AP Lang 2018 Poetry Packet
This painting of a barn and barnyard near sundown May be enough to suggest we don't have to turn From the visible world to the invisible In order to grasp the truth of things. We don't always have to distrust appearances. Not if we're patient. Not if we're willing To wait for the sun to reach the angle When whatever it touches, however retiring, Feels invited to step forward Into a moment that might seem to us Familiar if we gave ourselves more often To the task of witnessing. Now to witness A barn and barnyard of dust and smoke Is lifted a moment and things appear To resemble closely what in fact they are.
A Landscape Carl Dennis -Narrated by the poet, agency is given to Darwin (also acts as the credibility) - Quartet, the 2nd and 4th lines are indented -dissected the complexity of a failing love -technology -statices: flowers that symbolize remembrance -occasional switch from positive to negative
I do think of them from time to time- just now sucking the pulp of a tangerine the taste of which is mostly texture, in this spin-drunk season that seems to forget -us. -itself. At the job I lost, their husk carcasses with the locust bean's craced brown pods rusteld on the brick steps leading into the white-walled hours of computer screen; their compressed toil missing from the hives they left agape in the backyard of the next-door neighbor who, recently divorced had brought us the jars of honey I spooned into teas I sipped in the break room and watched at the wondow as he continued to tend the needle palm and hydrangea. In the age of loss there is the dream of loss in which, of course, I
About the Bees Justin Phillip Reed -Nomenclatures: a body or system of names in a particular field - agency: author/ and immigrants escaping motherland -2 couplets, 1 8-line stanza, 4 quatrains -migration displacement, suffering goes to a blind eye -"the longing for a land not our own the constant moving and shifting of things, within, without-" -"naming new things into our invisibility and this, we too, call home"
am alive at the center- immobile but no one's queen- enveloped (beloved) in bees, swathed in their wings' wistful enterprise. They pry the evolved thin eyelids behind which I replay the landscape as last I knew it (crow feathers as netting redder suns), their empire's droning edge mindless in the spirals of my obsolescing ears. Bbeneath my feet what kind of earth I'm terrified to break into sprint across to free myself, to free them from the myth they make of me and then bury below their dance of maufactory; what kind of future they could die for it punching into me their sting- what future without risking the same; and while, in either body the buzzards of hunger conspire, what kind of new dread animal, this shape we take?
About the Bees (2) Justin Phillip Reed -Nomenclatures: a body or system of names in a particular field - agency: author/ and immigrants escaping motherland -2 couplets, 1 8-line stanza, 4 quatrains -migration displacement, suffering goes to a blind eye -"the longing for a land not our own the constant moving and shifting of things, within, without-" -"naming new things into our invisibility and this, we too, call home"
We were searching for ourselves, after logic for no good reason, jumping fires to take the heat for walking, wishing the blue night not to fall into the blue sky and darken what remained. We were holding on to music, playing the solemn string the helaing horn, rolling back the meadow to give innocence one more tumble, waiting for the breeze to send the screen door slamming open. We were rushing with the sea of people tiding over curb and sidewalk, twilight running out of light, a city pacing its expansion into the sky, block by block, new views burying the old, thinking not thinking about the dead. We were
After Hours (1) Howard Altmann -agency: the dude -free verse -speech act: narration -describes a beach and its inhabitants (morning by the sea). Really likes his sand dunes -switches off to philosophical outset (no bounaries, routes, direction of significance, chaos, entropy, orderrrrrr, disorder, reality) -"pulsations of order" -" no arranged terror; no forcing of image, plan or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept" -"tomorrow a new walk is a new walk" -if it mentions a seagull, crabs, or any animal/ plant found by the sea, chances are this is it -alliteration and repitition
who we never thought we be, at the corner of expectation and desire, the world kind and un- kind, the rabbits scared the palace in ruins, language failing the earth in transition, the infinite sky divided the clouds dispersing premonitions. Come evening come shade, float us to your constellation, let the void draw us still; the radiologist turn off her light and go.
After Hours (2) Howard Altmann -agency: the dude -free verse -speech act: narration -describes a beach and its inhabitants (morning by the sea). Really likes his sand dunes -switches off to philosophical outset (no bounaries, routes, direction of significance, chaos, entropy, orderrrrrr, disorder, reality) -"pulsations of order" -" no arranged terror; no forcing of image, plan or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept" --"tomorrow a new walk is a new walk" -if it mentions a seagull, crabs, or any animal/ plant found by the sea, chances are this is it -alliteration and repitition
Who is the main agent of the poem? The Subject(s) of the verbs
Agency
the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.
