Week 5 - Two Poems

Li-Young Lee's "The Gift" relies heavily on rhetoric and imagery. The poem begins with rhetoric that reminds us of the tone in which one speaks to a child when putting him to sleep, telling him a story, helping him say his prayers. The rhetoric of the final stanza alludes to the sentiments of the first, where the child fears he will die of this splinter. However, this echo is reduced with the final sentiment of a kiss from child to father. The use of imagery in the poem is both literal and figurative. In the second stanza, the lines alternate from literal to figurative: "And I recall his hands / two measures of tenderness / he laid against my face, / the flames of discipline / he raised above my head" (9-13). Two hands, laid against my face, and raised above my head are literal, while equating them to two measures of tenderness and flames of discipline bring in metaphor. I think where the poem works best for me is in the imagery, particularly lines like "silver tear, tiny flame" (17). They are simple and tangible, but lovely, just like the act that is being described in the poem.

Philip Levine's "You Can Have It" melds all elements. There are aspects of diction that strike me, particularly the colloquial "Am I gonna make it?" (16). The narrative quality of the poem applies a heavily weighted rhetorical element. The imagery is particularly strong, however. I think the repetition of moon in the second stanza is a little lazy, personally, but hands yellowed and cracked, gasping for breath, chute its silvery blocks, bright grass between cracks dying... It are these aspects of the poem that really have a lasting affect for me, as opposed to the elements of diction and rhetoric, no matter how well-executed or strong they may be.

Poem 1 - 2nd Draft

Bobby told me about this guy he knew who's now married but when he knew him he was living in a water tower and this guy he used to smoke crack with let him live there and so he moved into this converted-water-tower-studio up Soda Springs Road and him and this guy and some other people would smoke crack together.

Bobby said this guy would climb up the ladder and crawl through his floor and find himself in this giant cylinder with riveted walls and echos.

There were no windows, no corners.

Bobby said something about this guy's record collection and somewhere in there the words "mellow tone in" were strung together and I remember laughing and Bobby laughed along just because he liked that he had made me laugh.

And we let the melatonin out and breathed the scotch broom in and I tasted the pine needles and the blackberry leaves and when the smoke had left I could also taste dandelions and madrone and my throat felt sore and everything smelt like mold and burnt sage. But stars reached out towards each other above us and the refracted light from my fucked up vision connected the dots and I really saw Orion's belt, not as projected upon the sky by me or someone else, but by the stars themselves, reaching for each other with spider thread.

Week 4 - Yusef Komunyakaa "Tu Do Street"

Yusef Komunyakaa's "Tu Do Street" is a poem that relies heavily on rhetoric and imagery, with the diction supplying a clear narrative voice while maintaining a non-in-you-face approach. The poem opens with several words that imply separateness (divides, lines in the dust, pushes) setting the tone and theme of the poem in place. There are several instances of beautiful imagery, particularly "membrane / of mist & smoke" (4-5), "bar girls / fade like tropical birds" (8-9), "I look / for a softness behind these voices / wounded by their beauty & war" (20-22), and "these rooms / run into each other like tunnels / leading to the underworld" (32-34). I love these last lines of the poem. There's the small (rooms) connected by a larger (tunnels) that leads to the ultimate (underworld). The fact that the poem opens with separation and closes with negative togetherness is compelling. These strengths are related to rhetoric, whereas each of the quoted sections listed above relate to imagery. Diction comes in to play with the inclusion of scene specific words, such as mama-san, psychedelic jukebox, and Dak To & Khe Sanh. All of these colloquial terms incorporated seamlessly and without explanation into the poem scream diction to me. I think I am correct here...

Week 3 - I Go Back to May 1937

Immediately when I started reading this poem I said to myself, "I know this... Is this...? Wait let me see, is there a part about sword-tips? Yep, this is the poem recited in Into The Wild!" So, anyway, I know this poem, but never took the time to find out who wrote it. The context that the movie put it in allowed me to instantly understand the theme of childhood victimization brought on by the decisions and actions of parents. It's interesting how seamlessly the inclusion of this poem in the film was made. I don't think I even stopped to ask whether it was written by someone other than Chris McCandless. The specific images of bricks, gates, books all speak to this universal collegiate image. However, the poet makes them her own with these images of plates of blood and sword-tips. Originally I viewed the tone of this poem as incredibly negative and angry. The lines:

you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die.

all seem like angry projections the child is placing on the parents brought about by her negative experiences as a child. However, when I heard Olds recite the poem herself, a more sorrowful tone took shape for me. The repetition of "I want" was really brought to the forefront and I began to view this poem as a melancholy attempt to rectify the past, to try to halt the heartbreak before it begins. Then it is brought around to her own mortality. But with the final line this poem reveals to me the acceptance of what's done is done and although it was awful, it's because of the decisions and actions of her parents and the negative aspects of her childhood that allowed her to write this poem.

Week 1 - Dylan, Ginsberg, Komunyakaa

I am a huge Bob Dylan fan. Much of the time my love for him is connected to his delivery and the musical aspects of his songs, but certainly the lyrics are imperative to my appreciation of him. This particular song is an interesting one. I would like to focus on it as a performance piece and not simply words on a page, especially given that we're talking about a musician here. The tone in which he sings and the softness of the music adds a lot to this "poem" to me. It opens with images of a hanging coupled with images of a carnival, all while softly sung. This theme of contrasting images pervades the poem and the musical tone becomes more and more sad for me. There are instances of slightly more "punch", but in general it is pure melancholy. If you simply read the lyrics, I think it can come across as a tad more sardonic than sad.

I've studied Howl many times in many classes and although I generally enjoy the poem, I didn't quite get that much out of it until we discussed it in class. We sort of hurried through it and didn't go too in depth, which is why I'm shocked that something finally clicked. But I think the matter of fact way in which Professor Soldofsky accounted for each of the images as being directly pulled from his life was incredibly helpful. Rather than feeling boggled down with trying to find abstract meaning it was boiled down to fact. Much easier to handle and much more rewarding.

My favorite lines from Yusef Komunyakaa's "Togetherness" are "a lyre & Jew's harp / sighing a forbidden oath" (5-6). The fact that lyre is a homonym for liar and that Jew's harp is, yes, an instrument, but also associated with negative connotations is incredible interesting and stylistic for me. I just love using "lyre" in this context I can;t get enough of it!

Week 2 - Loading a Bear

9/1/11 - Week 2 Playlist Response

The prose form of the paragraph serving as poem reminds me of Karen Volkman. Here's a link to a poem of hers (yeah, it's a tumblr link, so what?)

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/when+kiss+spells+contradiction

I feel like the imagery and alliteration of Volkman's poem allows the poem to really shine through the prose form, whereas Lee's poem is far less obviously poetic. However, I think both of these poems exhibit how form is malleable in poetry. The pacing of Lee's "Loading a Boar" coupled with the concentrated commentary on poetry (theme, if you will) lend themselves to the poetic aspects of the paragraph. The style reminds me of Hemmingway, but you wouldn't call Hemmingway a poet, right? You wouldn't read A Farewell to Arms and say, "Now that was an epic poem". But Lee's concision and topic are what make this poetic to me. The more I think about it, the more Hemmingway keeps coming to mind, actually. Wild boar, colloquialism, drawn out sentences and simple phrasing. Hmm...

Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

A link for one of my favorite poems (which I have also more or less
memorized, but don't go putting me on the spot or anything...)
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1404

Death Rattle

Rudy Callaghan said there would be an earthquake. The ground would quiver then tremble then break. Rudy Callaghan said the moon was too close to the earth. That the last time its orbit swayed this low, Loma Prieta could not stand the pressure. As the moon descended it drained the air from between its own glowing body and the mountain’s pined peaks. The closeness was terrifying. The mountain gave off an involuntary shiver. The slow, cyclical approach of a being governed by gravity, inconvincible, sent tremors through the earth like a realization of the uncanny, electricity flowing through nerves and bubbling up as goosebumps on chilled skin.

That’s what happened last time, said Rudy Callaghan. And that this time it would be the same. That the moon would suffocate us until the earth gave off a death rattle.

Rudy Callaghan was preparing for the catastrophe. Through waxing and waning he watched the satellite drift ever closer as he stocked up on water and alkaline batteries and canned food and can openers. When the moon was about to finally become full he drove his car to the meadow. He told me to come and I said I would. I wasn’t afraid about the waxing becoming waning, about the moment when the moon sat suspended above us, completely bathed in sunlight against the black night sky.

For me the phenomenon was not ominous. It was natural beauty with perfect symmetry, predictable and yet never monotonous. I wanted to experience the moon’s climax with Rudy Callaghan next to me. I wanted to feel overcome by her existence as I lay watching her, with him.

But Rudy Callaghan watched her with nervous anticipation as we sat there that night waiting for her to inch close enough to us and to the earth that eventually one party would crack. Either she would retreat, waning away back into the void, or the ground beneath Rudy Callaghan and me would crumble under the pressure.

I asked Rudy Callaghan why he was so afraid. Rudy Callaghan said he wasn’t afraid. I asked him why he was out there then and Rudy Callaghan told me he was waiting.

“A bee hums during ascension but then halts and hovers, never flying too high. But in its apprehension it is trapped by the spilling sap of an oak tree’s trunk as it is lured and lulled into eternal slumber, suspended and surrounded, in and by honey colored amber. This molten substance traps it as it hangs in amber glass, pockets of air speckling the solid mass like pollen floating through beams of spring light, dust motes multiplying. This bee then hangs within the pocket of some delicate clavicle and you hold it up to the flickering flame of a candle to inspect the insect as beeswax drips down to the ground.”

This is what Rudy Callaghan told me as he looked up at the moon, done waxing, now waning, but still hovering above us.

I asked Rudy Callaghan what he meant but he wouldn’t say anything more. Instead he grabbed my hand and dragged me towards the forest, running as if to escape. We sought the coverage of trees, perhaps to hide from the distended moon, perhaps.

I looked up at the moon through the tree branches above me. All I could see was a sheet of black lace draped across the encroaching orb like a widow feigning apprehension, but longing for closeness, hiding in plain sight behind a veil of sentiment.

As we felt the moon’s gaze through the tangled silhouette of boughs and twigs, Rudy Callaghan and I tangled our limbs together until we were a nest of confusion, causing the earth to quake beneath us.