Hello, sophomores. Please read and follow these directions, the most important of which is to PROOFREAD your writing ALOUD BEFORE you share it. Correct your mistakes. If your syntax seems a little sloppy, revise it. Share your best writing. Tell us what you think! DUE by 10pm on Wednesday, 3/28.
Directions: In our final round, vote for TWO of the following five poems. Read all five poems. Annotate, recite, and write extensively about the TWO you like best. Remember to correctly indicate the “Title of a Poem” when you write. Also, remember to “correctly use slashes/as you//quote the text/in your” response. Write at least 200 words about each poem you select (400 words total—minimum). Proofred out loud your writing so you can see if your happy with all that you writing in the blog. In other words, PROOFREAD your writing ALOUD BEFORE you share it.
As you write about your two selections, include multiple quotations. Discuss what motivates the speaker, which images you enjoy… Consider specific words, tone, line breaks. Discuss patterns that you notice. Discuss theme. Develop your interpretation, swimming deeper and deeper as you write. And most of all, enjoy exploring your clever ideas!
since feeling is first
by E.E. Cummings
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
For All
by Gary Snyder
Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.
Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.
I pledge allegiance
I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.
Nightclub
by Billy Collins
You are so beautiful and I am a fool
to be in love with you
is a theme that keeps coming up
in songs and poems.
There seems to be no room for variation.
I have never heard anyone sing
I am so beautiful
and you are a fool to be in love with me,
even though this notion has surely
crossed the minds of women and men alike.
You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool
is another one you don’t hear.
Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.
That one you will never hear, guaranteed.
For no particular reason this afternoon
I am listening to Johnny Hartman
whose dark voice can curl around
the concepts of love, beauty, and foolishness
like no one else’s can.
It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette
someone left burning on a baby grand piano
around three o’clock in the morning;
smoke that billows up into the bright lights
while out there in the darkness
some of the beautiful fools have gathered
around little tables to listen,
some with their eyes closed,
others leaning forward into the music
as if it were holding them up,
or twirling the loose ice in a glass,
slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.
Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,
borne beyond midnight,
that has no desire to go home,
especially now when everyone in the room
is watching the large man with the tenor sax
that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.
He moves forward to the edge of the stage
and hands the instrument down to me
and nods that I should play.
So I put the mouthpiece to my lips
and blow into it with all my living breath.
We are all so foolish,
my long bebop solo begins by saying,
so damn foolish
we have become beautiful without even knowing it.
Garbage Truck
by Michael Ryan
Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt
and a distinctive stink that announced
when I was inching down your street
at the regal, elephantine pace
that let my men step down from me running
to heave your garbage into my gut
then fling the clanging metal cans
to tumble and rumble, crash and leap
back to sort-of-where you’d lugged them to the curb
before another oblivious night of sleep.
Did you think life was tough?
I reveled in it, all the stuff
you threw out, used up, let rot,
the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,
vomit and filth, everything you thought
useless, dangerous, or repugnant:
I ate it for breakfast. I hauled it
out of sight. And what did I get?
You were annoyed by my noise.
You coughed at my exhaust.
Your kids stopped playing in the street
to pinch their noses and gag theatrically
with no clue how sick they’d be without me.
I was the lowest of the low, an untouchable,
yet I did what I did and did it well.
Now I am not laughable: a “waste management vehicle”
denatured robotic sanitized presentable.
My strong young men are gone. I have no smell.
I’m painted deep green to look organic and clean.
Your “residential trash carts” are matching green
injection-molded high-density polyethylene
that barely thuds when I lower them to the ground
after I’ve stabbed and lifted and upended them
with twin prongs that retract into my side
so not to scratch anything or scare anyone.
Who can complain? Right there on your street
I mash and compact and obliterate your waste.
You need never give it a second thought.
It’s safe it’s easy nobody gets dirty.
It’s how you want your life to be.
But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life.
Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.
Burned Man
by David Huddle
When I was twelve, a man was burned
not quite to death at my father’s
factory. Recovered enough
to walk the town, he didn’t know
what to do with himself—a ghost
whose scarred, fire bubbled face made you
look away, though not my father
who felt responsible and so wouldn’t
refuse the man’s eyes when they fell
upon him. The burned man held no
grudge, thought the accident his
own fault, and sought my father out
as the one whose eyes told him yes,
he was still alive.
So they held long
conversations on the post office
stoop, which I observed from the car
where I waited, where I could read
my father’s stiff shoulders, the way
he clutched the mail, how he tilted
his head, even his smile that was
in truth a grimace. I knew just
what my mother knew—my father
had to let himself be tortured
once or twice a week, whenever
Bernard Sawyers saw him in town,
lifted his claw of a hand, rasped
out his greeting that sounded like
a raven that’d been taught to say
Hello, Mr. Huddle, how are you?
They’d stand there talking in the town’s
blazing sunlight, the one whom fire
had taken to the edge of death
and the other invisibly
burning while they passed the time of day.
(Prefatory note: I really like all five of these poems for many reasons, and selecting just two proved difficult.)
The poem “Burned Man” by David Huddle begins by succinctly telling of a factory fire that once nearly killed a man. The bulk of the poem then depicts a brief encounter, observed from a distance, between the speaker’s father, Mr. Huddle, who owns the factory, and the man who was disfigured in the fire, Bernard Sawyers. These two men each suffer in the aftermath, and their conversation on the post office stoop shows how each man is managing his turmoil. By the end of the poem, the ambiguity of the title becomes apparent: While the disfigured man was, of course, burned in the fire, the speaker’s father now figuratively burns with feelings of guilt, compassion, and obligation.
This poem, like any great poem, puts every word to use. And some of the word choices create unsettling images that
(Ohh, baby, has it ever taken me a long time this morning to write just this much! I need to go now, but I wanted to share my thoughts so far with you. I revised and revised like crazy to be sure my sentences were clear. And I read my work ALOUD several times–sometimes the whole paragraph, and sometimes just a phrase.)
I chose to write about the poems “Since Feeling is First”, by E.E. Cummings and “For All”, by Gary Snyder. I chose to write about, “Since Feeling is First” because I loved the way he phrased certain stanzas. It took me about fifteen minutes of constantly rereading over this piece to finally understand what he was trying to portray in his writing. In the first stanza when he says, “since feeling is first who pays attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you” I believe that what he is trying to explain is that nothing can capture one’s attention like feeling, so who cares about anything else? He makes feeling so prominent that it completely overshadows anything else in that moment of importance. Furthermore, when he says, “wholly to be a fool while Spring is in the world” he is asking the reader, how on Earth could someone be upset when it is Springtime because Springtime brings happiness with its rays of sunshine. His next stanza emphasizes on this subject because he explains how Spring changes him by stated that kisses become sweeter and more significant than wisdom during Spring. His next stanza confused me for so long, but I believe that I have a good grasp on it now. When he says, “lady don’t cry-the best gesture of my brain is less than your eyelids’ flutter” I believe that he means that don’t cry because you should live every moment in happiness. He is a lot more focused on experiencing life and living in the moment then trying to analyze every little bit that happens; he is the kind of person who just wants to wait to see where the wind blows him. His last stanza is so deep and I reread it over and over again just because I enjoyed it so much. When he says, “we are for each other; then laugh, leaning back in my arms for life’s not a paragraph, and death I think is no parenthesis.” The beginning of this phrase is talking about how love is the best feeling of all and he ends it by saying that life may not even make a paragraph so live it to the fullest because after death is a mystery- so enjoy life while you can.
