This week I focused on Things I Forgot to Put on My Reminder List by Richard Jackson. I liked the tone of this piece which was what drew me to it. At first, I was a bit intimidated by the list because it was longer than the other poems I read. I thought the voice of the narrator was very real. It starts off at first with basic everyday tasks that we often forget to do like lock the door or turn off the coffee pot. I am a very forgetful person so not only can I relate to actually forgetting to do things like that, but I appreciated the reflection of what seemed like the narrator’s racing thoughts. I really liked the line, “How do we ever know what is important enough to remember?” I thought this was a very poetic way to make this differentiation between the big and the little things in life. I might forget whether or not I locked the door, but I will never forget the big things in life, like the first time I met my little brother or how I felt on my first date with my husband. We each decide for ourselves what is important enough to remember, but we also experience things that we needed to remember and can’t so this was a fun read.
This week, “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” stood out to me. I enjoyed the choice of subject, and how Neruda chose to dedicate such a sentimental and emotional ode to something as unspectacular as a dead fish in the market. The length of each line is notably short, sometimes just a singular word, bolstering the poem’s heightened drama with the slowness of its oral delivery.
I was really struck by “Atomic Pantoum” by Peter Meinke. The form of the poem, with the recurrence of lines from previous quatrains, very much accentuated my reading of the piece. Meinke describes the process of a chain reaction and one thing happening after another and snowballing until the bomb’s explosion. A pantoum requires the second and fourth lines from one quatrain to repeat as the first and third lines of the next quatrain, which creates a sense of ideas rolling and building on each other through the poem. Each quatrain is an echo of the one before it and a harbinger of the one after it. This form reminds me of a chain reaction, of causation, of momentum. The form and content of “Atomic Pantoum” play off of each other to achieve an even stronger communication of the poem’s themes.
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden:
It was really interesting to see the shift between perspectives throughout this poem, despite its short length. At the beginning, the narrator is reflecting on his father’s hard work on cold winter mornings (presumably in the past), then shifts for the next stanza and a half to the perspective of the narrator’s past self who doesn’t seem to notice or recognize his father for all this work. It ends with a few lines in which the narrator acknowledges his past ignorance. I found this theme really interesting to explore as I read through the piece. I think that the use of descriptive language throughout enhances the power of this message as well.
Dear Reader By Kim Addonizio
This is a form that speaks directly to an individual or entity. I enjoy this poet’s choice to address the reader directly, while not only focusing their attention on them. I also appreciate that the letter form allows for vulnerability from the writer while also being accessible to almost anyone who’s read a letter. It offers insight in a way that allows the reader to reflect while not overcomplicating things. This form has made me reconsider my approach to writing a poem for class.
I love how intimate and mundane “Dear Reader” by Kim Addonizio is. The epistle style lends to that, with a title that tells the reader who this poem if ‘for’. Addonizio addresses the reader with this, and yet ends with this very personal ending: “amazed that you are somewhere in the world without me, listening, trying to hold me in your hands.” It’s a really masterful way of flipping the form on its head, of showing how the letter style can reveal more about the writer than who they’re writing for or to. The poet writes about their own longing and loneliness, and then ends with a reference to the reader that suggests connection.
Prior to this week’s readings I had never engaged with pantoum poems before, but upon reading Randall Mann’s “Pantoum” it really stood out to me. It struck me significantly how he manipulated the repeated lines in such a way that imbued them with new meanings or built upon them to create a lengthy, compelling conversation on love and language. Throughout the poem no thought is left unexplored and it all comes full circle, as I take away is part of the nature of pantoum poems. Through its build up of language from boyfriend to partner to lover to roommate to friend, and having these extremes contrasting with each other and then contrasted with an overly neutral term Mann ends up creating a striking conversation on the failings of human language to express the human condition. Particularly, through focusing on this discussion through the lens of “men who fall in love with men” we end up with an enhanced discussion on language in terms of how it fails for minorities as a result of who it was created for/by. I also really found the tying in of this somewhat general discussion on love and language to the author’s personal life through his clever use of language and mention of “[his] roommate, [his] friend” that takes on a new meaning because of the way he established those words really impactful and moving. In general, Mann’s poem clearly has great thought to it, and through his repetition (and how he modifies these repeated lines structurally) a poem that is tightly knit and cohesive is created.
