Hannah Andrews - One of Two

I chose this poem because it was inviting. Not inviting in an "open arms" sense, but it inspired my curiosity. It seems that much modern poetry is intentionally elusive - one step or imaginatively removed - but One of Two provided me with a much-needed door ajar.

The poet is expressing a dual self and the conflict produced by the recognition of this polarity. She writes: "all I could picture was a second self,/me as coin tail, sure that in the moment of the split, option b sidles/off & joins all the other discards in a slick landscape, lush with/what our safe halves have given up." The duality seems to be a product of the endless possibilities (what's given up) and their conflict with the "safe [half]," what's been attained. The safe half is the realm of the established: her relationship with the individual to whom the poem is addressed, their "Savannah kitchen", and her daily role(s). To reconcile this conflict she visits her life in a dreamscape: ". . . last night, I went incognito & found myself in our Savannah/kitchen. We were cooking just the way you imagined us. There was/nowhere else you had to be: time sprawled gorgeous & the icebox/sweat pearled delicate. I don't want to tell you how I saw my own/face, as I squatted into the pantry for cake flour, eyes cast familiar,/a long look toward somewhere else." Through this description we (and the poet) come to reckon the conflict. She visits her own (safe) life unseen. The addressee has nowhere to be, time is theirs, the kitchen is theirs, living up to its urbane utility, and then she captures her own eyes. "eyes cast familiar,/a long look toward somewhere else." - she discovers her own eyes searching. Searching for something else. She is incomplete and the "safe" life/self doesn't amount to what was promised. Her eyes unconsciously search, longing for this unity, for this satisfaction, but they find it not in the symbolic pantry, not to be satisfied by comforts and cake flour.

hope that's cohesive :)

Knit by Julie Doxsee

I enjoyed reading this poem. It is a very short poem but is also confusing to me because of where she chose her line breaks. I feel that the second half of the poem (starting after the only period) is really where the poem begins. I interpreted the poem as tripping on opium with the reference to poppy juice. What confused me about the poem was how she started talking about tripping using lines like "My eye painted/church tops where/the day before/ was sky..." and ended the poem talking about consuming the drug. I feel if the poet would've went in sequential order (consuming the drug then her trip) I would've been able to understand the poem a little more. Overall I like the voice of the poem. The lack of punctuation until the period I feel is necessary but also confusing. At first I read the complete throughout, but the second time I read it and broke it up into two different poems; one before the period and one after the period. I feel I got more out of the poem reading it as two separate poems because it allowed me time to comprehend the first part and apply it to the second part. Overall I enjoyed reading this poem along with the rest of the book.

June's hide taken off distant hedges--Karyna McGlynn

Everything about this poem confuses me. But there is an urgency in the words and rhythm to the lines, that gives me the impression the poet might feel the same way. Beginning with the first two words, "and thus," along with the title, I am aware that I am about to read an account or commentary on a happening: "June's hide taken..." What I really get though is something like a list of short, sometimes choppy, and very active yet obscure lines. McGlynn also does not use punctuation which normally allows me the freedom to read the lines how I chose; however each line is double spaced. Thus the lines stand alone and I want to pause my reading at each line break; though doing that divorces each line from the other so much that they become difficult to associate. Also when I say active I mean that nearly all of the fifteen lines has a verb in them, for example: "june but had an animal embalmed," or "wrist limp can't blow it back plum." These are some of the things that McGlynn is doing I believe to create a tension in the poem, not only from one line to another, but also between the reader and the speaker.

As a listener or reader of a poem I believe to be an account I will have an expectation of the speaker to tell me something. McGlynn however doesn't overtly tell me anything. This makes me angry. But I delight in the rhythm of the lines so much, "down into dusk dulls me in this," that I do not become disengaged from the poem. I try to dive further into it but become further lost. McGlynn uses six different pronouns (she, her, someone, me, your, I) and one proper noun (june). In prose this might not be a problem, but in such short and independent lines whatever story the speaker is trying to tell seems to get lost, or rather floats from one pronoun to another without really feeling intimate, without really relating anything. I never really know what she is talking about.