I also chose “For All” because of his stunning use of imagery. He drew me in at once in his first stanza by describing in detail, him walking barefoot through an icy creek. Throughout all of his stanzas I felt as if I was actually becoming him and feeling every sensation that he was because of his extraordinary use of sensory details. He is able to interpret in his writing almost every single one of the five senses in just four short stanzas. He uses the reader’s eyesight to see the ripples in the stream as he walks through it. He uses the reader’s ears to listen to the rushing of the stream over the rocks and bends as it takes its course downhill making beautiful music. He also uses the sense of smell to bring the reader into the scene by explaining the scent of burning gravel from the sun’s rays and finally, he uses the sense of touch to make the recall an old memory of when they were once walking in a stream and feeling the, “stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes.” I also chose this poem because I liked how he changed the pledge of allegiance not in mockery, but so he could appreciate the words of it as well. He is more proud of nature then his country which is OK because it is his opinion, and at the same time he is proud of his country because the nature that he appreciates is within its limits. All in all, I enjoyed reading this piece because I felt as though I could connect the most with it out of all of the others because I have experienced a similar experience as a child.
Hello! Remember that everyone needs to print his or her poetry response from this tournament for Thursday’s class. Choose your response from Round One, Two, or Three. Feel free also to include any comments you may have received for that entry.
I really enjoyed the two poems “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan and “Burned Man” by David Huddle.
“Garbage Truck” was an instant favorite to me because although varied and inconsistent, it had some pretty good rhymes that gave the poem a nice rhythmic flow. For example, I really liked the way the author used three words that rhymed together when he said “you threw out, let rot/the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,/vomit and filth, everything you thought.” It sounded almost like a defiant chant to me from the garbage truck’s point of view about how it feels unappreciated. The tone in those lines, to me, made me think of a person complaining. Another thing I really like is how the author used personification to give feeling to the garbage truck. It was interesting to see it’s perspective, and how it might even feel offended by children making disgusted sounds and faces at it. The poem reads, “Your kids stopped playing in the street to pinch their noses and gag theatrically.” Lastly, I like the originality of the poem. It was unusual to see a poem about a garbage truck, nonetheless from the perspective of one and I enjoyed reading the author’s interpretation.
“Burned Man” appealed to me because of the way the author told the story of the burned man. I also really liked the in depth description, I feel that it gave the poem a more powerful punch when it includes a very descriptive passage such as, “whose scarred, fire bubbled face made you/ look away/,” describing the man. That gave me a graphic mental image of a man burned by fire, and what his permanently damaged face looked like. Also, I like how the author gives a look into the burned man’s thoughts when he says, “The burned man held no grudge, thought the accident was his/ own fault, and sought my father out/as the one whose eyes told him yes,/he was still alive.” It gives the reader a background as to why the man talks to the father in the first place. We learn it is because the first thing he say that signified he was still alive was the father’s eyes telling him so. Lastly, the final line comparing the man who was burned to the man presently burning was extremely powerful and well written. It says, “the one whom fire/ had taken to the edge of death/and the other invisibly/ burning while they passed the time of day.” I liked how the author compared the burning men; the one who was physically burned to the one who was mentally burning. I think it was the father’s guilt and discomfort at knowing that his factory was the reason the burned man was scarred the way he was, and that’s what is ‘burning’ him
The first poem that I chose to write about is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. When you first glance at this poem and its title, it seems a little unattractive because you automatically assume it’s about garbage, which it is. But, it has a much deeper meaning behind it that the writer gets to by the end of the poem. The theme of this poem is the reason why I liked it so much. Michael Ryan compares a beautiful thing, life, to something completely opposite, garbage. This comparison is surprising since life is something to be cherished, and garbage is well… garbage. But, the way that the writer compares these two is amazing. The last seven lines of this poem are what stand out the most to me, especially the last three. “Who can complain? Right there on your street/ I mash and compact and obliterate your waste./ You need never give it a second thought./ It’s safe it’s easy nobody gets dirty./ It’s how you want your life to be./ But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life./ Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.” These lines are very powerful. The author is communicating to the reader that people’s decisions in life can sometimes go without a second thought, and that everyone wants their lives to be “safe and easy” so that “nobody gets dirty,” just like how garbage is taken care of. However, life is not like the garbage, the garbage is like life. It’s stinky, gross, and thrown away by many, because life is not always how you want it to be. It’s not thought over like it should be, and it is not recycled, just as people don’t recycle their garbage and just don’t care. But, they need to take a step back and think about life. Think about what they’re putting to waste, and how much potential they have to pursue their dreams in life and be happy. This theme applies to almost everyone, no matter where they live, which is what I think makes this poem special.
The second poem that I chose to write about is “Burned Man” by David Huddle. I enjoyed this poem because of the imagery the writer creates in your mind and the lesson that it teaches the audience. David Huddle uses very sensory words that produce a vivid picture in your mind, which helps you comprehend the poem to a higher extent. The lines that made me picture the “burned man” were “a ghost/ whose scarred, fire bubbled face made you/ look away…” The image the mind produces is quite disturbing and makes you really understand how bad this accident affected this man’s life. It’s like you’re actually watching him walk down the street with his burned, scarred face and everyone is just staring at him in disgust, and then looking away once they soak it in. You feel bad for this man and want to run over to him to reassure him that everything is alright. Aside from this imagery, I really liked the lesson that this poem enforces. I think it teaches you to never hold a grudge against somebody, because it’s a perfect waste of happiness and time that you can spend enjoying life with no stress. “The burned man held no/grudge, thought the accident his /own fault, and sought my father out/as the one whose eyes told him yes,/he was still alive.” These lines teach the audience to not stay angry at people who may have hurt you, emotionally or physically. Though this particular poem doesn’t illustrate it, this may cause bad karma to come and stab you in the back. It’s not worth your precious time to be mad at someone, when you can spend that time being happy and enjoying yourself. Another valuable lesson that this poem teaches is to take responsibility for your actions. “My father/had to let himself be tortured/once or twice a week, whenever/Bernard Sawyers saw him in town…” Even though the burned man didn’t put all the blame on the father, the father still believed that it was his fault and didn’t need the blame to be put on his shoulders. He knew well enough that this was his fault, and he took responsibility for it. He thinks about it nonstop and beats himself up about it. This is what people should do, instead of accepting that it wasn’t their fault if someone told them it wasn’t when it actually was. The father in this poem is an excellent example for people to observe and learn to be responsible for their actions, whether they’re good or bad.
The first poem, “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cummings, sparked my initial interest. I was intrigued on the intentional bad grammar of the poem. It went along with the title of the poem just like the first stanza does. The first stanza, “since feeling is first/who pays attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you;” made me think of things other than words. This stanza says to me that if you focus on the little details of a person or life itself, then you’ll never be able to enjoy that person or your own life. The message of the first stanza ties in with the grammar and title of the poem; no one can fully enjoy the poem if they are focusing so heavily on the grammar and ‘syntax’ of it. Towards the end of the poem, the line, “for life’s not a paragraph,” also interested me. Life is not a paragraph, so it isn’t perfect or correct or goes in a line like a paragraph. That line makes me think back to the structure of the poem. There are errors and mistakes in it just like in life there are errors and mistakes. The grammar and the poem itself have the same meaning as life does. Life has random mistakes but if we dwell on those mistakes, we can’t enjoy life for what it is just like we can’t enjoy the poem if we knit-pick the little errors. This poem by E.E. Cummings may have mistakes, but it is very powerful and beautiful just as someone’s life is the same exact way.
