closely than anything else in my opinion. If he really liked the painter, he would have liked all of her including her lack of breast tissue. It did frustrate me to read honestly, but I thought in the ending when he picked up the bowl full of dead bees with rose petals on top was kind of a good way of getting back at him for the way he might have made the woman feel earlier on in the poem, so that’s why I liked reading it.
The poem I chose was “Fourth Grade Autobiography.” I thought it was a great reflection on the things a fourth grader is focused on. It also discussed the relationships with their family that they have. There were a few brilliant parts, like the end “I am careful not to touch. He is careful to smile with his whole face.”
While reading this I was already beginning to find ways to take this same structure to make my piece. One example of the structural elements I liked was a list of things they had in their yard written in short sentences. I also just loved that the author would describe things like “Midnight walks from his room to mine.” I want to challenge the way I write in this way.
The poem that stood out for me was ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ by Cameron Awkward-Rich. I found this poem beautiful specifically the line ‘Hand on my stupid heart.’ this created a message that really stood with me. I also appreciated the authors use of repetition that further solidified his message. While it was not short bursts of line much like the lyrical poetry I am used to, it was very simple to understand which can not be said for most poetry. Also while not lyrical the poem had a lot of very vivid and beautiful descriptions that allowed the work to stay with you and leave a sensory impact.
My Brother My Wound by Natalie Diaz is a complicated and striking poem filled with ripe language. I was struck by how the poet evokes the domestic sphere without every locating her characters or her narrative somewhere concrete. The poem begins with bulls in the street, creating an image of disruption, and plants them in the walls, never determining what walls or whether they are “real” to the poet. The idea of streets and buildings suggests a living space, perhaps a suburban area, but doesn’t land firmly there until the next sentence, sitting him at the table. This line is the most mundane of the poem, the most potentially “real,” and the stillest. Knowing from the title that this character is a brother, this line places us within the domestic sphere. Then, he creates a wound in his sister with a fork, a utensil instead of a knife or sword, found at that table. He creates this wound using something important to the domestic sphere, rather than his bulls or mars or the red eyes. This blends the simple “real” of the poem, that image of the brother at the table, and the metaphorical violence between the siblings. He reaches in her and turns on a lamp, again an object from the home, and releases the light within her. The lamp is destroyed after it is turned on, becoming light that is both tangible and sentient. These objects that evoke the home are depersonalized after they’ve been used — the fork becomes something holy and the lamp becomes something transcendent. It evokes the idea that the domestic sphere is invalidated by the brother. After the light is released though, she imagines it as a canary, and he responds, “Canaries really means dogs.” We are brought back into the home with this domesticated creature, rather than a free and wild bird. In the final line of the poem, he climbs inside the narrator like a window, which we can imagine is the window of this house, near the table, of those walls. Throughout the poem, neither character is able to escape the domestic sphere which is what ties them together as siblings. The reading this creates is a short story of a brother and a sister who attempt to understand the vastness within each other and to protect each other using what the know but not necessarily what frees them, the home.
James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” may be my favorite poem out of this week’s readings. The majority of the poem fosters an idyllic, relaxing tone: butterflies, distant cowbells, sunlight between pines… Then comes the very last line: “I have wasted my life.” The narrator seems profoundly miserable, to be having this thought in an otherwise overly picturesque moment, but something about this sudden, jarring plot twist is also humorous. I would never have predicted this last line, and I do laugh when I read it despite the narrator’s sad, almost pitiable situation.
I really enjoyed reading “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limón. I was initially drawn in by the title and was excited to see what the poem itself was about. Though the analogies were present throughout, my favorite part was how Limón used them to introduce ideas of female empowerment. I especially liked the lines “they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap,” and “somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power” and how they conveyed this message.
“How to Triumph Like a Girl” response:
I really enjoyed this poem because it felt accessible to read. Sometimes poetry can be a bit daunting to read because they are filled with abstract ideas, and while that can be compelling, it can sometimes be difficult to fully understand. This poem, however, seemed to break that mold. It read more like a story to me, but with the structure and line breaks of a poem. These line breaks provided emphasis to each phrase, which allowed me to focus more fully on each part of the sentence and dissect its meaning. I loved the message of this poem as well. I particularly loved the line “Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.”
Ode to Lithium #600- Shira Erlichman
Repetition can seem so gimmicky if the execution isn’t just right. If I had to point to a poem from our readings that, without a doubt in my mind, uses repetition almost perfectly, I’d have to say this one. Each set up and pay off branches out and intensifies, and because the poem complicates a very simple set up, there is a momentum that feels claustrophobic as the end approaches, until the reader actually reaches the end, which is, in my opinion, a very well calculated conclusion. The reputation also lets the poem reference itself, for example, “The side effect of it is good is it is bad. The side effect of it is bad is crossing your legs in the psychiatrist’s office, talking about side effects.” I think this just goes to show that repetition as a device is meant to be multipurpose, because if a statement or word needs to be repeated, it needs to have multiple meanings and purposes, not just semantically but within the poem itself.
Black Nikes By Harryette Mullen
There are two lines I want to talk about specifically in this poem. The first is, “Make it sparkle like a fresh toilet swirling with blue.” This line conjured an image, I’m quite familiar with, of a toilet as I pour Lysol around the bowl and watch the blue goo swirl like a whirlpool. I admire a poet who can conjure images so clearly and so quickly in an unsuspecting reader like me. The second quote follows the first, “Or only come close enough to brush a few lost souls.” I read this two ways. The first is using “brush” to describe a physical touch, a close proximity. The way I read it first though was “brush” as in toilet brush. As in to clean and scrub. This split-second interpretation was made because of the image I had just had based on the sentence prior. It added a new meaning to the read for me.
Something that struck me as I read the poem “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi was the minimal use of subject pronouns, since most of the sentences in the poem instead start directly with the verb. Although I initially read these sentences as first person, as the speaker’s own reflections and wishes, the omission of a subject pronoun creates a sense of ambiguity and informality that adds a lot of nuance to the poem. Every time I read it, I have a slightly different interpretation. It could be a singular person’s shorthand notes, akin to a diary entry, or it could stand for more of a collective sentiment, like a family’s shared mourning. Because of the unspecific “you” and the lack of subject pronouns, the poem focuses more directly on the relationship between the two parties, the missing and the missed, than either individually, though we can still gain descriptive information about them from what is given in the poem.
Ode to Lithium #600 by Shira Erlichman
Shira Erlichman’s poem “Ode to Lithium #600” really struck me with how it formatted itself. The poem itself could in a way be read as only the line “The side effect of Lithium is a poem” by choosing not to read what is in the parenthesis. The entirety of the poem within the parenthesis left me in anticipation of what the side effect mentioned at the start was and it struck me when the side effect of Lithium was what I had just read. The ending is both unexpected and inevitable and while the sentence can exist on its own without the parenthesis, then it would lose its impact. The ways in which the side effects detailed in the parenthesis become more and more abstract really captivated me, making me feel as if I was following along one’s train of thought alongside them, understanding the emotions and experience behind it. The way in which a poem is formatted can really do a lot for both its messaging and the impact it has on the reader, something which Erlichman’s prose poem really articulated for me.
I liked reading Ode to Lithium #600 by Shira Erlichman. I enjoyed how each sentence set up the next and enjoyed how the meat of the poem was fit into parenthesis. What I found most enriching was how the side effects listed went from straightforward things “not wanting to drink water” to “the side effect of a passion for waves is dream upon dream where every object is as blue as the sea. The side effect of overwhelmingly blue dreams is a girlfriend who listens.” This language made the poem lyrical while also offering a narrative of the poet’s life in relation to Lithium.
The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
I loved reading this poem. I used to be terrified about the thought of death, sometimes I would even have panic attacks when I thought about the concept of someday being plunged into an unconscious, unending darkness, so this piece was really touching. The way in which the narrative voice walks the reader, reassuringly, through the process of death, is beautiful. She even addresses concerns over death: “that which you fear, being/a soul and unable/to speak, ending abruptly,” and provides consolation by saying “I tell you I could speak again: whatever/returns from oblivion returns/to find a voice.” The descriptive imagery sprinkled throughout the piece also serves to create a softer, warmer feeling to the poem and counteract more negative, darker emotions that usually surround the concept of death, which is not an easy thing to achieve.
I loved the poem “Together and by Ourselves” by Alex Dimitrov, specifically in the way so many different images were woven together so deftly. Reading it felt both discombobulated and coherent, but it communicated the emotions of the poem so effectively. The use of sentence fragments and how they shift between different perspectives and voices feel so much like being in someone’s brain and their experiences of remembering (as well as at times speaking to someone else), and I think that the free verse structure lends itself very well to creating that atmosphere.
I focused on “A Story About the Body” this week. I enjoyed the poem and its frequent use of commas. It made me wonder what makes something a poem specifically. The structure of this piece is different from what I’m used to for poems in the sense that it resembles a paragraph. Why is this a poem instead of just a short piece of fiction or nonfiction? Is it just how the writer identifies it? Are there different types of poems? I think the fact that it is titled based on the body, instead of “A Story about Love” is significant because what the male character describes resembles lust more closely than anything else in my opinion. If he really liked the painter, he would have liked all of her including her lack of breast tissue. It did frustrate me to read honestly, but I thought in the ending when he picked up the bowl full of dead bees with rose petals on top was kind of a good way of getting back at him for the way he might have made the woman feel earlier on in the poem, so that’s why I liked reading it.
The poem I chose was “Fourth Grade Autobiography.” I thought it was a great reflection on the things a fourth grader is focused on. It also discussed the relationships with their family that they have. There were a few brilliant parts, like the end “I am careful not to touch. He is careful to smile with his whole face.”
While reading this I was already beginning to find ways to take this same structure to make my piece. One example of the structural elements I liked was a list of things they had in their yard written in short sentences. I also just loved that the author would describe things like “Midnight walks from his room to mine.” I want to challenge the way I write in this way.
The poem that stood out for me was ‘Meditations in an Emergency’ by Cameron Awkward-Rich. I found this poem beautiful specifically the line ‘Hand on my stupid heart.’ this created a message that really stood with me. I also appreciated the authors use of repetition that further solidified his message. While it was not short bursts of line much like the lyrical poetry I am used to, it was very simple to understand which can not be said for most poetry. Also while not lyrical the poem had a lot of very vivid and beautiful descriptions that allowed the work to stay with you and leave a sensory impact.
My Brother My Wound by Natalie Diaz is a complicated and striking poem filled with ripe language. I was struck by how the poet evokes the domestic sphere without every locating her characters or her narrative somewhere concrete. The poem begins with bulls in the street, creating an image of disruption, and plants them in the walls, never determining what walls or whether they are “real” to the poet. The idea of streets and buildings suggests a living space, perhaps a suburban area, but doesn’t land firmly there until the next sentence, sitting him at the table. This line is the most mundane of the poem, the most potentially “real,” and the stillest. Knowing from the title that this character is a brother, this line places us within the domestic sphere. Then, he creates a wound in his sister with a fork, a utensil instead of a knife or sword, found at that table. He creates this wound using something important to the domestic sphere, rather than his bulls or mars or the red eyes. This blends the simple “real” of the poem, that image of the brother at the table, and the metaphorical violence between the siblings. He reaches in her and turns on a lamp, again an object from the home, and releases the light within her. The lamp is destroyed after it is turned on, becoming light that is both tangible and sentient. These objects that evoke the home are depersonalized after they’ve been used — the fork becomes something holy and the lamp becomes something transcendent. It evokes the idea that the domestic sphere is invalidated by the brother. After the light is released though, she imagines it as a canary, and he responds, “Canaries really means dogs.” We are brought back into the home with this domesticated creature, rather than a free and wild bird. In the final line of the poem, he climbs inside the narrator like a window, which we can imagine is the window of this house, near the table, of those walls. Throughout the poem, neither character is able to escape the domestic sphere which is what ties them together as siblings. The reading this creates is a short story of a brother and a sister who attempt to understand the vastness within each other and to protect each other using what the know but not necessarily what frees them, the home.
James Wright’s “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” may be my favorite poem out of this week’s readings. The majority of the poem fosters an idyllic, relaxing tone: butterflies, distant cowbells, sunlight between pines… Then comes the very last line: “I have wasted my life.” The narrator seems profoundly miserable, to be having this thought in an otherwise overly picturesque moment, but something about this sudden, jarring plot twist is also humorous. I would never have predicted this last line, and I do laugh when I read it despite the narrator’s sad, almost pitiable situation.
I really enjoyed reading “How to Triumph Like a Girl” by Ada Limón. I was initially drawn in by the title and was excited to see what the poem itself was about. Though the analogies were present throughout, my favorite part was how Limón used them to introduce ideas of female empowerment. I especially liked the lines “they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour
is as fun as taking a nap,” and “somewhere inside the delicate skin of my body, there pumps an 8-pound female horse heart, giant with power” and how they conveyed this message.
“How to Triumph Like a Girl” response:
I really enjoyed this poem because it felt accessible to read. Sometimes poetry can be a bit daunting to read because they are filled with abstract ideas, and while that can be compelling, it can sometimes be difficult to fully understand. This poem, however, seemed to break that mold. It read more like a story to me, but with the structure and line breaks of a poem. These line breaks provided emphasis to each phrase, which allowed me to focus more fully on each part of the sentence and dissect its meaning. I loved the message of this poem as well. I particularly loved the line “Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.”
Ode to Lithium #600- Shira Erlichman
Repetition can seem so gimmicky if the execution isn’t just right. If I had to point to a poem from our readings that, without a doubt in my mind, uses repetition almost perfectly, I’d have to say this one. Each set up and pay off branches out and intensifies, and because the poem complicates a very simple set up, there is a momentum that feels claustrophobic as the end approaches, until the reader actually reaches the end, which is, in my opinion, a very well calculated conclusion. The reputation also lets the poem reference itself, for example, “The side effect of it is good is it is bad. The side effect of it is bad is crossing your legs in the psychiatrist’s office, talking about side effects.” I think this just goes to show that repetition as a device is meant to be multipurpose, because if a statement or word needs to be repeated, it needs to have multiple meanings and purposes, not just semantically but within the poem itself.
Black Nikes By Harryette Mullen
There are two lines I want to talk about specifically in this poem. The first is, “Make it sparkle like a fresh toilet swirling with blue.” This line conjured an image, I’m quite familiar with, of a toilet as I pour Lysol around the bowl and watch the blue goo swirl like a whirlpool. I admire a poet who can conjure images so clearly and so quickly in an unsuspecting reader like me. The second quote follows the first, “Or only come close enough to brush a few lost souls.” I read this two ways. The first is using “brush” to describe a physical touch, a close proximity. The way I read it first though was “brush” as in toilet brush. As in to clean and scrub. This split-second interpretation was made because of the image I had just had based on the sentence prior. It added a new meaning to the read for me.
Something that struck me as I read the poem “Miss you. Would like to take a walk with you” by Gabrielle Calvocoressi was the minimal use of subject pronouns, since most of the sentences in the poem instead start directly with the verb. Although I initially read these sentences as first person, as the speaker’s own reflections and wishes, the omission of a subject pronoun creates a sense of ambiguity and informality that adds a lot of nuance to the poem. Every time I read it, I have a slightly different interpretation. It could be a singular person’s shorthand notes, akin to a diary entry, or it could stand for more of a collective sentiment, like a family’s shared mourning. Because of the unspecific “you” and the lack of subject pronouns, the poem focuses more directly on the relationship between the two parties, the missing and the missed, than either individually, though we can still gain descriptive information about them from what is given in the poem.
Ode to Lithium #600 by Shira Erlichman
Shira Erlichman’s poem “Ode to Lithium #600” really struck me with how it formatted itself. The poem itself could in a way be read as only the line “The side effect of Lithium is a poem” by choosing not to read what is in the parenthesis. The entirety of the poem within the parenthesis left me in anticipation of what the side effect mentioned at the start was and it struck me when the side effect of Lithium was what I had just read. The ending is both unexpected and inevitable and while the sentence can exist on its own without the parenthesis, then it would lose its impact. The ways in which the side effects detailed in the parenthesis become more and more abstract really captivated me, making me feel as if I was following along one’s train of thought alongside them, understanding the emotions and experience behind it. The way in which a poem is formatted can really do a lot for both its messaging and the impact it has on the reader, something which Erlichman’s prose poem really articulated for me.
I liked reading Ode to Lithium #600 by Shira Erlichman. I enjoyed how each sentence set up the next and enjoyed how the meat of the poem was fit into parenthesis. What I found most enriching was how the side effects listed went from straightforward things “not wanting to drink water” to “the side effect of a passion for waves is dream upon dream where every object is as blue as the sea. The side effect of overwhelmingly blue dreams is a girlfriend who listens.” This language made the poem lyrical while also offering a narrative of the poet’s life in relation to Lithium.
The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
I loved reading this poem. I used to be terrified about the thought of death, sometimes I would even have panic attacks when I thought about the concept of someday being plunged into an unconscious, unending darkness, so this piece was really touching. The way in which the narrative voice walks the reader, reassuringly, through the process of death, is beautiful. She even addresses concerns over death: “that which you fear, being/a soul and unable/to speak, ending abruptly,” and provides consolation by saying “I tell you I could speak again: whatever/returns from oblivion returns/to find a voice.” The descriptive imagery sprinkled throughout the piece also serves to create a softer, warmer feeling to the poem and counteract more negative, darker emotions that usually surround the concept of death, which is not an easy thing to achieve.