The Language of the Brag

This poem really stood out to me from all the rest. The author has such a strong and powerful tone ham draws you in and makes you pay attention. The very first sentence refers throwing a knife, which really caught my attention. Each line she writes captures my attention more, as her words become more aggressive. I think my biggest surprise was her casual use of sexual language, using a vibrating cock as a metaphor, and later using the knife reference again saying she was stabbed in her inner sex. What's so interesting to me, is that she speaks so fiercely about the women's body, that you feel she's almost competing against the constant objectivity against the woman's body. You can tell she speaks from experience, she's watched the boys play and all she wants is to show them that she has suffered as a woman and is better for it. She's stronger, prouder and for that reason has a right to brag. I particularly love her reference to Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, in what I can only imagine be an implication that as women give birth to live, they have given birth to poetry. And as they then have the right to brag about poetry, she has the right to brag about new life. What is most outstanding to me though is her use of imagery. Lines like, "straight posture and quick electric muscles" and "my huge breasts oozing mucus" are so powerful to how she's portraying the female body, and leave you with such a picture that she is describing. She spends this poem exploring the form of the Heroin, and she is so successful at making you feel like she does have every last right to brag and boast with everyone else.

The Pardon

"The Pardon" by Richard Wilbur is a beautiful poem about the loss of innocence and acceptance of reality. What intrigued me about this poem is how Wilbur used an example of a man remembering finding his dog dead at age 10, and slowly coming to accept not only death but that death is not an endpoint. 

The poem is a 24 line poem with 6 stanzas of 4 lines each. It seems to follow the rhyme scheme "abbacddc." The first three lines of the poem setup what the theme of the poem will be; death. He uses vivid imagery to describe how his dog had been dead for 5 days laying "...in a clump of pine/And a jungle of grass and honeysuckle vine." I like how in the next stanza Wilbur uses these images of "honeysuckle vine" to describe the different smells of that memory. These smells of remind the reader of life and death with sharp adjectives. "To sniff the heavy honeysuckle-smell/Twined with another heavy odor heavier still/And hear the flies' intolerable buzz." Also, by repeating the word using a form of heavy three times, the reader gets the sense the man in the poem is not quite over the loss of his dog, or still even something more, the acceptance of death.

Halfway through the poem, the man has a dream in which he sees his dog and it comes back to haunt him. In the end, he apologizes to Death and asks him for a pardon. 

While beautiful as this poem is, I still have many questions about it. For example, to me a dog is a powerful thing to lose but I think if he were to find a dead body it would have been more powerful. Why not go that route? Also, why use this rhyme scheme? To me, it takes away from the heaviness that is the subject of death. It also makes the flow of the reading of it a little chunky. All in all, Richard Wilbur wrote a poem that is truly beautiful.

Dream Song 14

John Berryman works to create tension between and throughout his lines using different techniques such as enjambment, frequent interruptions, and condensing his syntax. Many of the lines in this poem are end-stopped, even punctuated with a period, making one or even two complete sentences fill up a single line. The first line "Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so." chops up this line into short, direct statements that set the tone for the entire poem. Berryman increases the tension by keeping the sentences within his poem fairly short and heavily punctuated. In two lines, "After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,/ we ourselves flash and yearn," the reader is made to feel as though they are in a car that keeps pressing the gas then hitting the breaks, keeping the reader on their toes as to what might come next. An even more extreme interruption occurs when "(repeatedly)" is used in line 5; by putting this word in parenthesis rather than just setting it off with commas, reader is brought to an even more abrupt halt that increases the tension. Another tactic that Berryman uses to create tension is ending a stanza on the word "no" with no punctuation and  continuing the same thought in the next stanza. This enjambment makes the reader feel uneasy and places a heavy emphasis on that word no, creating more tension. One of my favorite Berryman techniques however, is his use of condensed syntax. In the last line of the poem, "behind: me, wag", Berryman is eliminating the words that don't need to be said. In poetry, your words must be chosen a lot more carefully and Berryman is very careful about his words at all times. The poem ends with the dog's tail leaving behind the subject of the poem and "wag". I don't have an answer for what exactly was meant by "wag", but I think that's the point. By eliminating all other words that might help explain the word wag, the reader is left with it dangling at the end of "me", at the end of the poem. It provides even more tension for the poem, but in a way, a strange release. The word wag is so playful and simple that it almost seems to further the tension and break it all at the same time.

"The Beatles' First LP"

     I chose the poem "Annus Mirabilis" by Philip Larkin. The speaker opens the poem by stating when "sexual intercourse" really started to not become a topic of shame. It opened with a hook. The voice of the poem is not serious but sort of a whimsical and nostalgic review of when exactly the best years were. It is whimsical because when referring to the time in which he believed sex was explored, he referenced it as the time "Between the end of the Chatterly ban/And the Beatles' first LP." It isn't said outright but it is implied that the speaker also lost his virginity that year. The speaker cracks a small joke about how it "was rather late" for him when sex became a non shameful thing and reiterates it in the last stanza again with "Though just too late for me." 
     It is the most happiest in the year 1963 and we know that because he says it himself in the fourth and final stanza. The speaker states "So life was never better than/ In nineteen sixty-three." It is a very straight forward poem. I enjoyed it for the simplicity and the matter-of-fact voice the speaker had. It was also funny how the best year of his life was when he participated in "sexual intercourse" and how "everyone felt the same."
     There was a moment in the second stanza where the poem took a more serious note. The speaker said the was a shame since he was sixteen that "spread to everything" because it was a shame inducing topic. The shame could stem from being a virgin or the fact that sex was not talked about and was seen as taboo.  If it was because of him being a virgin, the line of shame highlights that there is this social stigma that boys can not be virgins and had to loose their virginities early or it's shameful. The writer put that little piece of truth subtly, but then right after in the next stanza shifted tones to a more positive one. He talked about how that year was the year it changed. The speaker compared life to being rich and a game you couldn't lose. That is how the speaker felt in nineteen sixty-three when he had sex. It was the dawn of the sixties and the Beatles' career was just starting. 