The first poem I am writing about is “Night Club” by Billy Collins. Mainly because I really like the way that it was written; for example, he repeated the line “you are so beautiful.” As well as “I am a fool” I found it interesting that he called himself a fool as well as the girl he likes. I think Collins is trying to say that he met a girl, whom seems to think he is good looking. However, she seems to be out of his league. However, she likes him and he doesn’t quite know why. Moreover, I think that the theme of this poem is that liking somebody solely on looks is foolish. Hence the line “there is all this foolish beauty.” I also like the line “we have all become beautiful without even knowing it.” I think Collins is trying to reinforce the idea that everybody is beautiful even if you don’t see it someone else will. When Collins speaks about Johnny Hartman’s music about love; I think he’s almost trying to give examples of a person who understands that everybody is beautiful on the inside.
Lastly, I thought that the imagery used when Collins describes the cigarette on the baby grand piano was so life like. I felt like I was there smelling the smoke, and looking at the piano with the cigarette.
The second poem I am writing about is “Burned Man” by David Huddle. I found this poem to be very realistic and sad. The first thing that I noticed was the use of imagery while describing Bernard Sawyers. I could see an image of him in my head when the author said his face was like a fire bubble. However, I also found it interesting how the author used his own last name for the father who owned the company he worked in. I thought it was very interesting and unusual. I wondered if the author had done something like this to a person he knew or something in his past might have had an effect like this. But I did like how the father/Mr. Huddle would always say hello to Bernard Sawyers whenever he saw him; and how nobody else would say a word. I also wondered why the narrator never went over with his father to Bernard. He/she always said that nobody said a word to Mr. Sawyers but why he didn’t feel like he should take some initiative and go say hello to him. Moreover, I also liked how realistic the situation seemed to be. If an event like this happened I would assume the owner of the company would feel very bad and try to make the victim as happy as he could.
Lastly I thought that the last sentence was very powerful. When Huddle said that, on the inside it was Mr. Huddle that was truly hurt. Meaning that although Mr. Sawyers was burned on the outside the emotional trauma of being part of the reason why Mr. Sawyers was hurt may be far more hurtful.
The first poem that earns my vote is “For All” by Gary Snyder. To describe this poem in one word, I would choose ‘peaceful.’ This poem is about an island who means so much to one person, so much that it is even hard to explain. I can infer the speakers love for this island for how he promises to be loyal and true to this place in his heart, even to the “beings who thereon dwell” in this ecosystem. I feel for the speaker because of how I, too, have a place in my heart as strong as Turtle Island. For me, the beach is where I basically grew up. Having a home in Cape Cod, literally right on the beach was my spot to go and cherish daily. Due to having the same connection as the speaker, this poem really speaks to me. Another reason why I chose this poem is because of the amazing imagery created in my mind as the lines in the poem unfolded on my tongue. For instance, the lines of, “fording a stream/barefoot, pants rolled up,/holding boots, pack on.” This is my favorite line in the poem. I can image beauty, inferring from the text of a grown man spanning through thick mud and reeds, as the water and dirt foam through his toes onto his bare feet. He looks like a traveler, with folded up pants and a knap sap tilted off his worn down back. I can’t help but to question whether the speaker is talking about himself in third person. I wonder if these actions of fording a stream while traveling are his ideal day on Turtle Island, or maybe that is his daily routine. The images that jump at me from this poem are unreal. This piece truly takes my breath away and helps me realize the beauty in life and nature.
The second poem that I chose is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. The reason I chose this poem is because of the message the speaker is sending and the syntax used to send across this message. I love how the poem starts off as a complaining garbage man. Soon enough though, the speaker explains how ungrateful the world is. He says, “You were annoyed by my noise./You coughed at my exhaust./ Your kids stopped playing in the street.” These lines are powerful for this is reality. Reality includes all of the above and that civilization doesn’t realize how lucky we really are. The speakers goes on about his job and what he goes through, picking in all the thrown out, filthy stuff. Maybe the speaker’s motivation for writing this is because of his struggles in life. Maybe, he is a garbage man “heaving” garbage into his gut. I wonder if the reason he wrote this piece is due to frustration, maybe due to a horrible day at work or his real realization on life. After reading this poem, I have a different outlook on life. I don’t take everything for granted. My favorite part of this poem is the ending. The last lines include, “But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life./Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.” This is my favorite part because of my reaction. After reading this, I immediately took in what the speaker said and said aloud, “Garbage is life.” This line stays with me and makes me realize what I have and what I’ve thrust into those green waste bins on the side of the road. I hope everyone realizes the power and message this poem influences onto its readers.
I want to encourage everyone to come to Open Mic Night this Friday! Admission and treats are all free. With over 25 acts, it promises to be a really great night. :)
I chose “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan because I think that it’s very different, especially the fact that the speaker of the poem is a garbage truck. One thing that I liked about this poem is all of the interesting imagery. For example, “I was inching down your street/at the regal, elephantine pace.” When I read this, I could clearly picture a garbage truck slowly going down a road; especially because I’ve seen elephants before and can picture a garbage truck moving as an elephant does. Another line that I could really picture happening, and connect to is, “Your kids stopped playing in the street/to pinch their noses and gag theatrically.” When I was little, I used to do the same thing. I think that the tone of this poem changes significantly from the beginning to the end. In the beginning, when the speaker is talking about how things used to be, he sounded proud. It said how he reveled in all of, “the scum the snot,/vomit and filth” and how he ate it for breakfast. The garbage truck seemed happy being a garbage truck, even if people didn’t accept him how he was. But from the line, “Now I am not laughable” to the end, the tone seems angry because the garbage truck has been turned into something that he didn’t want to be, a “waste management vehicle.”
The second poem that I chose is “Burned Man” by David Huddle because I think that it’s very deep and interesting. The imagery of this poem was very intense, especially when it describes the man’s face, “a ghost/whose scarred, fire bubbled face made you look away” When I read the line, “Recovered enough/to walk the town” I thought of the book “Ethan Frome” because in both the poem and the story, a man has become disfigured but still walks the town. When I read this poem the first time I didn’t completely understand it, but after a few more readings, I think I finally got it. I believe that the speaker’s father, Mr. Huddle, feels extremely guilty about what happened to Bernard Sawyers. He feels guilty because the accident which caused Mr. Sawyers to be extremely disfigured and almost cost him his life occurred in his factory. At the end where it says, “They’d stand there talking in the town’s/blazing sunlight, the one whom fire/ had taken to the edge of death/and the other invisibly/burning while they passed the time” it’s obviously referring to Bernard Sawyers when it refers to the one who fire almost killed. And when it says that the other man is invisibly burning, I think that it means that the guilt that Mr. Huddle feels is burning him. I also wonder if this actually happened or if it’s based on real events because I noticed that the poet’s last name is the same as the father in the poems last name so the poet could be the speaker of the poem.
Nice work, Ceara. You’ve made good insights in both responses. I like your attention to the shift in tone from proud to angry in “Garbage Truck”. The truck is proud to perform the service of devouring everyone’s garbage, and when it must shift to being called a “waste management vehicle,” something noble and classic is lost.
I agree that the imagery in “Burned Man” is intense. The word “ghost,” when used to describe a living person, is especially unsettling and sad. You also make an interesting comparison to Ethan Frome. I wonder whether anyone else thought of this. Guilt is prominent in both works. However, now that I’ve read “Burned Man” several times (I read it for the first time last weekend), I’m starting to shift my focus to the speaker of the poem and away from the two men. It’s interesting to imagine that a young person is perceptive enough to understand the dynamic between his father and Bernard Sawyers. We will discuss a similarly perceptive young person as we become better acquainted with Scout, the narrator of To Kill a Mockingbird. Although, it’s also possible that these two storytellers have the benefit of hindsight when they tell of the events they observed. We’ll talk about this, too.
Keep up the good work (and good proofreading), everyone!
In addition to encouraging you to come to Open Mic Night on Friday, I have one more announcement.
