Robert Francis:Catch

Catch

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.

Frank Bidart: Ellen West

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…

Adrienne Rich: Power

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.

Elizabeth Bishop: One Art

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.

Frank O’Hara, Having A Coke With You

Having a Coke with You

 

 

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne

or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona

partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian

partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt

partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches

partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary

it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still

as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it

in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth

between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

 

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint

you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick

which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time

and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism

just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or

at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me

and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully

as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience

which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

 

How romantic is this guy? Talking about this woman’s beauty and how he would rather look at her than any portrait. It kind of seemed like he veered off in the end though. He talked about many famous painters and their paintings and how, while they seem so marvelous, they never capture what he actually sees. This is exactly what we were talking about in english class. The aura of an event is never there in a painting or picture. The time disconnection destroys any aura the action in the painting would have. He supports this in the beginning of the poem too, talking about the aura the woman has. Her orange shirt and her happiness and the 4 o’clock light, it just awed the author. It’s moments like those that are hard to describe, the sensations you feel. Those moments are rare, and must be truly appreciated, because the feeling, or aura, wont last forever, even if a camera can capture the picture.

William Blake, Songs of Innocence

SONGS OF INNOCENCE

PIPING down the valleys wild,

Piping songs of peasant glee,

On a cloud I saw a child,

And he, laughing, said to me:

 

‘Pipe a song about a lamb!’

So I piped with merry cheer.

‘Piper, pipe that song again;’

So I piped: he wept to hear.

 

‘Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe;

Sing thy songs of happy cheer!’

So I sang the same again,

While he wept with joy to hear.

 

‘Piper, sit thee down and write

In a book, that all may read.’

So he vanished from my sight;

And I plucked a hollow reed,

 

And I made a rural pen,

And I stain’d the water clear,

And I wrote my happy songs

Every child may joy to hear. 

 

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.

Lorna Dee Cervantes; Valentine

Valentine

Cherry plums suck a week’s soak,

overnight they explode into the scenery of before

your touch. The curtains open on the end of our past.

Pink trumpets on the vines bare to the hummingbirds.

Butterflies unclasp from the purse of their couplings, they

light and open on the doubled hands of eucalyptus fronds.

They sip from the pistils for seven generations that bear

them through another tongue as the first year of our

punishing mathematic begins clicking the calendar

forward. They land like seasoned rocks on the

decks of the cliffs. They take another turn

on the spiral of life where the blossoms

blush & pale in a day of dirty dawn

where the ghost of you webs

your limbs through branches

of cherry plum. Rare bird,

extinct color, you stay in

my dreams in x-ray. In

rerun, the bone of you

stripping sweethearts

folds and layers the

shedding petals of

my grief into a

decayed holo-

gram—my

for ever

empty

art. 

 

 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. 

Yusef Komunyakaa; Blackberries

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.  

 

Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Child is Father to the Man

The Child is Father to the Man

 

‘THE child is father to the man.’

How can he be? The words are wild.

Suck any sense from that who can:

‘The child is father to the man.’

No; what the poet did write ran,

‘The man is father to the child.’

‘The child is father to the man!’

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. :]

Walt Whitman

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A NOISELESS patient spider, 

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, 

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, 

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament out of itself, 

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand, 

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, 

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to 

connect them, 

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor 

hold, 

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

We live for an other. Everything we do, everything we communicate is for an other. So here, this spider, although isolated in its vacant surrounding, tries to connect with the world around him. The author’s soul however, remains detached in his space, searching to connect with something. I can see this being a part of the transcendental movement, being detached from materialistic and rather being a part of nature, the space around you. I also made the connection to existentialism, with being detached with the world around you in that you live without meaning, just being. If your soul never catches on to something, then you will just exist, rather than live with desire and emotion and feeling. It’s an eerie poem, in that his soul has caught on to nothing. Being blessed with so much in my own life, i can’t imagine being detached in such an extreme way. Existentialism always frustrates me when i get down to thinking about it, like c’mon, find a hobby! I’m glad i can connect to the spider rather than the author in this poem. It reassures me that i have so many great things in my life, rather than having a soul which can find nothing to cling to.