It should not come as a surprise to many in the Post 45 class that I was initially not a fan of the “language poets”. I prefer my poetry to look and sound and act like poetry. I struggle to make sense of poems that look like random words squished into or spread out over […]
Dan Disney says in his article, “‘Let Me In!’ Opacity and Illumination in an Age of Technological Reproduction,” that while lyric poetry serves as an “illuminating gesture towards the real,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems “act as a metatextual invention which problematizes all claims to linguistic transparency.” But what does this really mean? Metatextual is defined as a […]
Did he talk to you Did you she what she saw I do the talking My words formed by turns and curves The lion spoke It spoke to me As the dog barked The shadowy dog barked Did you hear the juggler Did you hear the embarrassed juggler Is she in the portrait Did they […]
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 […]
Speaking of Scales September enters softly; see my soul Is seeking new depths, taking lighter steps. Trees of myrtle give leaves to the hungry ground, Where this season’s first red and gold are found; They trace proof of blood, and rage, heroes loaned. O Muse how I hunger, o how I groan! For a heav’n: […]
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 […]
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 […]