I found the elegy, ‘not an elegy for Mike Brown’, to be an incredible and moving piece that stuck with me even as I began to explore other poems and other structures. Simply put, I could not stop thinking about it. I want to start first by acknowledging the topic and the importance of the message that the author is writing about, the lines are kept pretty short and the length of the elegy overall isn’t very long but it is moving and gets the emotions and ideas across very clearly to the reader. The formatting and including the slashes was also a unique touch to me, I think this broke up the piece in a creative way but I also found it very necessary as it gave me the reader a second to truly digest what had just been said. Also as I have said previously, for me poetry is often very hard to decipher and I find myself constantly looking for a ‘meaning’ I was not searching for here, it was completely accessible as well as when you are discussing a topic like the one discussed here I think it is very important to not be vague or sort of general in any way. This is a point you WANT the reader to easily get and the author portrayed this incredibly.
Haiku [i count the morning] by Sonia Sanchez is really beautiful. What I love about haikus is that there can be so much meaning packed into so few words. This makes the word choice extremely important, and I think the language she uses here, ie “morning,” “stars,” “sweet,” “riverdark,” “sound,” etc. are all very deliberate and paint a beautiful, potent image. I think it can sometimes be difficult for haikus to feel complete (at least personally) since they can be so short, but this one feels very full and not at all lacking.
Hustle by Jericho Brown is a beautiful and heart wrenching ghazal. This poem feels like it was made for this form and is a great example of how form lends to the meaning of a poem. The repetition of that last line, “in prison,” creates the inevitability of this concept that Brown is emphasizing in the poem. If you know the structure, you know that the poem will end with the author’s title, and that knowledge makes the rest of the writing that much richer.
This week I focused on Things I Forgot to Put on My Reminder List by Richard Jackson. I liked the tone of this piece which was what drew me to it. At first, I was a bit intimidated by the list because it was longer than the other poems I read. I thought the voice of the narrator was very real. It starts off at first with basic everyday tasks that we often forget to do like lock the door or turn off the coffee pot. I am a very forgetful person so not only can I relate to actually forgetting to do things like that, but I appreciated the reflection of what seemed like the narrator’s racing thoughts. I really liked the line, “How do we ever know what is important enough to remember?” I thought this was a very poetic way to make this differentiation between the big and the little things in life. I might forget whether or not I locked the door, but I will never forget the big things in life, like the first time I met my little brother or how I felt on my first date with my husband. We each decide for ourselves what is important enough to remember, but we also experience things that we needed to remember and can’t so this was a fun read.
This week, “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” stood out to me. I enjoyed the choice of subject, and how Neruda chose to dedicate such a sentimental and emotional ode to something as unspectacular as a dead fish in the market. The length of each line is notably short, sometimes just a singular word, bolstering the poem’s heightened drama with the slowness of its oral delivery.
I was really struck by “Atomic Pantoum” by Peter Meinke. The form of the poem, with the recurrence of lines from previous quatrains, very much accentuated my reading of the piece. Meinke describes the process of a chain reaction and one thing happening after another and snowballing until the bomb’s explosion. A pantoum requires the second and fourth lines from one quatrain to repeat as the first and third lines of the next quatrain, which creates a sense of ideas rolling and building on each other through the poem. Each quatrain is an echo of the one before it and a harbinger of the one after it. This form reminds me of a chain reaction, of causation, of momentum. The form and content of “Atomic Pantoum” play off of each other to achieve an even stronger communication of the poem’s themes.