Alliteration
an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly; an indirect or passing reference.
Allusion
What has disturbed the status quo and set the poem in motion? What has been happening before the poem starts?
Antecedent Scenario
apostrophe is a figure of speech in which the poet addresses an absent person, an abstract idea, or a thing
Apostrophe
Assonance is the repetition of a vowel sound or diphthong in non-rhyming words. To qualify as assonance, the words must be close enough for the repetition of the sound to be noticeable.
Assonance
verse without rhyme, especially that which uses iambic pentameter.
Blank Verse
a pause in a line that is formed by the rhythms of natural speech rather than meter
Caesura
is a list of things
Catalog
refers to an expression that has been overused to the extent that it loses its original meaning or novelty
Cliche
an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning.
Connotation
agreement or compatibility between opinions or actions.
Consonance
Yesterday, the final petal curled its soft lure into bone. The flowerhead shed clean, I gathered up your spine and built you on a dark day. You are still missing some parts. Each morning, I curl red psalms into the shells in your chest. I have buried each slow light: cardinal's yolk, live seawater, my trenza, a piece of my son's umbilical cord, and still you don't return. A failure fragrant as magic. Ascend the spirit into the design. My particular chiron: the record that your perfect feet ever graced this earth. Homing signal adrift among our stars, our tender impossible longing. What have I made of you sacrifice. This bone: it is myself.
Corpse Flower Vanessa Angelica Villareal -narrative poem, the poet is given agency -disconnection with family, because he lacks the memories they hold of their past home -his memories are not his own -" First light, last scent, lost country. First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others."
two lines of verse, usually in the same meter and joined by rhyme, that form a unit.
Couplet
when did we become friends? it happened so gradual i didn't notice maybe i had to get my run out first take a big bite of the honky world and choke on it maybe that's what has happen with some uppity youngsters if it happens at all and now the thought stark and irrevocable of being here without you shakes me beyond love, fear, regret or anger into that realm children go who want to care for/protect their parents as if they could and sometimes the lucky ones do into the realm of making every moment important laughing as though laughter wards off death each word given received like spanish eight treasure to bury within against that shadow day when it will be the only coin i possess with which to buy peace of mind
Dear Mama (4) Wanda Coleman -narrative poem, the poet is given agency -disconnection with family, because he lacks the memories they hold of their past home -his memories are not his own -" First light, last scent, lost country. First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others."
Surely the body is made of stranger things than politics can steal: the tangled residue of stars, the plastic bag and orange peels I kick past the bridge, flaming nerves splayed across ancient and forgotten avenues, the stomach-heavy goodbye to others that always feels a limit on anyone's remaining days I see now I really did believe that the stories of languages breaking open the embedded money source were the victory of changing grandeur over the paltry measured ties misnamed time- I could never believe that the people meant the counting, the stacking, the definitions the dividing, that those could be more than misunderstanding even when burned in iron; The world is simply not anything any of us say of it our names are strange delusions pulling us back from a brink we are always falling through- it has no shape no words it is not a brink we are not anyone there is no falling
Deep Cover Costumes Mark Wallace - describes blackberries -kids picking blackberries to bring home, but due to fungus and others the blackberries go bad -the children are distraught because they go through so much to get them -"the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not."
the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing.
Diction
What are the major movements of the poem?
Division of Inner Structural Parts
is a sad poem, usually written to praise and express sorrow for someone who is dead.
Elegy
(in verse) the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza.
Enjambment
Mostly I'd like to feel a little less, know a little more. Knots are on top of my list of what I want to know. Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord to keep it from fraying? Not the man who called my life a debacle, a word whose sound I love. In a debacle things are unleashed. Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary. I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. They don't use words, but they can be said to love. They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree. And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing stops them, it's called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth. Sometimes when I'm alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to trees as if I were a birch among birches.