Please remind me that I need to talk about your CAPT practice tests. I need to make copies of some work samples to show how we prepared for the test. Also, if anyone still has his/her helpful index cards to study tips, please bring that in, too. THANK YOU!!!!
If you volunteered to count votes in this tournament, please do so and share the results for each title. Once we have all the rankings, we’ll have one final vote to determine the ultimate champion! Which poem do you think will prevail?
The first poem that I am voting for in this round is “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cummings. The first reason that I am choosing this poem is because of its rhythm. I am not sure on the technical way to describe it, but it makes me think of a calm flowing river. This river winds and twists with each and every line and stanza. It traveling like a snake moving through the grass, and when the river reaches its end it feels like it becomes part of a larger river and continues on its way this flow brings a large amount of emphasis on the final line “And death i think is no parenthesis (.)” The fact that this final stanza in the poem has no closing punctuation to end it also brings emphasis to there being no real end. Another thing that I enjoyed is, in my mind, the image of something being apart of something bigger than yourself. Whether it is some kind of community or team I don’t think that it matters. I think the poem also says you can’t see the whole picture or idea until it has been completed (such as any of the Ocean’s movies).
The second poem that I am voting for is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. I like this poem because it combines a great since of humor to a very deep message that I believe most people almost never think about until it is too late. The humor that will make any reader laugh is found in the very first stanza “Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt.” That is funny especially when it gets read out loud. However, the poem does not remain comical for long it soon becomes very dark wit some of its later stanzas, for example “…I hauled it/out of sight. And what did I get?/You were annoyed by my noise./You coughed at my exhaust./Your kids stopped playing in the street/to pinch their noses and gag theatrically/with no clue how sick they’d be without me.” This makes you think of the meaning, don’t ridicule something especial if it is important. This can apply to both people and objects it isn’t worth making fun of something if the only one that truly benefits is you. The sister meaning to this is, you don’t know what you have until it is no longer there. This is most obvious when the poem says “But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life. /Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.” Meaning that if you’re not careful you could lose something important to you whether it is a pet, a friend, or a family member, Respect every thing you can before it is gone forever.
The first poem that I am voting for is “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cumminings.This poem encompasses two very large topics in one poem, love and life. In the first stanza Cummings says that thinsg need to be looked at as an overall entity rather then focusing on the deatils to be enjoyed.He is saying If people let the little things bother them they wont be happy. For example a poem generally doesnt have meaning or come full circle until the last stanza or two. The line “for lifes not a paragraph” means that life is long and should be enjoyed and shouldnt be spent worrying about small things. I really enjoy the line ” and kisses are better fate/ than wisdom” To me this line means that people should fly by the seat of their pants and live according to a scheduale and I truely agree with Cummings there.The puncuation in this poem really impressed me as well; Cummings doesnt place commas where commas would generally be placed and he only uses one period in the whole poem. Cummings doesnt place a period at the end of the poem which I feel is very fitting for the ending.”and death is no parenthesis” means that life isnt the end, its only the end of one part of a persons life. Cummings does a great job in this poem of provoking thought about life and humanity.
The first poem that was my favorite out of the five possible poems was “Night Club” by Billy Collins. As I began to read the poem, the first line in the first stanza was a line that stuck out to me the most. To me, this line, “You are so beautiful and I am a fool,” seems to stand alone; this portion of a sentence seems like it could be a sentence by itself, even though it isn’t. One thing that I also noticed about this poem is the repetition placed throughout. This line in particular is one that seems to repeat several times, “You are so beautiful.” I wondered to myself, is the reason that the speaker is repeating this sentence, because he/she is trying to pass on a theme that people should probably get to know? The speaker speaks it directly in the poem, “You are so beautiful and I am a fool/ to be in love with you,” and this theme is a universal theme most readers will understand the first time they’re reading through. People actually do think to themselves, “Why am I wasting my time with you?” The final thing that I wondered after reading this poem was if the speaker or the “I” in the poem was the author, Collins or a fictional speaker that he made up.
The second poem that was my favorite was “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. This poem was my all-time favorite poem to read; not only was it thoroughly entertaining, but it also had amazing aspects inside of the writing. One thing that I noticed and completely agreed on was how true the words that the speaker (perhaps the garbage truck,) was actually saying. For instance, I remember doing this whenever I would see a garbage truck pass by me, “Your kids stopped playing in the street/ to pinch their noses and gag theatrically…” The realism of this poem is what causes readers to want to continue to read because of how much the speaker pulls the readers in. One line in particular that I though summed up the entirety of the poem and the purpose of garbage was the line, “But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life.” When a person actually thinks about the meaning of these lines, it’s actually outstanding at how accurate they really are. It’s true, most of the items that we use in our life end up becoming trash and it can be said that without all of these items they eventually turn into garbage; our life would be completely different.
I picked the poem “For All” by Gary Snyder. After reading this poem for the first time, it immediately made me think and reminisce of summer. Every word and line in this poem is peaceful, which made it relaxing to read. “Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters/stones turn underfoot,” This is one of my favorite lines in the poem. It reminds me of being in Lake George and playing in the stream with my brothers. The water would constantly be running, and we would walk across the stones with each other. You can really tell how Snyder feels about this island. “I pledge allegiance//I pledge allegiance to the soil/of Turtle Island,” These lines really explain that he loves this island. It reminds me of how every morning I say, “I pledge allegiance to the flag.” To me, pledge is a strong word and means, for example, you love your country, or in Snyder’s case, Turtle Island. This poem also helps you appreciate everything going on around. For example, Snyder starts off the poem by saying how nice it is to be alive and well. He is appreciative of his surroundings and that he is able to see it everyday. While reading this, the audience can picture everything so clearly because of how real Snyder’s writing is.
The poem “Nightclub” by Billy Collins is definitely a favorite of mine. I think that Collins is a very talented writer. The first stanza is my favorite. It draws you right in with the first two lines, “You are so beautiful and I am a fool/to be in love with you” When I first read this, I paused at the end of this line, not realizing that I should have continued reading. Collins only included this line to show that it was a recurring theme in songs and poems, which I think is a true and noticeable observation. He then goes to explain this line even more, but in different way I never thought possible. He arranges just those words to make the sentence seem different every time. “You are a fool to consider me beautiful,/That one you will never hear, guaranteed.” Here, Collins arranged the words in the original sentence to show how just one sentence or a couple words, can mean a completely different thing if they are even slightly changed. I could go on forever explaining how much I love this first stanza because of how true it is. I think that the actual theme of this poem is taking something you wouldn’t normally notice and finding the beauty in it. Normally, you wouldn’t thing of a scene at a nightclub beautiful. Although, if you paused a moment at a nightclub, when it’s late at night and everyone is either relaxing or dancing, you would easily be able to see the beauty in it.
My favorite poem of this round and probably the entire tournament was E.E Cumming’s “since feeling is first.” The first couple of times I read this poem I didn’t understand it in its entirety because of the way it was worded. After a few more times I realized that the poem flowed really nicely and I also picked up on some minute details that I had not noticed before. At first I didn’t think this was a love poem but now I do. Cummings writes that “kisses are better than fate// then wisdom.” I think by this he means that his love will outlast life itself. He obviously believes in life after death due to his final line “and death I think is no parenthesis,” which says that death will not be an ending to their relationship. I also noticed that he didn’t capitalize all of the “I’s” in the poem. I understand that he was trying to break the norm for poetry at the time, but think that this might serve a deeper meaning. By not capitalizing this letter he is saying that he is not important now that he has fallen in love. He believes that his lover is the world, and he is unimportant in comparison to her. If you view the poem differently (not as a love poem) then it could merely mean that he is insignificant in the big scheme of the world as many of us are.
