Archive | Close Reading

This poem feels impersonal at first, simply describing the girl and making visual connections to both the girl and the apples, yet when you move toward the end, Salter seems to paint the apple and the actions of peeling and prepping the apples as more. She relates the deconstruction of said apples to the “…spiral/ […]

All things must come to an end. Years come to a close, and seasons change as life moves on and continues forward.  Richard Wilbur’s poem, Year’s End, focuses on the end of a season as life moves on and continues.  The narrator examines his surroundings and discusses how life, ideas, and moments often end with […]

TW: Depiction of infant mortality In “On Your Twenty-first Birthday“, Joan Austin Geier formulates a formalist poem that is heartbreaking in its content. While examining this piece, I enjoyed the formalism even through a topic that is so tragic. As I have often stated though, as freethinking and progressive as I may be in many […]

Close Reading–Summer Storm Dana Gioia’s Summer Storm, published in 2001, is a poem about two people who met at a wedding and connected briefly on a patio during a storm, but never spoke again. The connection impacted the narrator so deeply that despite twenty years having passed, the memory of the connection still lingers loudly […]

This week I felt very inspired by “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” by Adrienne Rich. The poem is short and sweet yet encompasses so many ideas and feelings within its three stanzas. I want to start by analyzing the word choices Rich uses. Her word choice draws out contrasting characteristics between the fragile Aunt Jennifer and her […]

Sonia uses diction very purposefully throughout the poem “blk / rhetoric.” She creates a poem that is based on “the Black condition as I see it” (66). Using her preface of the poems and pairing that with how she leaves out letters in black, using the abbreviation for this every time she references the word […]

Carolyn Rodger’s How I Got Ovah fuses projective poetics with the Black Arts Movement aesthetics. Charles Olson, in his manifesto Projective Verse,  argues that, in poetry, there is no need for an appeal to the senses because the reader should be propelled by the energy of the breath, which is governed by syllables and lines. […]

The poems of the Black Arts Movement seem to be a stark contrast from last week’s confessional poetry. More specific and based on personal experiences during a certain time period, I found these poems to be more grounded or “concrete”. I decided to do a close reading of one of Gwendolyn Brooks poems, choosing “We […]

I fear Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Boy Died in My Alley,” written in 1975, could’ve been written yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. And I pray not tomorrow. Brooks’ poem aims to address the epidemic of African American boys dying at the hands of gun violence. The shooter is not included […]

Something I most enjoy while reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry is the clear visual depictions of very abstract and intangible things such as grief, disassociation, and the overwhelming nature of thoughts. That being said, Plath does not write so clearly as to rid the work of all mystique or intrigue. “Elm” is a good example of […]