Epistemology Catherine Barnett -an aged statue of two people (a man and a woman) holding hands - though the statue persisted for long, the meaning of the hand holding may not be the same (pointed out by poet) -"Time has transfigured them into Untruth. Snow fell, undated. Light" -"our almost instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love" -shift in attitudes of time (latin to venacular) -Rhyme scheme: ABBACAC
On balcinues, sunlight. On poplars, sunlight on our lips. Today no one is shooting. A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors- the scissors in sunlight, her hair in sunlight. Anither girl steals a pair of shoes from a sleeping soldier, skewered with light. As soldier wakes and looks at us looking at them what do they see? TOnight they shot fifty women at Lerna St., I sit down to write and tell youu what I know: a child leanrs the world by putting it in her mouth, a girl becomes a woman and a woman, earth. Body, they blame you for all things and thtey seek in the body what does not live in the body.
Firing Squad Ilya Kaminsky -adresses violence in two different ways -agency: narrator, most likely has experienced all of this -2 stanzas, first focuses on personifying violence -second stanza is an overarching view to a person who'd resort to violence -" the secret of cruelty as if that made it lose its power over me, its antics" -"but it lives in us all like a question we can't answer but keep trying"
The basic unit of measurement of accentual-syllabic meter
Foot
I'm writing you 10 years later & 2,000 miles Away from Our silence My mouth a cave That had collapsed I'm writing While you You wear the Hospital gown & count failures Such as the bosy'd Inability to rise I see your fingers Fumbling in the Pillbox as if Earthquakes are in Your hands I think it's time FOr us to abandon Our cruelties For us to speak So s o f t We're barely Human.
Forgiveness Christopher Soto for Dad -narrative poem, almost like a story here -antecedent scenario: a dictator gets punished, his secrets are revealed -literal scenario: The author is describing the sensation of getting nailed in the skull -shows disgust, disbelief, refuses to continue image and uses this to explain purpose of the poem. -" a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand it's we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail, drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world."
poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter.
Free Verse
??????
Fresh Rhyme
The insect was yellow with crumpled-black banded legs and shellacked back that would outlast us and wistful eyes from what I could discern on that trail between fields, and we laid him out in the open air under a sky fast-blue with change, wedging a leaf beneath his triple-belted belly so he didn't rest on plain dirt, and we placed two cloverblooms by his head and he was old you said, could tell by how definities the sstripes were, how complete the patterns bold and dark, almost engraved, and he was beautiful in that pasture of thirty-three cows and we drank milk in the blaring heat and ate the cake you'd made. We were the only humans there-unholy-seeming things with two lefs, dismal histories- drinking and eating around his elegant husk, and from the furze, fellow insects rose, a frenzied static around dour bodies, while he remained in sity an unremitting yellow, the color more vivid, louder now that he was a remnant. Was color the purpose here? Yellow had alerted us to him, and we took care with leag and clover to make his bed. THe insect's gold our togetherness, its death from which we fed.
Funeral: For Us His Gold Alessandra Lynch after Gerald Stern - Narrator motivates and encourages readers to maintain hope and keep sticking together, despite the current problems as of now. (uses Gwendolyn Brooks to establish a voice. Also as support) - Agency : Narrator, Gwendolyn Brooks -Shift after "she's right" -"Ignorance has become powerful. The dice that rolls our futures is platinum" -Trochaic meters at the catalog part, which helps rile up the people -multicultural reference
Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal more than I mean to . I can't stop tonguing them, my teeth. Almost giddy to know they're still there (my mother lost hers) but I am embarrass nonetheless that even they aren't pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning, like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud, and said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice. I can still sing some. Early cancer didn't stop the compulsion to sing but there's gravel now. An undercurrent that also reveals me. Time and disaster. A heavy landslide down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me what you really want was for me to stop speaking to you. To stifle the sound of my voice. I know. Didn't want the quicksilver of it in your ear. What does it mean to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen all day until the water rusted it way in. And there I was putting a pan over here and pot over there to catch it.
Given to Rust Vievee Francis -an aged statue of two people (a man and a woman) holding hands - though the statue persisted for long, the meaning of the hand holding may not be the same (pointed out by poet) -"Time has transfigured them into Untruth. Snow fell, undated. Light" -"our almost instinct almost true: what will survive of us is love" -shift in attitudes of time (latin to venacular) -Rhyme scheme: ABBACAC
exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.
Hyperbole
I begin to talk to violets. Tears fall into my soup and I drink them. Sooner or later everyone donates something. I carry wood, stone, and hay in my head. The eyes of the violets grow very wide. I reglue the broken foot of the china shpherd who has put up with me. Next door, in the house of the clock-repairer, a hundred clocks tick at once. He and his wife go about their business sleeping peacefully at night.
