Trees

Trees

On a normal day,

They are normal.

Brown, rough, tall, and large,

people walk past them without

A second thought. They are normal.

But on special days,

they become special.

They rise up, turning from just trees

into Toomer’s Trees,

supporting a whole nation with

their branches.

They are robed with the finest

white linen in all of town and

rolled to perfection.

They stand tall with pride,

towering over everyone,

family and foe alike.

For they are the Toomer’s Trees,

and on special days,

They are extraordinary. 

RESPONSE FOR 8/29

RESPONSE FOR 8/29

            A common theme I saw in “Loading a Boar” by David Lee and “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds was the sense of urgency. David Lee achieved this by making his entire poem one sentence long. Without any pauses for breath or thought, the poem seems to just speed up as the reader strives to get to the end in one breath. This can be seen throughout the whole poem, but lines 1-2 show an example, “We were loading a boar, a goddam mean big sonofabitch and he jumped out of the pickup four times and tore out my stockracks and rooted me in the stomach and I…” (Lee 1-2). All the action that happens in these two lines, alongside the lack of punctuation create a sense for the reader to want to quickly finish the sentence to find the result, though in this case the poem is one sentence, so the reader keeps continuing faster and faster until the poem ends.

In “I Go Back to May 1937”, Sharon Olds creates this sense of urgency by quickly changing the tone from one of optimism to one of regret. Line 13 is where the tone really changes, when she says, “They are innocent, they would never hurt anybody. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don’t do it-” (Olds 11-14). The diction the author uses creates the image of the speaker running up to the couple, trying to prevent the something the reader only knows to be bad.

One thing I noticed all of the poems had in common was run-on sentences.  In the two poems listed above, the subject of the poem combined with the run-on sentences created a sense of urgency. But in the other two poems we read, “A Dog Has Died” by Pablo Neruda and “DNA” by Linda Bierds, the subject of the poem is much more somber and ordinary. The effect of this, at least in “A Dog Has Died”, helps to create a tone of somberness and morning for the dead dog. 

Response for 8/26

CREATIVE WRITING RESPONSE FOR 8/26

The four poems we read for our first poetry assignment demonstrated how diverse the term “poetry” is. For example, “so much depends” by William Carlos Williams is a one sentence, four stanza poem, while “Photographs of the Interiors of Dictator’s Houses” is a three and a half page poem that covers many topics. These poems also showed me that even in their diversity there is a central theme in the structure of the poems- unity between the structure and topic.

In “so much depends”, Williams uses his subject matter to structure his poem and create a cohesive atmosphere. The poem is about the simple life: farming, chickens, rain, and a red wheelbarrow. Williams uses a very simple structure for his poem by only having four stanzas, each consisting of two lines, where the second line has only one word composed of two syllables. This can be seen in any of the four stanzas, including the third one, “glazed with rain/ water” (Williams 5-6). This unity between the subject matter and the structure of the poem itself creates a consistent feeling of simplicity for the reader.

Likewise, Albert Goldbarth uses repetition to give his readers a sense of unity. He applied the concept of being the color gold to many different items, creating a common link between them. For example, in lines five through six, he says, “a chandelier the size of a planetarium dome/ is gold” , and in lines seventy nine through eighty, he says, “The slice of American cheese/ on the drive-through-window burger is also gold”. The chandelier and cheese, which generally have nothing in common, now do, in that they’re both gold. He applies this characteristic to many other things throughout the poem, which helps to create a sense of unity between all of these objects, because they all share one common trait: being gold.

I found “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins and “Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or the Mulata” by Natasha Tretheway to be my favorite two poems, because I can see myself using them as examples for my own writing. I loved how Collins first uses imagery to create a happy and carefree tone by imagining his students having fun with the poem (by doing things like waterskiing across it, listening to it, etc. (Collins, 9-11)) and then uses imagery again with personification to create a dark and hateful tone (by personifying the poem and imagining students torturing it (Collins 12-16). This poem also demonstrated how poems do not have a secret, hidden meaning. In “Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus”, I was inspired by Tretheway’s fluid rhythmic pattern. I found myself falling in love with reading the poem aloud, because while it stayed away from being sing-songy, there was a definite cadence that I was really drawn to. I noticed how little she ended a line of her poem with punctuation, something I do way too often. I think I will revisit this poem when writing my own poetry to use as an example.