Dec 14, 2020 · The snow geese must have felt sorry for the homesick sparrow from a faraway place, for they dropped me a little line from the sky. ... That first line is so powerful. It is both commandeering the dialogue but also pleading. ... Missouri a few years ago when I returned to help family. The most powerful part of the poem for me is . Let me connect ...
The first line is the DNA of the poem; the rest of the poem is constructed out of that first line. A lot of it has to do with tone because tone is the key signature for the poem. The basis of trust for a reader used to be meter and end-rhyme. Now it’s tone that establishes the poet’s authority.
This idea is broadened out in DMZ Colony in the first section ‘Sky Translation’ when migrating snow geese inspire Choi to make the return to Korea both physically and as a creative project of translation. This brings us back to the longing of homesickness (home + sickness) that Choi translates from the internally-culturally-oppressed nature of the Korean language.
Feb 01, 2019 · The author came over from Jamaica in 1912 and eventually became part of the Harlem Renaissance along with other African American writers that developed their ideas together and this was the first time this was very popular in America. Mckay had a different standpoint on our country because he was born in a different country and settled on ...
What I like about Rebecca Watts is that she is a poet who just gets on with being a poet.
It has taken me a number of months to work out how to write about Don Mee Choi’s two works of poetry and poetic translation Hardly War and DMZ Colony (Wave Books), and I should say at the outset that, as a white, English, male non-translator with only a smattering of a couple of European languages and someone whose awareness of Korean history is, or was, negligible, I have approached them first and foremost from the perspective of a student.
I came across a Twitter exchange recently on the subject of poetry editors’ sometimes harsh indictments of poet’s work and also the fragile reactions of some poets to having work rejected. This made me think a couple of things which I’d like to share here for anyone who’s interested.
The music seems to fold around the words. That was my principal response as I was listening to Call in the Crash Team, the debut album from LYR, a collaboration between poet laureate Simon Armitage, musician Richard Walters and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Pearson.
If you are impatient with amateur philosophy, I’d recommend skipping to the second paragraph of this review; I’m including some initial pondering because my admiration of Flint – An Elegy and a Book of Dreams, an e-pamphlet by the Mexican poet and translator Adriana Díaz Enciso, takes me back to some fundamentals about my own thoughts on language, which I would like to sketch out but which may seem unnecessary, especially to anyone better versed in the philosophies of language and literature than I am – I know this kind of self-indulgence can be frustrating in a blog review; so don’t get irritated, move on..
Oisín Breen’s debut volume (‘collection’ really being the wrong word for this 95-page, three-act meditation on memory, love and loss) presents the reader with an extremely enjoyable and sometimes profound series of reflections, cogitations, lyrical flourishes and interpretive frustrations.
I’m sometimes a little suspicious of ekphrasis. I’m not sure why but I think it is related to a feeling I get that it is used for one of two reasons: either because the poet has run out of ideas of their own or they are showing off their knowledge and understanding of another artist’s work.
The very first line of the poem is a rhetorical question. The speaker asks his/her beloved whether he/she should compare him to a summer day. This question sets the tone and atmosphere for the rest of the discourse. It creates the air of magnificence around the personality of the speaker’s beloved.
Nature is depicted as a harsh and cruel antagonist in this poem. The speaker says that the harsh winds shake the darling buds during May. This depicts that elements of nature are always bent upon damaging the beautiful objects in the world. Moreover, the two extremes of sunshine during summer deprive the humans of the pleasant weather. It is the working of the cruel nature that does not let humans have fun in this world.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” is one of his most beautiful pieces of poetry. This sonnet is also referred to as “Sonnet 18. ”.
Read below our complete notes on the poem Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?) by William Shakespeare. Our notes cover Sonnet 18 summary, themes, and literary analysis.
Throughout the whole poem, the speaker talks about the beauty of his beloved. He admires the beauty of his beloved in different ways throughout the three quatrains. He starts by asking his beloved whether he should compare him with a summer day or not.