To a Waterfowl

I'm always drawn to humor in writing and that's why I enjoyed reading Donald Hall's "To a Waterfowl" very much.  The first line was what hooked me in just because of the absurdity of the image "with hats like the rear ends of pink ducks".  Having a hook is especially important in poetry because its condensed nature doesn't allow the poet to build up to one; the reader must be caught within the first few syllables.  Hall's poem is interspersed with other ridiculous images to add to the humor: "they spank their hands, they smile like Jell-O", "watching Godzilla Suck Mt. Fuji, / addressing my poems, feeling superior", "with hints that I am a sexual Thomas Alva Edison".  He also shows humor in his rapid switching of tone such as in the line "returned to the l'eternel retour of the Holiday Inn / naked, lying on the bed".
Hall intentionally leaves most formal styles at the door.  He pokes fun at common poetry techniques, "crooning, 'High on thy thigh I cry, Hi!' -- and so forth", and common poetry rules, "'My goodness, Mr. Hall, / but you certainly do have an imagination, huh?' / 'Thank you, indeed,' I say; 'it brings in the bacon.'" in order to prove his point about the high intellectual expectation most people have about poets.  The latter quote in particular is very hilarious considering how sinful it is to use tired, old saying in poetry.  He also makes the poem more informal by giving it conversational tone and using lots of dialogue.  The kicker, or what Kizer called "The Counter-Turn", is in the fifth stanza, when Hall uses an unflattering depiction of himself to show the readers that he's more ordinary than extraordinary.  He then turns to us, the readers, who are born from this tradition of supposed high class as shown in the lines "You, in the bluejeans, / laughing at your mother who wears hats, and at your father / who rides airplanes with a briefcase watching his grammar?", and accuses us of being just like the people that we thought were humorous.  He mocks us in his last line.
Hall shows his satire like a wet slap to the face and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

Dream Song 14 ~ John Berryman

My favorite poem from this chapter is "Dream Song 14" by John Berryman. I loved the simplicity of the poem for the most part. Berryman uses very basic literary devices to just portray his boredom with his life. Berryman used personification in the first stanza, where he gives the sky the ability to flash and the sea the ability to yearn. The second literary device that Berryman uses is allusion, especially when he talks about Achilles as he directly referring Achilles to the greatest Greek warrior in the Trojan war, and the hero of Homer's Iliad. I found this poem to be very unique because Berryman organizes the tone of the poem to be very frustrated and dissatisfactory with his own life. Furthermore the poet in the poem totally inadequates the very flashy life that everyone is leading in the society and chooses to isolate himself from this ordinary life by portraying all its deficiencies. My favorite part of this poem is when the poet's mother says that her son has "no inner resources" represents the way of thinking I just mentioned above. The poet finds life very boring, actually he finds almost everything boing, as I think maybe because in the back of his mind he believes that everybody is leading the very same lives without having any uniqueness to it. The poet even finds his environment to be boring such as tranquil hills. I also found the rhyme scheme of this poem to be very interesting, especially as the poem is composed with three stanzas the long and short lines have alternative pattens which goes like: A, A, B, A, A, B which is writing a sonnet in a very short space condition. I also loved how Berryman used keen adjectives and verbs to portray the emotional potency in the poem. Berryman uses various ways to express his standpoint on the people who lives a very flashy and over-examined life, and demonstrates his exasperation to support his suicide. 

Stillborn

Stillborn by Slyvia Plath

            I like the poem “Stillborn” by Slyvia Plath because Plath is able to take something so disturbing like miscarriages and turn it into a beautiful dark poem. Plath makes it very easy to relate to the struggles a mother faces when she is told about a stillborn baby taking the reader step by step through the process. However Plath does this by comparing her own poetry to a stillborn baby. Plath in known to have had experienced miscarriages in her lifetime before however, her main concern is her poetry heightening the darkness of the poem.

            The phrase “they bulged with concentration” is a way Plath is able to use personification of stillborn babies to reference her poems that attempted to be well and ended up being unsuccessful. She “cannot understand what happened to them!” and why they were unsuccessful. She then goes on to use alliteration in the line “smile and smile and smile and smile at me” in order to increase the feel of humiliation that Plath receives for her on poetry – they smile at her in a somewhat mocking way. 

“There lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start” – in this statement Plath is referring back to her poems meaning that the lungs will fill, she will begin writing the poem but the heart, the true meaning and conclusion to the poem just won’t start. Then Plath goes onto crudely describing the poems she writes to have a “fishy air” which is just Plath’s way of dehumanizing the stillborn baby.

My favorite thing about the poem is how Plath decides to end the poem, “they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her”.  This sentence goes back to how Plath feels her poetry mocks her. The reader is able to easily sympathize for Plath because she makes it seem as if the poetry is teasing her in some way, along with the stillborn baby.