When I get to the final lines of the poem none of this mystery is worked out for me, but I finally read something that is direct, "ok / I couldn't say a damn thing about it." The speaker is telling me in plain language that she is trying to tell her own perspective of this ocurrance but that she can't. And by saying "ok" it is as if she is asking me to understand that the way she is telling the story is the only way she can tell it. McGlynn has been setting me up for this all along, but she is successful because I am unaware of it. Once I understand that the speaker herself may be as confused as I am I can reenter the poem without the feeling that I am missing something. When I do this I am allowed to float along with the story from one line to the next and simply enjoy the ride because I have understood that sometimes the story is not what is important. What is important is simply trying to tell it.

[My Tattoo] by Erin M. Bertram

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about this poem; there are some qualities about it that I really like, and a few that I am not so fond of. The poem is filled with great decriptions of the tattoo, such as "Wingspan flared feral, silent suspension / between alight & arrival, always impending, always / already there." Interestly, since the poem is completely about her tattoo, I can see a lot of similarities between this poem and another that we read earlier in the semester, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, by Wallace Stevens. Much like the Stevens poem, Bertram provides several different "ways" of looking at this tattoo, which I think is a really unique idea.

She uses a few subtle examples of alliteration in the poem, such as "silent suspension / between alight and arrival," though I think some more examples of alliteration or consonance might have made the poem sound more "energetic." To me, her form does not seem to accomplish much; she uses three-line stanzas, each broken up by a single space. There are no indented lines, or "tricky" line breaks which keep the reader alert, which I am a big fan of and would have liked to have seen in this poem. The very last line in the poem, " amid a whirl of otherwise dynamic, unchanging heat," stands by itself, which I really liked because it made me ponder an "alternative" meaning for the poem, though I can't really think of one that makes sense. Finally, I think the title of the poem, [My Tattoo], is way too obvious. Many of the words she uses in the poem, such as "forearm, ink, lines sketched, and drawn," convey the "tattoo" theme quite well, so in my opinion, the title really spoils the rest of the poem.

Neon Romance on an Ice Floe

Kismet Al-Hussaini

The first line:

Leg of dawn, blue-petaled wheel,

had me thinking opium. It was strange because the only opium pod I’ve ever seen had more of a reddish purple pedaled wheel atop a green pod (Do they come in different colors?). I thought it was interesting because I later found a reference to poppy seeds in the last sentence. I secretly suspect that I read the whole poem subconsciously, and in all actuality, had poppies on my mind before I read “blue petaled wheel. Anyways, opium would explain why the narrator loses contact with the old lover. Perhaps the lover is all strung out and doesn’t care. “Leg of dawn” sounds intrusive. I’ve heard that the sight of the sun is terrifying after an opium binge. Also, petaled is actually spelled pedaled and I wonder what the significance of this could be.

I’m not quite sure of the real meaning behind this poem, but I do know that it made me feel apathetic. In the title, ice floe refers to a piece of ice under six miles at its greatest dimension. This sets up a slow drifting motion in my mind. That, combined with the cold and “poppy” images makes me stare at the “steeple where sparrows scatter into formation”, like someone who witnesses the apocalypse, shrugs his shoulders, and moves on.

NEW QUESTIONS: Please answer the following in the comments field.

1. What responsibility do you, the writer, have to the character(s), subjects, objects, situations (etc.) you might inhabit? Do you impose your vocabulary upon them or try to speak in theirs? Which is more honest? Which is better writing?


2. What are you angry about? Who, specifically, are you angry at?


3. What do you consider to be avant-garde art in this century? What does it pit itself against?


Feel free to be as open-ended, speculative and investigative as you want--or need--to be in your responses

PLEASE ANSWER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS, AS POSED IN CLASS

Re: Jessica's poem, "We Are"

1. Does the form of this poem create a wall between reader and poet, and if so what type of wall and why?

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Re: our relationships to poems, in which "it" is a poem. [Please answer in the first person]

2. Who am I to say it should be changed?


post your responses as a comment