These themes of these sonnets are usually love, beauty, time, and jealousy to mortality and infidelity . This collection of sonnets is believed to be addressed to two different persons. On this basis, these sonnets are divided into two portions. The first portion consists of the first 126 sonnets.
This sonnet confirms this tradition of the English sonnet form. It is written in the form of quatrains and is composed of fourteen lines.
Poetry is capable of evoking certain emotions based solely on the sounds it uses. Words can sound sinister, percussive, fluid, cheerful, dour, or any other noise/emotion in the complex tapestry of human feeling.
As we explore how to write a poem step by step, these three major literary elements of poetry should sit in the back of your mind: Rhythm (Sound, Rhyme, and Meter) Form. Literary Devices. 1. Elements of Poetry: Rhythm. “Rhythm” refers to the lyrical, sonic qualities of the poem.
Some poetry may be this way, but in reality poetry isn’t about being obscure or confusing. Poetry is a lyrical, emotive method of self-expression, using the elements of poetry to highlight feelings and ideas.
A poem should make the reader feel something. In other words, a poem should make the reader feel something—not by telling them what to feel, but by evoking feeling directly. Here’s a contemporary poem that, despite its simplicity (or perhaps because of its simplicity), conveys heartfelt emotion. Poem. by Langston HughesI loved my friend.
Poetry doesn’t have to be “good,” either —it can simply be a statement of emotions by the poet, for the poet. Publishing is an admirable goal, but also, give yourself permission to write bad poems, unedited poems, abstract poems, and poems with an audience of one. Write for yourself—editing is for the other readers.
Free verse poems—which are poems that don’t require a specific length, rhyme scheme, or meter— only became popular in the West in the 20th century, so while rhyme and meter aren’t requirements of modern poetry, they are required of certain poetry forms.
“Rhyme” refers to words that have similar pronunciations, like this set of words: sound, hound, browned, pound, found, around.
The first is assuming that they should understand what they encounter on the first reading, and if they don’t, that something is wrong with them or with the poem. The second is assuming that the poem is a kind of code, that each detail corresponds to one, and only one, thing, and unless they can crack this code, they’ve missed the point. The third is assuming that the poem can mean anything readers want it to mean.
It would be convenient if there were a short list of universal questions, ones that could be used anytime with any poem. In the absence of such a list, here are a few general questions that you might ask when approaching a poem for the first time: 1 Who is the speaker? 2 What circumstances gave rise to the poem? 3 What situation is presented? 4 Who or what is the audience? 5 What is the tone? 6 What form, if any, does the poem take? 7 How is form related to content? 8 Is sound an important, active element of the poem? 9 Does the poem spring from an identifiable historical moment? 10 Does the poem speak from a specific culture? 11 Does the poem have its own vernacular? 12 Does the poem use imagery to achieve a particular effect? 13 What kind of figurative language, if any, does the poem use? 14 If the poem is a question, what is the answer? 15 If the poem is an answer, what is the question? 16 What does the title suggest? 17 Does the poem use unusual words or use words in an unusual way?
Williams admits in these lines that poetry is often difficult. He also suggests that a poet depends on the effort of a reader; somehow, a reader must "complete" what the poet has begun. This act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing to it your experience and point of view.
Some people say that a poem is always an independent work of art and that readers can make full sense of it without having to use any source outside the poem itself. Others say that no text exists in a vacuum. However, the truth lies somewhere in between. Most poems are open to interpretation without the aid of historical context or knowledge about the author’s life. In fact, it’s often best to approach a poem without the kind of preconceived ideas that can accompany this kind of information. Other poems, however, overtly political poems in particular, will benefit from some knowledge of the poet’s life and times. The amount of information needed to clearly understand depends on you and your encounter with the poem. It’s possible, of course, even for someone with a deep background in poetry to be unaware of certain associations or implications in a poem. This is because poems are made of words that accumulate new meanings over time.
Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying. Successful poems welcome you in, revealing ideas that may not have been foremost in the writer’s mind in the moment of composition. The best poetry has a magical quality—a sense of being more than the sum ...
As she scrambled over rocks behind the beach, near the artichoke fields that separate the shore from the coast highway, she found a large smear of graffiti painted on the rocks, proclaiming " La Raza ," a Chicano political slogan meaning "the struggle.". She sat down and wrote a poem.
But some climbs are easier than others; some are very easy. You may enjoy an easy climb for a while, but you may also find that you want a bigger challenge. Reading poetry works the same way, and, fortunately, poets leave trails to help you look for the way "up" a poem.
Central to understanding the poem's meaning is Yeats 's concept of cyclical time represented by his vision of overlapping "gyres.". These gyres could be physically described as interpenetrating cones. The gyre is mentioned in "The Second Coming" in the poem's first line, where Yeats describes the metaphorical falcon (humanity) ...
Yeats perhaps wrote "The Second Coming" as an allegory for modern warfare. World War I (1914–18) had been a conflict of unprecedented bloodshed and scope that radically altered the world map and also altered Western thinking. Other conflicts around the same time, as well as concurrent disasters such as the global influenza outbreak that killed millions, would have influenced Yeats. A key theme of "The Second Coming," then, is the way Yeats perceives war and disaster as bringing out the worst in humanity, empowering the wicked and bloodthirsty and disempowering good people.
In "The Second Coming" Yeats presents a subversion of the traditional Christian concept of the Second Coming of Christ, depicting instead the return of older, pagan values.
The biblical view of history is more linear and has a definite ending: the victory of Christ over evil and the effective, permanent end of the world. Yeats's more pagan attitude toward history, however, would argue that Christianity has had its time. Now the pagan beast rises again, "its hour come around at last.".
A metaphor is an analog y that identifies one object with another and ascribes to one object the qualities of a second object. A metaphor can also be an object used to represent an idea. The metaphor may be simple, as with a single comparison, or extended, where one object is central to the meaning of the work. For example, the table in Hughes’s poem represents status, power, and opportunity, which the darker brother is denied by being relegated to the kitchen. The kitchen represents segregation and lack of opportunity. When blacks sit at the same table as whites, true equality will result.
Free verse was a popular style of poetic composition in the twentieth century and it was not uncommon for poets of Hughs’s time to compose in free verse. Whitman, to whom Hughes responds in this poem, is sometimes called the father of free verse.
Poem structure - the line as a building block. The basic building-block of prose (writing that isn't poetry) is the sentence. But poetry has something else -- the poetic line. Poets decide how long each line is going to be and where it will break off. That's why poetry often has a shape like this:
The length of the lines and the line breaks are important choices that will affect many aspects of the reader's experience: The sound of the poem - When people read your poem out loud, or in their heads, they will pause slightly at the end of each line.
The answer is to do the work in two stages. First, let your ideas flow. Then, go back to the poem later and work on improving the poem structure and form. In the second stage, it's a good idea to experiment a lot. Try breaking the lines in different ways and compare the effects.
Like paragraphs, stanzas are often used to organize ideas. For example, here are the two final stanzas of the Robert Herrick's poem. In the first of these stanzas, he is explaining that being young is great, but life just gets worse and worse as you get older.
The right form for your poem depends on, and works with, the poem's content, or what it's about. If the poem is about flying, you probably don't want lines that feel slow and heavy. If you're writing a sad poem, short bouncy lines might not be the way to go. You may feel overwhelmed by so many issues to think about.
If your line break interrupts a sentence or idea in a surprising place , the effect can be startling, suspenseful, or can highlight a certain phrase or double meaning. Lines that finish at ends of sentences or at natural stopping points (for example, at a comma) are called end-stopped lines. Here's an example: