Archive | Close Reading

When I read Lucille Clifton’s “I am accused of tending to the past” I am reminded of why we as a collective humanity read poetry. Clifton distills the elements of our human condition that transcend time—like history, reproduction, care, and the power of language and punctuates these elements with inventive brevity. To me, this poem […]

Beat Writers- Steven Willis Willis introduces this poem with “Beat Writers” as the title and dedicated for Baraka and Ginsberg. Considering that Baraka was “arguably, the most significant BAN artist/theorist and an essential figure in twentieth-century American literature,” paired with Ginsberg, who tends to be almost the father of American Contemporary Poetry, I feel as […]

I am both captivated and at times confounded by Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Facing It.” For the most part, I am able to understand and feel myself sink into the poem and can wrap myself within its stunning and stilling imagery; however, towards the end on the poem, things became a little foggy and unclear for […]

How many things could we possibly be thankful for?  Ross Gay says that there is a whole lot that we should thank others for and recognize how special the world around the reader can be.  His poem, “A Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude,” was similar to the Thanksgiving tradition of going around a table and saying […]

Based upon Berstein’s article “Artifice of Absorption” this poem is absorptive. His use of diction in the poem address the poem itself entire, saying “This line is..” or “This line has…” He does not use any direct address to the reader throughout his lines, simply only referring to the poem and ideas that can be […]

I understand where VZ was coming from when he said we would hate the language poets we’re focusing on this week. I don’t necessarily hate the writing style, but it is very disjointed and frustrating to follow compared to the structures that make up formalist poetry. However, the more I read this week the more […]

Not Plasir but Jouissance in the Language Poets Unlike the Black Mountain poets and the Black Arts Movement, the Language poets do not unite around a collective manifesto. However, in his eponymous article, Steve McCaffery explains that structuralism, a post-World War II French/Continental “ism,” informs their conceptual framework. For this reason, he further explains that […]

Close Reading of “This Line”, sort of This week’s reading and poetry really did not come into focus for me until I read Lyn Hejinian’ Against Closure. She articulated perfectly how language fills the void in a person’s mind that is the void of unknowing. We don’t know anything until we can articulate it and […]

I will admit, this week’s poems were hard for me to read. Understanding language poetry does not come easily to me because there is an erasure of concrete meanings applied to the words. However, it does heavily remind me of Gertrude Stein, whose work I have grown to love because it pushes me as a […]

The Pardon (Spoiler, my paralyzed dog recovered!) Upon my first read through of “The Pardon” by Richard Wilbur, I was both moved and agonized. Last weekend, we put our family dog to sleep. Thirteen years ago, I found my first dog under a pine tree, paralyzed from botulism. If we read these poems as self-contained […]