I Cannot Be Quieet an Hour Mary Ruefle -narrative poem: A speaker who's in pain (probably from an injury) has moved onto a new part of his life. He's also moved into a new apartment, who's tenant committed suicide -mentions of a physical therapist -might be following in the footsteps of the previous tenant (Charlotte) -No punctuation, except for the period at the end -goes from a shallow narration to the physicist about how his day's gone to a deep ending -"....to move in the space of another's suffering" -"in the space where suffering may meet it's end"
a metrical foot consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable.
Iamb
a line of verse with five metrical feet, each consisting of one short (or unstressed) syllable followed by one long (or stressed) syllable, for example Two households, both alike in dignity.
Iambic Pentameter
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work.
Imagery
a rhyme involving a word in the middle of a line and another at the end of the line or in the middle of the next.
Internal Rhyme
You know hot it pretends to have a broken wing to lure predators away from its nest, how it staggers just out of reach. . .if, at this moment, you're feeling metaphorical, nest can be the watever inside us that we think needs protection, the whatever that is small & hasn't yet found its way. Like us it has lived so long on scraps, on what others have left behind, it thinks it could live on air, on words, forever almost, it thinks it would be better to let the predator kill it than to turn it back on that child again, forgetting that one lives inside the other.
Killdeer Nick Flynn -bear represents the poet's (narrator) body -separates body from the mind. The body is hindering the mind's potential -" The witness of the body" -"Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow," -"Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, "
Literal. It is the situation that is being described
Literal Scenario
have a musical rhythm, and their topics often explore romantic feelings or other strong emotions.
Lyric Poem
a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable
Metaphor
a stressed and unstressed syllabic pattern in a verse or within the lines of a poem
Meter
?????
Minibole
This morning's raucous quiet: din of a lawnmower Pulse-like swell of cicadas chattering in the brush Trucks grumbling along a nearby highway Under a sea of high thin clouds, a sheer ocean of sky The dead are islands: an archipelago Of mute echoes, of resonant silence Their voices still within this gorgeous commotion- Crow call, water burbling, wing rough in trees- In a weed's play, against skin, in the heart's vibrations. Under racket of this day's distractions Under the birds' clamorous singing Under lapping waves of noise Their stopped tongues their stilled voices speaking.
Morning Voices Ed Falco -Petrarch sonnet (iambic pentameter, ABABCDCD ABCABC) -Judas goes out to kill himself, but saves a beaten guy despite his own situation - "Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten, The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope."
When the pantheon crumbles, does gravity still work? What happens to the arcing satellites? What do you do when the high priests have hung up their mitres, when the shepherd crooks have all gone straight, when the curtain is torn, the covenant broke, the tithes spilled all across the tiles? Which parishes do you frequent, whose statutes do you study, whose name is on your lips when you self-flagellate? To whom do you whisper your death bed confession, alone in the dark, lying atop a certain hill, bleeding on a certain throne of thorns? What do you do when the sky opens? There are books about this, but none written from experience. Like how a baby's first word isn't really its first word, just the first one that's understood. The process of rapprochement happens slowly, then all at once. Just like the apocalypse, which is unevenly distributed, but speeding up. Here we go. Into the breach.
Numinous Alex Manley -agency: the dude -free verse -speech act: narration -describes a beach and its inhabitants (morning by the sea). Really likes his sand dunes -switches off to philosophical outset (no bounaries, routes, direction of significance, chaos, entropy, orderrrrrr, disorder, reality) -"pulsations of order" -" no arranged terror; no forcing of image, plan or thought: no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept" -"tomorrow a new walk is a new walk" -if it mentions a seagull, crabs, or any animal/ plant found by the sea, chances are this is it -alliteration and repitition
has to do with meter, rhyme, and stanza-form, sometimes following a prescribed pattern
Outer Form
the attribution of a personal nature or human charact
Personification
You may not believe it, but I have tried, set my sights on the morning star in belief it would guide me. I have tried. I have tried, as the Jesuits taught, to be singular, to be whole, to be one. The labor of this was exhausting. Time reveals things one need not appreciate when young, and I fear being singular, being one, is something damned near impossible for someone like me. Saint Jerome, cloistered in a tiny room, found his singular calling in updating the Latin Bible with his knowledge of Greek texts. In Assisi, Saint Francis updated nature, called birds out of the trees. I am, unfortunately, no saint. Fractured, divided to the quick, I am incapable of being singular. And the old nun who taught Art at my high school, who called me a stupid mongrel, understood this very face long before I did.