My second choice would go to “Burned Man” by David Huddle. I enjoyed this poem because of the theme it displayed about people in general. It says that the human mind is very guilty, and this guilt leads to us to do the right thing. Although the father wasn’t responsible for the mutilation of the factory worker, he still felt guilty that a man’s life was ruined under his supervision. The speaker says “my father let himself be tortured once or twice a week / whenever Bernard Sawyers saw him in town.” This leads me to believe the father didn’t wish to be friends with the man but his conscious was filled with guilt so he made an effort to make the man’s life a little easier. I also picked this poem because of the graphic description the speaker used to describe the burned man. This added imagery to the poem and made it stand out among the rest. When choosing a second place poem I instantly remembered this one because of the picture of the gruesome image of the man that was stuck in my head.
The first poem I am voting for is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. The whole poem seemed like it would just be about a garbage truck, but at the end the garbage is connected to real life. My favorite part of the poem is the last two lines which are “But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life. /Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.” These lines are really deep and they mean a lot of different things. These lines make me think about what the good memories I have kept and what are the memories I have thrown away. It also shows how memories, like garbage, are a person’s life and they make up your life. This poem also shows how life changes. I say this because the garbage truck starts with two men on the back and ends with having two prongs. The truck also went from smelling, being loud, and nobody liking it to having no smell, barely any noise, and nobody noticing it. The garbage truck adapted to the new technologies like a person has to do with their life. It is also interesting when the author has the lines about how nobody gives a second thought about their trash when it gets taken away just like not many people give a second thought when their memories are taken away.
The second poem I chose was Garbage truck by Michael Ryan.I found this poem to be interesting because Ryan juxtaposes two completly different things life and garbage. People often ponder and study life but people are always throwing away garbage without giving it a second thought.This poem made me realize how many things I take for granted everyday and then I began to realize how much different life would be without all these luxeries.Everytime the author asks a question in the poem he is trying to make humans realize how easy our lives are because of the things we take for granted for example a garbage truck.This poem also has very good imagry, for example “your kids stopped playing in the street/to pinch their noses and gag theatrically”. The last four lines explain how most people want their lives to be; safe and easy. Those lines also say that people need to focus more on the thi ngs they do have rather then the things they dont. “lifes not garbage” life is everything you make it to be and your life depnds on how hard you work.
The second poem I am voting for is “Nightclub” by Billy Collins. I like how the first stanza is about something different than the second, but the poet brought it all back together at the end. The beginning of the poem is about how all songs and poems have the same message about beauty and foolishness, but there is no originality in any of those poems or songs. The words “you are a fool to consider me beautiful” really made me think because that is how I feel sometimes, but I never hear it in any songs. There are a lot of people in this world who think they are beautiful and better than anybody else, but that doesn’t give those people many unique features which is how a person should be. The second stanza is about a person sitting in a nightclub listening to jazz music. I enjoyed this stanza because of the imagery. I enjoyed the words “it feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette/someone left burning” because of how well I can picture this. I see the smoke going off the cigarette and twirling in the air. The smoke makes people look and their eyes follow it. At the end of the poem the poet wrote “so damn foolish/ we have become beautiful without even knowing it.” This is how the poet brought the poem all together because it has the words foolish and beautiful. These lines may mean that if somebody were to take a picture of this scene, you would look beautiful and innocent.
The second poem I chose to write about was “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. At first, I didn’t know what this poem was going to be about. The first line, “Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt,” confused me because I had no idea who the speaker of this poem was. Finally, “when I was inching down your street//to heave your garbage into my gut,” made me realize that the speaker was a garbage truck. I thought this was interesting and clever of Ryan to write as a garbage truck. “It’s safe it’s easy nobody gets dirty./It’s how you want your life to be./But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life./Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.” really impacted me. It made me realize how important garbage trucks are to our society. We do take them for granted and they do bother us, but without them, streets would be dirty and gross and it would be unsanitary like when the Black Death struck. The line, “life’s not garbage. Garbage is life,” also brought home the poem for me because garbage really is a way of life. We would live in a dirty unhealthy world without garbage trucks. I liked the creativity of this poem and how the garbage truck was personified. It actually seemed like the garbage truck had thoughts and feelings. Most poets would not think to express their work or message through an inanimate object. This poem is unique with a good message and I enjoyed reading it for those reasons.
The first poem I deem worthy of my vote in “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. I am voting for this poem because of its strong use of allegory. The speaker is a garbage truck, who earns the disdain of others due to his smell, noise, and generally unappealing nature. Later, the speaker becomes a “waste management vehicle,” who rather elegantly fits into peoples’ lives, given that they no longer need to give him any thought. I take this whole narrative to be symbolic of fitting in. Rather than contend with people’s hatred and scorn, the garbage truck conforms, becoming quiet, silent, and green. He then gains a comfortable level of invisibility in society, but something isn’t right. Garbage is his life, so masking that life superficially is betraying himself. This sparks a curious quandary in my head over whether or not conforming is a bad thing. Of course preserving one’s individuality is incredibly important, but isn’t it selfish to express that individuality if it is somewhat detrimental to everyone else, as the needs of the many outweigh the needs of one. I personally believe that everyone has the right to self expression and that their is beauty in it, but one should be able to defend their individuality, in order to prove its genuineness and resolve. Otherwise, what good is their expressing it?
I also decided to vote for “For All” by Gary Snyder just because it makes me feel good. This poem makes me picture somewhere I take myself when we do yoga in class and you tell us to go to our happy place. The setting described is nothing short of divine, a definite Elysium compared to the dreary settings we usually read about (Mockingbird is the third Depression era novel I’ve read in English in the past years.) By contrast, Snyder’s Turtle Island is a purely pleasant setting that I wouldn’t mind occupying. The way he describes how all things are interconnected really stirs by interest. Science shows us that all things in this world are connected somehow, so in a place like Turtle Island, where every aspect seems to be in glorious peace, any person on the island could anticipate total tranquility. Furthermore, I liked how Snyder took inspiration from the Pledge of Allegiance. By using it, not as a parody, but as inspiration, the poet evokes a feeling of dedication to this serene setting on the same level that an American would have to his or her country.
The first poem that I choose to write about is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. At first, when I read the title of the poem I was a little confused, I mean a poem about garbage is not exactly the most appealing. But, as I read on I came to find that indeed this poem was about garbage, but it had a much deeper meaning that is connected to life, and the world around us. I loved this poem because Michael Ryan took two opposing subjects and connected them to each other. When Michael Ryan started this poem out by writing “Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt” it threw me for a loop because I could not initially tell who the speaker was. But as I read on I came to find that Michael Ryan had personified the Garbage Truck. When the Garbage Truck says “ Did you think life was tough?/ I reveled in it, all the stuff/ you threw out, used up, let rot,/ the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,/ vomit and filth, everything you thought/ useless, dangerous, or repugnant:/ I ate it for breakfast” it truly brought me into a reality check. The author is trying to communicate to us through the Garbage Truck, that we need to take a step back from our ever so busy lives and think about how it would feel to so called “eat” everyone’s sorrows and everything that nobody cares about or wants anymore, just like the Garbage Truck does. This poem also brings the message home that we can’t just throw out our memories, and expect them to just disappear because no matter how hard we try to forget about the past, it will always be with us. In this poem I truly feel that the Garbage Truck is the barrier of what no one wants, whether that be memories or just plain old trash we have to consider that our memories and our trash have to end up somewhere, they don’t just diminish. I absolutely loved this poem and thought that it was extremely well written. I’m definitely voting hard for this poem in round three!
