Archive | Close Reading

A Hybrid Ars Poetica: Levertov’s Musicality Meets Nelson’s Interiority  Nelson offers in her conclusion to “Confessional Poetry” a lens through which one should examine the poets who belong to the school: Withdrawing into privacy to conduct a conversation with oneself is one of the most powerful images of autonomy that we have. The freedom of […]

      Anne Sexton’s The Room of my Life     Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was a profoundly accomplished poet who was categorized as a part of the Confessional Poets, who wrote raw revelations about topics thought to be private or unspeakable. Her poetry reflects perhaps, her tumultuous mental health, but certainly her perception of […]

TW: Abuse. Suicide ideation/attempt. I keep saying that I’m not a poet, and that I struggle with understanding poetry, then we get to Sylvia Plath and I remember the things that I’ve always enjoyed about poetry. It’s not that “Daddy” is any easier to understand than many of the other poems we’ve read. Still, somehow […]

I enjoyed reading the poems of the New York School this week, particularly the handful we were assigned by Kenneth Koch. Initially I was intrigued because of the setting – I am from New York and found it funny to read the bios about the poets who were writing/living/visiting the places I grew up in […]

 The title of John Asberry’s poem seems to pose both a question and a statement. The reader is caught by the idea that there is only one thing that can be done or the question of what that one thing is. When we are stuck in emergency situations, we often question the one thing that […]

  The Problem of anxiety, as posed and described by John Ashbery in his thus-titled poem is not that anxiety does not stop you from living rather, it colors your life in ways that make living harder, bleaker, duller, hungrier even. There is an accurate sense of timelessness to anxiety that Ashbery captures within the […]

John Ashbery’s “The Problem of Anxiety” is an emotional poem that intertwines themes of depression and aging. The poem is short and seemingly straightforward. However, there are many contradictions within Ashbery’s poem that allude to the narrator’s uneasy and distorted state of mind. I want to start by analyzing the poem’s tone. Throughout the entire […]

Reading Charles Olson’s “Maximus, to Himself” (1960) in isolation from the collected The Maximus Poems struck me with a particularly uncanny feeling given the poem’s repeated fascination with estrangement and the complicated status of the individual.  The poem is predominantly declarative, even in its reflective manner, which I believe creates a sense of authority in […]

Upon reading Denise Levertov’s “Life at War,” I found myself at war with how I should feel. It was as though each stanza intentionally brought me to a different emotion, leaving me as the reader unsure of how Levertov wanted me to feel collectively.   This poem has many moments of joy and beauty. In […]