Portrait in Graphite and Ornamental Hagiography (1) C. Dale Young, 1969 - Two people having (forbidden) love and them doing the do. They get interrupted by a goosefish (ugly as hell), and then project their feelings onto it. - 6 paragraphs, 9 lines -AABABCCDD -from couple to the fish -personifies the fish -the moon
Profession, family, belief: I can see now my background challenges me, prevents me from remaining true to only one thing. The fog, settled over Ocean Beach, settles the matter by embracing everything indiscriminately, and I want to understand why I notice such things. For most of my life, I have desired a category, a designation, but maybe that desire was misplaced? Maybe it was just another failure, a failure of imagination? Outside, two hummingbirds cross-stitch the air. They have lived here for so long, lived off the "nectar" I boil up for them each week, that they show me no semblance of fear or distrust- they hover and feed near me with violent precision.
Portrait in Graphite and Ornamental Hagiography (2) C. Dale Young, 1969 -quatrain, ABBA (half rhymes, it's stretched...) -much mention of composers and artists -describes gramophone as well -obedience, but shows possible breakaway (dream to change) - "much less to imitate his bete noir blanche who barked, fat foolish creature" -"Art is Art" -"The life it asks for is a dog's life"
Behind disinfected curtains, beyond touch of sunrise douring the terrible gold of leaves, a man could be his own eternal night. City flattened to rubble, hit surviving height a vlack flight of notes: the chip-toothed blade and oldest anesthetic. Escaped convict, he climbs wild-eyed, one hand out- running its twin on the rails of a broken Steinway. Who has not been found guilty of a carrion cry- the dream of a feathered departure one has not earned, then fall back down teeming fault lines of the flesh? Memory recedes into nocturne, a kingdom born of spruce and fading light- he reaches in the end what he had to begin with: fingertips on corrupted tissue, cathedral of octaves in his thinning breath, tears like small stubborn gods refusing to fall.
Portrait of My Father as a Pianist Cynthia Dewi Oka -"In a dark time, what is the work of a syllabus? What is the function of a classroom? What does it mean to teach students about the values of close reading and critical thinking?" -mentions of academic criteria (tests, analysis, essays, arguments) -compares history to a garden (imperfect? Dangerous, dark) -triplets -"of uncertainty, a glow that's argument to shadow. Or if not that, we'll write an essay"
Because I did not have to smell the cow's fear, because I did not have to pin the man, watch his eyes go feral, because I did not have to drag the stones that formed in the child's body, because I did not sheathe my hands in dank soil, or skirt the machines battering, the needles knitting my lower back because when the factory collapsed I smelled no smoke, and no one made me kneel at the cop's boots and count the pulse slowing beside me as every sound soured, because my hands have never had to resist being comforted by the warmth of blood, because, the plastic- wrapped meat and the mousetraps, because my job was to stay clean ad thankful and mostly imaginary, I have been stealing what little I can: onions, sandpaper, handfuls of skin. the dumpster's metal groan. hurried breath. hot knives.
Quarantine Franny Choi -the speaker is recalling painful memories -iambic pentameter (AABB) -mazy: maze like complexity - leaves crumble easily, connected to a broken heart -mounds: sources of regret
a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes
Quatrain
There are poets with history and poets without history, Tsvetsaeva claimed living through the ruin of Russia. Karina says disavoe every time I see her. We, the daughters between countries, wear our meean mothers like sccarves around our necks. Every visit, mine recounts all the wrongs done gainst her ring seng sent for polishing returned with a lesser diamond, Years of never rest and, she looks at me, of nothing to be proud of. I am covered in welts and empty pockets so large sobs escape me in the backroom of my Landlord's fabric shop. He moves to wipe my tears as if I'm his daughter or I'm no one's daughter. It's true, I let him take my hand, I am a girl who needs something. I slow cook bone grief, use a weak voice. My mother calls me the girl with holes in her hands, every time I lose something. All Russian daughters were snowflakes once, and in their hair a ribbon long as their body knotted and knotted and knotted into a large translucent boe. It happpens, teached said, that a child between countries will refuse to speak. A girl with a hole in her throat, every day I opened the translation book. Silent, I took my shoes off when I cam home, I put my house clothes on. We had no songs, few rituals. On Yom Kippur, we lit a cnadle for the dead and no one knew a prayer. We kept the candle lit, that's all. The wave always returns, and always returns a different wave. I was small. I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter. Not even you knew I was strange, I ate the food my family ate, I answered to my name.
Return Gala Mukomolova -spaced out, as if rough communication -the narrator seems to be reaching out to an outsider, who doesn't seem to be answering back -isolation in the sanctuary might represent a physical disability (blindness) -relies on voices, do not scatter voices -narrator asks a lot of questions to the outsider -"Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin. To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered life." -"Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes." "....not to scatter the voices"
I am glad daylong for the gift of song, FOr time and change and sorrow; FOr the sunset wings and the world-end things Which hang on the edge of to-morrow. I am gald fro my heart whose gates apart Are the entrance-place of wonders, Where dreams come in from the rush and din Like sheep from the rains and thunders.
Rhapsody William Stanley Braithwaite -spaced out, as if rough communication -the narrator seems to be reaching out to an outsider, who doesn't seem to be answering back -isolation in the sanctuary might represent a physical disability (blindness) -relies on voices, do not scatter voices -narrator asks a lot of questions to the outsider -"Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin. To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered life." -"Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes." "....not to scatter the voices"
means nostalgia, I'm told, but also nostalgia for what never was. Isn't it the same thing? At a cafe in Rio flies wreathe my glass. How you would have loved this: the waiter sweating his knit shirt dark. Children loping, in tiny suits or long shorts, dragging toys and towels to the beach. We talk, or I talk, and imagine your answer, the heat clouding our view. Here, again, grief fashioned in its cruelest translation: my imagined you is all I have left of you.
Saudade John Freeman -imagery is the only way to get saudade meaning across
Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won't slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job's done Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So it, my dear, there sometimes seem to be Old bridges breaking between you and me Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall Confident that we have built our wall.
Scaffolding Seamus Heaney
indicate the stressed and unstressed syllables in a poem
Scanning
A rosary that was my mother's tucked in the glove compartment of his car and a copy of Exile on Main Street with instructions to play track 6 when he hit some lonesome desert highway. I love him so much my chest hurts, thinking of him riding off into his own life, me the weeping shadow left behind (for now). I know I'll see him again but it's ceremony we're talking about after all- one growing up and one growing older both wild curses. A train blows its horn the light rising beyond the harbor, a dog barks from a car window and the nostalgia (always dangerous) hits me like a left hook. I'm trapped between the memory and the moment, the deal we make if we make it this long, the marker of a life, the small worthwhile pieces that rattle around in my pockets waiting to be set somewhere in ston.
Set in Stone Kevin Carey - Two people having (forbidden) love and them doing the do. They get interrupted by a goosefish (ugly as hell), and then project their feelings onto it. - 6 paragraphs, 9 lines -AABABCCDD -from couple to the fish -personifies the fish -the moon
is a type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not identical sounds. In most instances, either the vowel segments are different while the consonants are identical, or vice versa.
Slant Rhyme
Behold that Tree, in Autumn's dim decay, Stript by the frequent, chill, and eddying Wind; Where yet some yellow, lonely leaves we find Lingering and trembling on the naked spray, Twenty, perchance, for millions whirl'd away! Emblem, alas! too just, of Humankind! Vain Man expects longevity, design'd For few indeed; and their protracted day What is it worth that Wisdom does not scorn? The blasts of Sickness, Care, and Grief appal, That laid the Friends in dust, whose natal morn Rose near their own;-and solemn is the call;- Yet, like those weak, deserted leaves forlorn, Shivering they cling to life, and fear to fall!
Sonnet 92 [Behold that Tree, in Autumn's dim decay] Anna Seward -enjambment, narrative poem (explains everything) -agency is given to the author -"I did not mean to write about death, but rather how when something dies we remember who we love, and we die a little too, we who are still breathing, we who still have the energy to survive."
manner of expression
Speech Acts
the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.
Synesthesia
So, so, break off this last lamenting kiss, Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away; Turn, thou ghost, that way, and let me turn this; And let ourselves benight our happiest day. We ask none leave to love; nor will we owe Any so cheap a death as saying "Go." Go; and if that word have not quite killed thee, Ease me with death, by bidding me go too. Or, if it have, let my word work on me, And a just office on a murderer do. Except it be too late, to kill me so, Being double dead, going, and bidding, "Go."