The second poem that I choose to write about was “Nightclub” by Billy Collins. I loved this poem, and the way that it flowed and sounded when I read it aloud made it sounds beautiful and very intriguing. When the speaker says in the first line “You are so beautiful and I am a fool” it made me think about how sometimes in life people truly fall so deeply in love with someone that they think they are a fool. As I read on I came to find that the speaker has different opinions about how people in general feel about each other. For example, in line thirteen the speaker says “You are a fool to consider me beautiful.” This shows me what people think but don’t actually say. When someone likes you that you think is too good for you than people actually do wonder to themselves, “Why does this person have feelings towards me and think I am beautiful?” The statement I just mentioned is indeed very powerful, and I think that Billy Collins does an excellent job of making it clear to the reader that not everyone thinks of themselves as beautiful, and when someone thinks that way about you, you can sometimes consider them a fool. One of the reasons I loved this poem so much was because of the ending. When the speaker says “we have become beautiful without even knowing it” it truly brings about the idea that everyone is beautiful in their own unique way. In conclusion I also loved the way Collins used imagery throughout his poem. For example when the speaker says “It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette/ someone left burning on a baby grand piano” I felt like I was actually in the Nightclub watching the smoke rise from the piano up onto the iridescent lights. Overall I loved this poem and thought that it was extremely well written.
In conclusion, even though all of these poems in the third round of the March Madness Poetry Tournament were all very unique in their own ways, the two that really stood out to me were “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan, and “Nightclub” by Billy Collins.
After reading all the poems, I chose to write about “Burned Man.” In this, I saw a reoccurring theme. The poem gives subtle hints about the feeling of guilt. This man in the poem is feeling guilty and blaming himself for something that wasn’t his own fault. This is human nature; we always see things being our own fault, when other people feel differently.
This poem is the view of what a child might be noticing, or seeing by the actions of his father. There is a line that says “I knew just/what my mother knew-my father had to let himself be tortured…” This line is the perfect example of what humans are like because it is showing that the father is holding back and not telling his wife or child how he is feeling. However, at the same time he is showing obvious signs of guilt, even though it wasn’t his fault and no one else is blaming him. When Huddle uses the word tortured, I believe it was the perfect choice of words because the father is suffering and feeling bad about what had happened in his factory to the poor man. And it also says that every time he sees the man he is reminded of everything that happened.
Throughout reading this I have also noticed that the author uses himself as one of the referred to characters. The line that says “Hello Mr. Huddle, how are you?” is showing that he is writing about his own life as if it were from someone else’s perspective, or view.
The poem that recieves my first vote is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. I really enjoyed reading this poem because I believe that it relates to the real world. This poem is definetly not one of the happiest poems that I have read, but I still enjoy it. This poem is also not one of the prettiest to picture in your mind, as you can tell right off from reading the title. But, this poem relates to real life. I believe that it is not just about a garbage truck. It is about anyone who does a tough and dirty job and is either ignored or looked down upon because of it. In the poem it explains how the garabage truck takes your trash for you and you either never give it a second thought or complain about the noise and smell. People like janitors or maids sometimes get this kind of treatment in real life. Sometimes even soliders come on to crowds waiting to throw tomatoes at them when they had just put their lives on the line for our country. Even though the garbage truck is not to the extent of soliders being booed, it still says something. Also, this poem talks about the value of life. It says that we should look at what we have, and what we have thrown out. Also, how lucky we are to have it be so easy to get rid of our trash. We are also lucky to have water come so easy and food. In other countries you could have to walk 10 miles to get the goods to survive. That is why I really enjoyed reading this poem.
For my first poem, I chose “Nightclub” be Billy Collins. It starts off by saying “you are so beautiful and I’m a fool/ to be in love with you.” I thought that the poem would be just another love poem, but in fact, it is not. I really liked the next line, when he says that love “is a theme that keeps coming up/ in songs and poems.” I find that quite ironic, because this is a poem. You never usually see an author acknowledging the fact that it is a poem. To see that originality, I was instantly hooked on what this poem entails. Collins then goes into saying that “there seems to be no room for variation,” and when I really thought about it, I have never seen a poem that had was about love talk about anything other than how much one narrator loves another.
“I have never heard anyone sing/ I am so beautiful…” “You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool/ is another one you don’t hear…” “Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful./ That one you will never hear, guaranteed.” These last few lines in the first stanza are shockingly true, or so I thought. After I had pondered Collin’s words, I thought that it really wasn’t as surprising as I initially thought it was. I have never even given it a thought to ever “sing” I am so beautiful. I’ve also never considered the line, “you are a fool to consider me beautiful,” because I wouldn’t be the type of person to think that, almost in fear of being thought of as egotistic.
My thoughts are still a bit cloudy in the last stanza, starting off with the first line, “for no particular reason this afternoon/ I am listening to Johnny Hartman.” I come to find out that this man is in fact a real person, but I am not exactly sure of what kind of music he sings. In the next line, “whose dark voice can curl around/ the concepts of love, beauty, and foolishness,” I imply that he could possibly be a jazz singer, because of the softer, narrative tone. Collins goes on by saying “it feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette…smoke that billows up into the bright lights.” I feel like it is talking about beauty, how this smoke is rising. But, when you think about a cigarette, I don’t think of it as a good thing, I think about it as something unwanted or unattractive. I feel like it may be saying something about how beauty is inside of everything, no matter how it looks on the outside. It then says: “some of the beautiful fools have gathered.” These people could be like the cigarette, how looks don’t matter to be something beautiful, making these people in the narrators eyes as being something foolish, for possibly not realizing the fact that they are beautiful. Collins then writes, “yes, there is all this foolish beauty,” in which I feel is confirming my initial thought of the narrator seeing the beauty in all of the people. It goes on to talk about the nightclub scene, but in the very last line, it says “so damn foolish/ we have become beautiful without even knowing it.” Reflecting back to the first stanza, talking about how you don’t hear someone singing that they are beautiful. Without anyone knowing, they are beautiful. Even if their outside image isn’t thought of as beautiful, something inside them shines through, reflecting on their own beauty.
The second poem that I chose was “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. After reading this poem, I have realized that this poem is much deeper than I initially thought. It starts off by talking about a regular garbage truck, with two men standing on the back, the “distinctive stink that announced/ when I was inching down your street/ at the regal, elephantine pace…heave your garbage into my gut.” But then it goes into being very rhythmic, “tumble and rumble, crash and leap” of the garbage going into this truck. This truck goes on by saying “did you think life was tough?/ I reveled in it, all the stuff/ you threw out, used up, let rot,/ the pretty packaging, the scum, the snot,/ vomit and filth, everything you thought/ useless, dangerous or repugnant:/ I ate it for breakfast. I hauled it/ out of sight.” These lines take this poem into a deeper tone, in only talking about what people are throwing out. The garbage truck goes on; “and what did I get?/ you were annoyed by my noise./ You coughed at my exhaust/ your kids stopped playing in the street/ to pinch their noses and gag theatrically/ with no clue how sick they would be without me.” Which is true, I remember doing some of that as a kid is my old, suburban neighborhood. Only really, without these trucks, we would become very ill, because we would be forced to be in our own waste. Then the garbage truck changes, saying “now I am not laughable: a ‘waste management vehicle’/ my strong men are gone. I have no smell. I’m painted deep green to look organic and clean” I liked how the part “deep green to look organic and clean” because it kind of rhymed, putting not exactly a happier feeling, but more of a lighter feeling, instead of the darker feeling earlier in the poem. The garbage truck talks about all the better things about him, how he doesn’t make a noise. “It’s safe, it’s easy, nobody gets dirty./ It’s how you want life to be./ But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life./ Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.” The last few lines make you ponder about what has been written. The beginning truck, the dirty one, symbolizes what life really is like, difficult and at times unbearable, but thats what it is. This new “eco-friendly” garbage truck is how you want life to be, not difficult, not scary or complicated, this life is simple, it picks up the garbage and gets rid of it, noiselessly and non complicated; “But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life./ Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out.”
The next poem that I chose to get my second vote is “Burned Man” by David Huddle. I enjoyed this poem because of the narrators father. I really admire this man. He blames the accident on himself because it was his factory. It was not his fault, but he still took it too heart and said it was his fault. It takes a real man to take things to heart like that. The father has a really good soul. Also, in the poem it explains how bad the father is feeling and how even though he is “tortured” by having to speak to this man in public, he still does it. I think that the narrator in this poem is the author and the man I admire is his father. I know this because the authors last name is Huddle, the narrator speaks in 1st person, and the burned man greets the father by saying “Hello, Mr.Huddle”. The author must really admire his father as well. He writes about his experiences and how good of a man he was. The other reason why I chose this poem is because it has great sensory and description. I can see the burned mans face and how he wanders the town. I can also see in my head the way the father and the burned man speak to each other at the post office, with the father feeling terrible on the other end. That is why I really enjoyed reading the poem “Burned Man”.
Hello everyone!
RESULTS FOR MARCH MADNESS POETRY ROUND 1:
Famous- 11 (12 if you wanted me to include your response, Ms. A)
A Cold Rain in the day Before Spring- 11
Song of Smoke- 1
The second poem my vote is being casted to is, “Night Club” because this was not just any ordinary love poem. The first line of the poem says, “You are beautiful and I am a fool.” This line seems to stand alone throughout the whole poem because it is what each different idea is based on. The line is repeated through the poem, however always has a different context to it. For example, in the first stanza, Collins is trying to explain that these are all examples of themes that you will never see portrayed in a love song or poem. The first stanza is describing if you were to have a different theme for the love tribute, it wouldn’t make sense. There is no room for variation in the theme of love tributes.
The title is related to the concept of the poem because when you are at a night club it’s an interesting and fun experience, just like love. Billy Collins related the two because of the one major similarity between them, which is the fact that each of these experiences is unique. Nothing can top the experience of being in a club. The same is also true for love; nothing in the world can make you feel the same feeling as if you were in love.
The two poems I chose to write about are “since feeling is first” by e.e. cummings and “Nightclub” by Billy Collins. Both these writers did a phenomenal job writing their respective poems, even though their style and messages are so different.
“since feeling is first” by e.e. cummings is the first poem I chose. This poem, to me, seems to say that if you’re always thinking about the way life should be, you’ll never really be happy. In the first stanza and the very beginning of the second, the speaker says that “who pays any attention/to the syntax of things/will never wholly kiss you;//wholly to be a fool” The person who pays attention to each detail in life, who tries to make everything orderly, will never really grasp some of the greater things in life. Emotions are not orderly; they can be completely uncontrollable at time. If you only think of the way things should be and how you should feel, you’ll never be able to really live in the moment, everything you do will only be halfhearted. When the speaker says “and kisses are better fate/than wisdom” he states very clearly that emotions are more important than wisdom. To become wise, one must go through many different aspects of life and experience them; being wise does not often inspire happiness. Kissing someone you care about, however, usually makes a person happy. Happiness is better than hardship, even if that hardship leads to something great.
The final two lines in this poem are my favorite, “for life’s not a paragraph//and death I think is no parenthesis”. Life is not a paragraph. What is a paragraph? A paragraph is a group of sentences all about the same topic, having a distinct beginning and end. Life is much too complicated for a single paragraph, for life does not continue on in the same way every day; there are deviations from the norm. Death is much too disruptive to be a parenthesis, because there is no way to contain death; if there is a death than it will affect all those who associated with the deceased. Life is a story, with many paragraphs, incomplete and run-on sentences, brilliance, and insanity. There is no way to truly contain life, especially not in the confines of a single paragraph. Similarly, death is not so easily contained that a parenthesis would contain it. Death, once it gets a hold, touched everything it can come into contact with, no matter how tenuous the grip. Life and death are too complicated to be contained in these ways.
The second poem I really enjoyed way “Nightclub” by Billy Collins. The imagery in this poem is very vivd, especially when the speaker describes Johnny Hartman’s voice, “whose dark voice can curl around/ the concepts of love beauty, and foolishness/ like no one else’s can./ It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette/ someone left burning on a baby grand piano/ around three o’clock in the morning;/smoke that billows up into the bright lights”. The voice is compared to a cigarette and a baby grand, bringing to my mind a deep, rich, sophisticated voice; the kind you would hear in a nightclub. Something that’s really amazing about this image is how accurate it is. I was actually very curious to hear how Johnny Heartman actually sounded, so I googled him and when I listened to him sing, it was exactly how I imagined he’d sound from this description. Another thing I really like about this poem is the connection the speaker made between beauty and foolishness. The first stanza I love so much because it points out the flaws of the love songs heard everywhere; they’re always the same because sometimes people don’t want to hear the other options. “There seems to be no room for variation.” Love songs are always the same thing, either saying someone is beautiful or they’re too beautiful. When I listen to the radio I never hear songs about how someone who is beautiful is also foolish, or that the person is a fool to be in love with the singer; that’s not what you hear in songs. In songs you hear what you want to hear, in life most people are thought to be foolish for one reason or another, which really ties to the end of the poem, “We are all so foolish,” Everyone is foolish for one reason or another.
The first poem that got my attention was “Garbage” by Michael Ryan. I really like this poem because it portrays many different feelings. For example, the first line says, “Once I had two strong young men hanging off my butt.” When the class first heard this being read out loud, they cracked up! The speaker’s word choice sends mixed signals because while reading this I also sensed seriousness. Ryan started his poem off with a joke, but the feelings started to change as I read deeper into the poem. For example, the lines saying “Your kids stopped playing in the street / to pinch their noses and gag theatrically / with no clue how sick they’d be without me,” show me how important garbage trucks really are to the world and how unfair it is that they are seen as “the scum” and “filth”. The speaker’s word choice and alliteration also stood out to me. Ryan wrote, “distinctive stink,” which is a mouthful to say. The line saying “to tumble and rumble, crash and leap” is an example of parallelism because the verbs sound the same in the first half of the sentence but then change at the end of the sentence. I like how the speaker included “crash and leap” because I can picture an object flying through the air and then falling and making noises when it hits the side of the garbage truck.
The second poem that I really enjoyed reading is “Burned Man” by David Huddle. This is another one of my favorite poems because unlike a lot of the others, it made me emotional because I felt so sad reading this poem. “He didn’t know / what to do with himself- a ghost / whose scarred, fire-bubbled face made you / look away.” This part of the poem shows me how being burned caused a lot more than physical damage. He was emotionally scarred as well because he was alone and no one wanted to be near him because of how he looked. I also felt terrible for the burned man when I read that the one man that he thought he was friends with, actually couldn’t stand to be around him either. I found this from the lines saying, “I knew just / what my mother knew-my father / had to let himself be tortured / once or twice a week.” It bothers me that everyone felt bad for themselves when they had to look at the hurt man and most of them never thought about the feelings of the man who was the real one suffering. This poem kind of portrays the theme, “don’t judge a book by its cover” because the poem tells about the people leaving the burned man alone and not caring about his feelings because his damaged skin made them feel sick.
