Robert Francis

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.

This poem reminds me of how I used to view poets when they are composing their pieces. I used to think they purposely made it tricky and difficult to find the meaning. Now, I feel more comfortable with approaching a poem and working through it to find deeper meanings. This poem almost seems humerous to me now because I feel like this author is making fun of the poeple who accuse poets of trying to deceive the readers. I loved how he compared it to playing catch, because instead of having straight throws back and forth, these boys are trying to make it difficult to catch by having them work to get at it. It’s the same thing as poetry, because to tell the meaning straight out would be boring, while changing it up and making it slightly ambiguous forces you to put effort into catching the meaning. There needs to be two people, because youre always writing for another, and so one can throw and one can catch, or write and read. It can be both difficult to catch the meaning and throw a decent general idea.

Ellen West

I love sweets,—
                      heaven
would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream …

But my true self
is thin, all profile

and effortless gestures, the sort of blond
elegant girl whose
                            body is the image of her soul.

—My doctors tell me I must give up
this ideal;
                  but I
WILL NOT … cannot.

Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.”

But he is a fool. He married
meat, and thought it was a wife. 

This poem could not have paralleled the conversation’s had about women being here to please men. Everything women do is supposedly directed at getting the best male to mate with. The hidden ways that the world is possessed by men makes it difficult for women to move past this idea. Even the advertisements about natural beauty and different shapes seem to contradict themselves while promoting a beauty or self enhancing product. Here this women clearly loves the sweet stuff, like ice cream, but she restricts herself because she is supposed to be this delicate thin women. It is supposed to be effortless too, thats how one accomplishes the ultimate being. Perhaps her husband believes that she is not one that is wrapped up in this superficial life, but she admits that it is undeniable. He married a piece of meat, just one of the many he had to chose from. By the way she emphasizes that she WILL NOT and cannot give up this ideal makes me think it frustrates her that she thinks like this. I can completely relate to this women. In the sense of makeup and clothes and trends, I sometimes wonder why I get so caught up in it. However, I can not find how to just be, because I am always aware of my appearance and how I am perceived. I feel as though it has been in me for so long that it is near impossible to ignore those self critical thoughts. It has turned into a subconscious way of living. It sucks because I don’t want to be a piece of meat, but I seem to fail at denying society’s standards. Maybe someday…

Power
 
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
 
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
 
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
 
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

In this poem, I feel like the author is trying to open readers’ eyes to the corruption of the human race. No one likes to admit their flaws, which is why she explains how Marie Curie denied her wounds. Marie did not want to admit that her wounds were a result of her power. Being part of humanity, we are able to create and learn and develop new things. In this case, radiation was a result of one of our most powerful creations. By ignoring the signs and symptoms, though, we deny our wrongs, and try to only envision the power we hold. With this power, however, Adrienne reveals that downfalls come with it and we are not as close to Godly as we wish to be. We deny the weaknesses we possess because we would rather be associated with a God like being rather than a beast like being. In reality, most are in the middle, with neither extreme behaviors. This poem exemplifies the human race’s strive to be divine.

One Art
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

When she says “the hour spent badly,” I thought about how people are always rushing around following a society organized schedule. To work to earn money or to appointments. The things are trivial compared to what really matters in life, and we usually get too caught up and forget them. As we get older and older, we get used to losing things everyday. Whether you lose a watch, or you lose a house after moving out, people become accustom to loss, even to the point where losing someone is “not hard to muster.” It may seem like a disaster, but we move past it, and accept the loss in the end.

As a child, you are unknowing, and oblivious to the harsh realities of the world. This poem, though a seemingly cheerful one, saddened me when I was reminded of when I was young and naive. This child on the cloud wept with joy to hear the piper’s happy song. It seemed odd to me, however, that the boy would be so emotional to hear the happy song. While I understand how a child would enjoy the song, I feel that the child shouldn’t feel so overjoyed to hear it. I guess I just think that if the child is still innocent, then he or she should not feel that happy to hear it. Children usually take those things for granted, since they don’t realize how significant innocence is. This child, weeping for joy for this happy song, perhaps does not still have his or her innocence, and is therefore not weeping for the song. Instead, the child weeps because of the longing he or she is feeling to go back to that time of innocence, when that song would actually be a comfort.

 Having a love for sweet sappy gestures, I was drawn to this poem. The title Valentine and the half heart shape could only mean its romantic and endearing. Well, I’m pretty sure I was wrong. After reading this poem, I was not only confused on a majority of it, but instead of a warm fuzzy feeling I expected, I sensed a sort of dark and solemn tone. Some of the phrases were easily comprehended, like the ones about the flowers and hummingbirds and butterflies. But when the author talked about the cherry plums and her art, as talked about in the last sentence of the poem, I was lost.After the realization that my first romantic instinct was wrong, I started noticing all the nature references. My response now is that this poem is more about a lost valentine, one who is perhaps buried under this flower bush. She talks about the creatures that land among the branches which originate from the limbs of the valentine.The last line added so many more aspects to consider in the poem, like the bone, hologram, and the art, that it really through me off. Maybe the death of the valentine turned her grief into a decaying hologram, but what does that even mean? What is her art? This uncovered love poem left me mostly confused. 

Blackberries

They left my hands like a printer’sOr thief’s before a police blotter& pulled me into early morning’sTerrestrial sweetness, so thickThe damp ground was consecratedWhere they fell among a garland of thorns.Although I could smell old lime-coveredHistory, at ten I’d still hold out my hands& berries fell into them. Eating from one& filling a half gallon with the other,I ate the mythology & dreamtOf pies & cobbler, almostNeedful as forgiveness. My bird dog SpotEyed blue jays & thrashers. The mud frogsIn rich blackness, hid from daylight.An hour later, beside City Limits RoadI balanced a gleaming can in each hand,Limboed between worlds, repeating one dollar.The big blue car made me sweat.Wintertime crawled out of the windows.When I leaned closer I saw the boy& girl my age, in the wide back seatSmirking, & it was then I remembered my fingersBurning with thorns among berries too ripe to touch.

It is weird how when told we can not have something, we desire and strain for it even more. I think here, the author shows how as a child, patience is hardly present. Even though the berries were not ripe enough, and they knew the thorns would prick them, they still couldn’t constrain themselves from the sweet fruit. Its like growing up. As a young child, you dream of all the possibilities and freedoms you have as an adult, and as an adult looking at a child, you see the same yearning you once felt. No matter how many times people tell you to live your childhood to the fullest, because it is the time you will want to go back to, you can’t listen, because you can smell the sweet berries, and are exploited to “wonderful” things adults are allowed to do.  

How can he be? The words are wild.

The child is father to the man. It is physically humanly impossible for a child to be the father to a man. So what is the author talking about? Well the author seems as baffled as me, unsure of what sense someone could make of this. Something that immediately jumped into my head was that sometimes children can teach, nurture, and enlighten their fathers, just as a father is supposed to do to a child. It seems ‘wild’ that this could be the case, that someone with little experience could teach someone with more experience. When you think about it though, children teach us the most important things. To live each day to the fullest, to notice and enjoy the most simple things in life, to be carefree and joyous. Life is too short to waste on worry, stress, all of the adult responsibilities and grief that comes with age. Like the author, I’ll ask anyone with any sense or idea of what the poem means to comment. :]