“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden:
It was really interesting to see the shift between perspectives throughout this poem, despite its short length. At the beginning, the narrator is reflecting on his father’s hard work on cold winter mornings (presumably in the past), then shifts for the next stanza and a half to the perspective of the narrator’s past self who doesn’t seem to notice or recognize his father for all this work. It ends with a few lines in which the narrator acknowledges his past ignorance. I found this theme really interesting to explore as I read through the piece. I think that the use of descriptive language throughout enhances the power of this message as well.
Dear Reader By Kim Addonizio
This is a form that speaks directly to an individual or entity. I enjoy this poet’s choice to address the reader directly, while not only focusing their attention on them. I also appreciate that the letter form allows for vulnerability from the writer while also being accessible to almost anyone who’s read a letter. It offers insight in a way that allows the reader to reflect while not overcomplicating things. This form has made me reconsider my approach to writing a poem for class.
I love how intimate and mundane “Dear Reader” by Kim Addonizio is. The epistle style lends to that, with a title that tells the reader who this poem if ‘for’. Addonizio addresses the reader with this, and yet ends with this very personal ending: “amazed that you are somewhere in the world without me, listening, trying to hold me in your hands.” It’s a really masterful way of flipping the form on its head, of showing how the letter style can reveal more about the writer than who they’re writing for or to. The poet writes about their own longing and loneliness, and then ends with a reference to the reader that suggests connection.
Prior to this week’s readings I had never engaged with pantoum poems before, but upon reading Randall Mann’s “Pantoum” it really stood out to me. It struck me significantly how he manipulated the repeated lines in such a way that imbued them with new meanings or built upon them to create a lengthy, compelling conversation on love and language. Throughout the poem no thought is left unexplored and it all comes full circle, as I take away is part of the nature of pantoum poems. Through its build up of language from boyfriend to partner to lover to roommate to friend, and having these extremes contrasting with each other and then contrasted with an overly neutral term Mann ends up creating a striking conversation on the failings of human language to express the human condition. Particularly, through focusing on this discussion through the lens of “men who fall in love with men” we end up with an enhanced discussion on language in terms of how it fails for minorities as a result of who it was created for/by. I also really found the tying in of this somewhat general discussion on love and language to the author’s personal life through his clever use of language and mention of “[his] roommate, [his] friend” that takes on a new meaning because of the way he established those words really impactful and moving. In general, Mann’s poem clearly has great thought to it, and through his repetition (and how he modifies these repeated lines structurally) a poem that is tightly knit and cohesive is created.
I found the elegy, ‘not an elegy for Mike Brown’, to be an incredible and moving piece that stuck with me even as I began to explore other poems and other structures. Simply put, I could not stop thinking about it. I want to start first by acknowledging the topic and the importance of the message that the author is writing about, the lines are kept pretty short and the length of the elegy overall isn’t very long but it is moving and gets the emotions and ideas across very clearly to the reader. The formatting and including the slashes was also a unique touch to me, I think this broke up the piece in a creative way but I also found it very necessary as it gave me the reader a second to truly digest what had just been said. Also as I have said previously, for me poetry is often very hard to decipher and I find myself constantly looking for a ‘meaning’ I was not searching for here, it was completely accessible as well as when you are discussing a topic like the one discussed here I think it is very important to not be vague or sort of general in any way. This is a point you WANT the reader to easily get and the author portrayed this incredibly.
Haiku [i count the morning] by Sonia Sanchez is really beautiful. What I love about haikus is that there can be so much meaning packed into so few words. This makes the word choice extremely important, and I think the language she uses here, ie “morning,” “stars,” “sweet,” “riverdark,” “sound,” etc. are all very deliberate and paint a beautiful, potent image. I think it can sometimes be difficult for haikus to feel complete (at least personally) since they can be so short, but this one feels very full and not at all lacking.
Hustle by Jericho Brown is a beautiful and heart wrenching ghazal. This poem feels like it was made for this form and is a great example of how form lends to the meaning of a poem. The repetition of that last line, “in prison,” creates the inevitability of this concept that Brown is emphasizing in the poem. If you know the structure, you know that the poem will end with the author’s title, and that knowledge makes the rest of the writing that much richer.