The first poem that really stood out to me was “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cummings. This one was really easy to connect to on emotional level because of how romantic the speaker talks about their views on love. The speaker almost seems to be saying that people care far too much about all things unimportant, such as “the syntax of things,” as opposed to the really important things, like emotions and feelings. This original romantic idea of putting your love above all else made me think of “The Notebook,” the cult classic of love stories, where Allie is so deeply, head-over-heel s in love with Noah that she is willing to do anything it takes to be with him always. Even though they reach a bump in the road when Allie’s parents make her return home, “kisses are better fate than wisdom,” and even though it may take a while, she is able to make it back to her true love and spend the rest of her life together, with him, simply proving the point that although what they were doing wasn’t particularly logical, you can never be logical when it comes to matters of the heart. My favorite line of this piece is where the speaker says “laugh, leaning back in my arms/ for life’s not a paragraph//And death i think is no parenthesis.” They almost seem to be saying that you should never have a worry, because life goes on, no matter what happens. Instead of crying about something that will only bother you for an insignificant amount of time, this line says that you should celebrate life and not give a thought about death, because it isn’t the end.
The second poem I chose to write about is “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. Although at first this particular piece may seem to simply be a comical piece about the life of an unloved garbage truck, by the end of the selection, I was able to find deeper meaning in the poem’s subtext. Even though at some points I felt that the poem rambled on a little bit too much as it continues to go on about going down the street “at the regal, elephantine pace” and causing children to “pinch their noses and gag theatrically” as it went by, once I got to the last couple of lines of the last stanza, all of prior writing began to make sense. The garbage truck is always there to take out the things that you no longer want and is needed for our society to remain sanitary, but as soon as people leave their garbage cans on the sidewalk for removal, they “never give it a second thought” and forget about just how important the garbage truck’s job really is to their lives. The garbage truck takes care of everyone’s waste so that “nobody gets dirty,” and just as your home remains clean thanks to the garbage truck, so should your life because in order to live well, you need to “Look what you’ve got. Look what you throw out” and pay special attention to both things. This particular quotation suggests that the speaker is trying to say that you need to be appreciative of what you do have and be careful with what you throw out, not only pertaining to items, but people and relationships as well because if you throw those things away, your life will be come garbage.
While all of the poems in this round are beautifully written, and instill images into our heads of gentle mountain streams, and downtown nightclubs at two am, I chose to write about the poems “Nightclub” by Billy Collins, and “Garbage Truck” by Michael Ryan. Both of these poems seems very shallow, in the way that the imagery and words used are slightly superficial, while still providing nice poems, but when you read them over again, and look underneath the surface they create, you notice the symbolism, powerful emotions, and vivid pictures that float around in your body.
In the poem, “Nightclub”, you start off reading a slightly confusing bit about how there is only one theme of love that is ever sung about, and all of the other one are hidden in the shadow. This first verse really struck me at how much can be analyzed in it. For example, the rhythm in it, while not following a certain beat, still flows clear and adds to the sensuality of it. Also, I like the wording in it, because it forms complete sentences that makes sense; but it does so in such a poetic way (flowy, sensual, rhythmic) that you don’t even feel like you’re reading as much as someone else is talking to you. “Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful. /That one you will never hear, guaranteed.//” In the second verse, the images, pictures, and sometimes movies that are put in my head just from reading descriptions show how intense and deep this poem can be. “It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette/ someone left burning on a baby grand piano/ around three o’clock in the morning/.” This line is one of the lines that creates a movie in my head, of an old time jazz club, in the forties, with the smoke from people cigars and cigarettes floating up to the tall-as-heaven ceiling. The theme in this poem also really struck a chord within me because to me, it is saying that we are all fools to be in love, and since we are all fools, is there really any fool at all?
The other poem I chose to write about was “Garbage Truck”, which brings history and emotions to my mind. At the beginning of the poem, from the point of view of the garbage truck, we get a picture of what its life was like in the past, the noises, the actions, and the views of the people from it, too. We got the emotions that the garbage truck felt, how it “reveled in it, all the stuff/ you threw out, used up, let rot…/”. What I like most about the beginning is how we also got the noise the truck heard, the metal cans being tossed back in the general vicinity. Also, the pride the machine felt, picking up trash, helping people out, making kids stop in the street to acknowledge its presence, was so great I felt it to. Then I felt the sadness at the once great being turned into some suburban “‘waste management vehicle’/”, the pain and feeling of loss when it didn’t get to have its strong men on its back, couldn’t hear the clang of the cans, and nobody noticed it. But, I think the end of the poem is what struck me the most, especially the end. “But life’s not garbage. Garbage is life./ look what you’ve got. Look what you’ve thrown out.//” This really makes the reader think: think about his life, what he has given up, gained, built up and torn down. Like I said, while this poems seems superficial, it’s deep and powerful.
HI! Here are the results from March Madness: Round II!
“Did I Miss Anything” = 9
“This Moment” = 7
“Valentine” = 10
“I Am Offering This Poem” = 5
“Teenagers” = 14!
Should I go ahead and tally the votes Ms. A or should I wait for you to vote?
Thanks, Jesse. Add Ben’s votes and then tally.
FROM BEN WAGNER:
The first poem I chose was “For All” by Gary Snyder. The imagery in this poem is superb. It blends nature with the bodily senses to create a vivid picture. The lines, “Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters/stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes/cold nose dripping” lets your body experience each sequence in first person. I find it interesting that the speaker wrote this line, “smell of sun on gravel.” Of course, you can’t actually smell the sun but if it was a really hot day you might smell the gravel instead. This means that even though the speaker is trying to get you to use your sense, subconsciously he wants to embed the idea of the sun into the reader’s mind. Since this is a nature-focused poem it rings true that the sun is an important entity because it gives light/energy to all things on earth. Also, this part was quite humorous to me. “I pledge allegiance to the soil/of Turtle Island” is not a normal statement. This gives me insight into the speaker himself. From that line I conclude that the speaker is a very free-spirited and conceptually “down to earth” person. However, it can be interpreted in another way. The speaker shows his devotion to this location in which the soil (to him) could be a representation of our national flag. The last stanza really sums up the speaker’s message. “One ecosystem/in diversity/under the sun/With joyful interpenetration for all.” By switching the lines of the Pledge of Allegiance he shows his true dream: Peace.
One ecosystem all living together in diversity with joy for all represents a “Utopia” or perfect world obviously succeeding to peace itself. “For All” was the easiest poem for me to connect to mainly because it put such a detailed picture in my head.
The second poem I chose was “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cummings. In my opinion, the speaker is describing how our feelings or emotions come first in any given situation, sometimes blinding us from the real truth. The first three lines emphasize this right away, “since feeling is first/who pays any attention/to the syntax of things.” The first half of the poem describes all the things feelings can not do, “Will never wholly kiss you;/wholly to be a fool/while Spring is in the world.” However, as the excerpt gradually expands, it sheds new light on feelings. Perhaps the speaker almost meant to promote feelings in the second half of the poem. The third and fourth stanza show
how feelings can play a major role in the happiness of not just one individual, but many individuals. “Don’t cry/–the best gesture of my brain is less than/ your eyelids’ flutter which says//we are for each other: then/ laugh, leaning back in my arms.” These lines have a much lighter mood than the beginning. In the fourth stanza the speaker says, “for life’s not a paragraph.” After the joy in the beginning of the fourth stanza the speaker realizes that you need to let your feelings take control, for better or for worse. The last line confuses me a little. “And death i think is no parenthesis.” I think the speaker is trying to say that death should not be “looked down upon” but rather it should be accepted. “Since feeling is first” was a tough poem for me to interpret but I had fun reading it.
Here are the results for Round 3;
since feeling is first-5
For All-8
Nightclub-7
Garbage Truck-16
Burned Man-11
From J Bird