The Expiration John Donne - A guy is on his lunch Break - "Bunny Died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock....." - step away from them (death) -Includes Brand Names -The best way to deal with things is to keep going.
You must not think that what I have accomplished through you could hav ebeen accomplished by any other means. Each of us is to himself indelible. I had to become that which could not be, by time, from human memory, erased. I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable furious spirit so inconsolably into you you would without cease write to bring me rest. Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew nothing I made myself had enough steel in it to survive. I tried: I made beautiful paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage. The inextricability of love and hate? If I had merely made you love me you could not have saved me.
The Ghost Frank Bidart - Narrator motivates and encourages readers to maintain hope and keep sticking together, despite the current problems as of now. (uses Gwendolyn Brooks to establish a voice. Also as support) - Agency : Narrator, Gwendolyn Brooks -Shift after "she's right" -"Ignorance has become powerful. The dice that rolls our futures is platinum" -Trochaic meters at the catalog part, which helps rile up the people -multicultural reference
We will count on these walls to whisper our resumes to the strangers who take up the work of these rooms, forwarding them past dust. Our purpose shared, suspended in trust to a poem that told us a long love is willed. Believing such we are bound to exit flattered by our design, unmindful that this thing has also always been lying in wait, a thing in itself, bossy and brutish that has thrived in spite of sabotage chapters occasional giddy neglect. A volition apart that exceeds dull need a self-interweaving imperative be mine that will whisper our love past dust.
The Imprint Jennifer Moxley -the author is picking blackberries off the branches -does so in freedom, a fond memory (is a part of life) -simpler than Seamus Heaney's blackberries -"Creeks that run there is This thick paw of my life darting among" -"black bells the leaves; there is this happy tongue"
The fern gathers where the water seldom goes unless the storms swell this world of wise choices, the loud trickle of clear tongues of the stream licking the edges of rock, while up ahead a curve hides tomorrow from our crystal ball, the thing we are afraid to admit we have, the guarantee we hide from faith. In the woods our dog is lost from time to time, until suddenly we hear her paws inside winter's death becoming the yearly promise of new undergrowth, her careless paws that beg each day for the next bowl of treats, true faith in what love yields. The rain stops not long after it threatens to soak us with cold and chills, the trees open to the gradual break of blue inside the gray, turning the clouds naked and white under the sun, the stream disappears under a bridge made by men so trucks can crawl back and forth over this road of dirt with its one row of grass, where our tongues make a silver thread finding its way past the fear.
The Silver Thread Afaa Michael Weaver -couplets -they: parents we/us: the children -"this goes for a long time. Everything they do is wrong, and the worst thing, " -"they all do it, is to die, taking with them the last explanation" -about the cycle of life between parents and their children
I am taken with the hot animal of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs and have them move as I intend, though my knew, though my shoulder, though somethings is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead on the harbor beach: one mostly buried, one with skin empty as a shell and hollow feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft, I do not touch them. I imagine they were startled to find themselves in the sun. I imagine the tide simply went out without them. I imagine they cannot feel the black flies charting the raised hills of their eyes. I write my name in the sand: Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky. I pick up a pebbly that looks like a green egg. To the ditch lily I say I am in love. To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow street I am in love. TO the roses, white petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am in love. I shout with the rough calculus of walking. Just let me find my way back, let me move like a tide come in.
The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. Donika Kelly -narrative, narrative, explanation, observation, correction, declaration, correction, declaration, declaration -Dude tries to describe a tree ,fails at it and chooses to leave a vague (more fitting) explanation -Credibility with the gene pool - Tree is personified (remember Mr. King's narration) -"It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us"
Where are you from? There. Where are you headed? THere. What are you doing? Grieving -Rabiya Al Adawiyya Little brother, we are all grieving & galaxy & goodbye. Once, I climbed inside the hold clock tower of my hometown & found a dead bird, bathed in broken light, like a little christ. Little christ of our hearts, I know planets light-years away are under our tongues. We've tasted them. We've climbed the staircases saying, There , there. Little brother, we are all prayong.. Every morrning, I read out loud but not loud enough to alarm anyone. Once, my love said, Please open the door. I can hear you talk. Open the door. Little christ of our hearts, tell anyone you/'ve beent alking to god & see what happens. Every day, I open the ddoor. I do it by looking at my daughter on a swing- eyes closed & crinled, teeth bare. I say, Good morning good morning you little beating thing.
There, There, Grieving (1) Zeina Hashem Beck -Narrated by the poet, agency is given to Darwin (also acts as the credibility) - Quartet, the 2nd and 4th lines are indented -dissected the complexity of a failing love -technology -statices: flowers that symbolize remembrance -occasional switch from positive to negative
Little brother, we are all humming. More & more, as I read, I sound like my father with his book of prayers, turning paages in his bed- a hymn for each day of the week, a gift from his mother, who taught me the ten of diamonds is a win, left me her loose prayer clothes. Bismallah. Little christ of our hearts, forigve me, for I loved eating the birds with lemon, & the sound of their tiny bones. But I couldn't stomach the eyes of the fried fish. Little brother, we are always hungry. Here, this watermelon. Here, some salt for the tomatoes. Here, this song for the dead birds in tim eboxes, & the living. That day in the clock tower, I saw the city too, below- the merchants who call, the blue awnings, the corn carts, theh clotheslines, the heat, the gears that turn, & the remembering.
There, There, Grieving (2) Zeina Hashem Beck
Seventy-seven betrayers will stand by the road, And those who love you will be few but stronger. Seventy-seven betrayers, skillfull and various, But do not fear them: they are unimportant. You must learn soon, soon, that despite Judas The great betrayals are impersonal (THough many would be Judas, having the will And the capacity, but few the courage). You must learn soon, soon, that even love Can be no shield against the abstracted demons: Time, cold and fire, and the law of pain, The law of things falling, and the law of forgetting. The messengers, of faces and names known Of of forms familiar, are innocent.
To My Daughter Hyam Plutzik
May I venture to address you, vegetal friend? A lettuce is no less than me, so I respect you, though it's also true I may make a salad of you, later. That's how we humans roll. Our species is blowing it, bigtime, as you no doubt know, dependent as you are on water and soil we humans pollute. You're a crisphead, an iceberg lettuce, scorned in days of yore for being mostly fiber and water. But new research claims you've gotten a bad rap, that you're more nutritious than we knew. Juicy and beautiful, your leaves can by used as tortillas. If you peer through a lettuce leaf, the view takes on the translucent green of the newest shoots. Sitting atop your pile, next to heaps of radicchio, you do seem a living head, a royal personage who should be paid homage. I am not demanding to be reassured. I just want to know what you know, what you think your role is--and hear what you have to say about suffering long denied, the wisdom of photosynthesis, stages of growth you've passed through. I can almost hear your voice as I pay for you at the cash register, a slightly gravely sound, like Kendrick Lamar's voice, or early Bob Dylan, both singers of gruff poetic truth. Nothing less was expected from you, sister lettuce, nothing less.
To a Head of Lettuce Amy Gerstler -addressing a lettuce as an entity -viewing nature as equals to humans
Why the image just now of a bullet entering the mouth? Why call it rawm when it isn't sticky and pink like a turkey meatball, just the usual: gold, and shiny, and cylindrical? What about this bullet is uncooked? Why does it multiply with you in parka or short skirt, versions of the you that you were, swallowing raw bullets as you walked? THe images come without assailant, without gun, just the holes the bullets opened, the holes through which they went. And now at the age in which you ride enclosed in flass like the Pope or President you are spitting up the bullets slow-simmered in your own juices. You are shitting them out, feeling them drop from you ini clumps of blood, in the days of bleeding left. But youu cannot expel all of them. SOSme, raw as they day they enetered, have expanded their mushroom heads into the flesh, or lodged thteir hot tip into the taste center of the brain. Will the tongue's first encournter with pomengrante seeds be forever a lost Eden, that fruit of your girlhood, which, also meaning grenade was perhaps never innocent? Do your own raw bullets come back to you, my frineds? Let us legislate the active voice, instead. NOt, "Many bodies have been used as blanks, aluminum cans." But, "Here are the men who pulled the trigger, look at them."
You & the Raw Bullets Rosa Alcala -narrative poem, almost like a story here -antecedent scenario: a dictator gets punished, his secrets are revealed -literal scenario: The author is describing the sensation of getting nailed in the skull -shows disgust, disbelief, refuses to continue image and uses this to explain purpose of the poem. -" a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand it's we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail, drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world."
