Lens

The camera's snaps set down the beat for the endless tires

As Boston whips by

The seats bouncing, 

The lamp posts and telephone poles and street signs

Scanning over the lens

A rectangle

Too fast for the rule of thirds or 

Balanced exposure or aperture

Leaving surprise genius to discover later

Final Project Proposal

What form(s) will your project take?
My final project will involve making a short film in the perspective of a "tiger" daughter, referencing a memoir written by a Chinese "tiger" mother several years ago. I'm hoping that the video will be longer than 5 minutes and have a beginning, middle, and end.
I'll also put together a collection of some of the poems I've written in the past two months.

What direction will your poems take?

I'm mostly using this as an opportunity to explore a medium that I'm not very familiar with and fool around more with word and visual metaphors. For example, I'm planning on using a card game to represent how education uses numbers to measure "success". I'm also going to force myself to work in more anecdotal stanzas instead of just "floating" around in theories/ideas. I'm also hoping on playing with faster cuts and more effects, and recording a more emotional narration. Because I will probably have multiple actresses playing one character, the video won't show anyone's complete face. 

Jamie DeWolf called me the "frappuccino-fueled generation"

They turned on music two minutes before the expected start time, and the songs didn't seem to fit any specific genre. Dyed hair and Minnesotan hat-scarf fashion filled the the audience, which was younger than that of the Bly poetry reading. My notes summarize the tone of the event before it began as "These people must be beyond hipster, and one of the guys in the audience is probably Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang."

The event had several performers, with Guante encouraging the audience to actively voice their opinions, whether through spoken feedback or snapping fingers. "This is the art of drawing breath," he said in his first poem. "...Know that you're not welcome here."

Here's Guante. I have no idea why they kept that blue screen up.

Spoken word probably requires some sort of mixed internal anger and reconciliation, because the poems crescendoed and decrescendoed across volume spectra like music. Subito pianos and fortes accented the ends of phrases. After his first poem, Guante shared a piece of unfinished work and asked the audience for ideas to improve it. "Three open letters to three younger versions of myself," he titled it. He didn't have a lot of "to be" verbs in his poetry and fiddled with word play and contrast, such as in "daydream to nightmare." He believed that the real question for himself was not how to be stronger, but "how can I use the strength I already have." He dug for a deeper truth in his past with fast-paced analysis.

This is Larissa and Chava working some sass into spoken word. 

The next presenter, Larissa, sung her poetry. "He's at the bottom of the bottle," she said, looking off her phone for the first few lines. She also performed a dialogue with Chava Gabrielle. The U of M Women's Student Activist Collective sponsored the event, so to nobody's surprise, some of the poems addressed women issues. Larissa and Chava talked about slut shaming, using their hands and arms to act lines while they spoke. Chava later presented a poem on body image. It followed a format of letters between an enthusiastic Mia forcing an eating disorder onto hesitant and insecure Gabby: "Dear Mia, ... am I good enough yet... I just want to be beautiful... Love, Gabby."

Sometimes the performers slipped up on a word, but they recovered and rode smooth tides of lines. One of the poets, Aimee Renaud, spoke quietly and read from a notebook, but her topics held similar weight to that of others. She talked about how people associate words such as "giggle" and "chatter" to women instead of men, and how the perceived gender of a fork changes when compared to a spoon or a knife.

A blonde-haired lady (Thadra Sheridan?) really took advantage of the freedom that spoken word offers. She emphasized certain words more than others and paused within clauses, allowing sass, irony, and sarcasm to infiltrate her tone. "I don't have any track marks," she said, showing her wrists.

Tish Jones, another performer, began her poem before she even arrived on stage. "She walks this life alone," she sang as she strolled down the aisle of seats.

So that smudge in the middle of this great iPad photo is DeWolf performing off-stage.

Finally, the slam-winning Jamie DeWolf showed up with plenty of swearing and subtle surprises in his lines. "You have the future in your fingerprints," he said, avoiding the cliche ending of "in your hands." He shared provoking imagery such as "angels strangle themselves with their own halos." I especially liked the "girl poems" that he wrote (yes, boys can write girl poems, too). "Flesh is an insult to what you are," he said as part of a rant to the common question, "Do I look fat in this?"

Even during the pauses between his poems, DeWolf continued the casual closeness between him and the audience. "Let me take off my hat so you can see how ugly I really am," he said between poems. He even stepped off the stage for the rest of the evening, mingling near the front row of seats. He asked questions to the audience before each performance, inquiring our background: do we have divorced parents? Do we have kids? Are we beautiful? Are we ugly? How many people in this room are in love?

"There are high schoolers here? Jesus," he said. His poems had many 20th-21st century and pop culture references, calling current teens the "frappuccino-fueled generation."

Towards the end, he showed some spoken word videos, which can be found here. I loved "Ricochet in Reverse" for its manipulation of time in the Columbine massacre. The narration has gone under some technical special effects to make it feel more distant from the characters on screen and the poem drives the movement in the video. "Dylan fixes his stare on a girl he used to sit behind in Algebra class," Jamie DeWolf and Geoff Trenchard say, their voices slightly echoed. "Her bloodshot eyes reflect back without blinking." Even without the video, listeners can feel haunted by the language. Since the poem recounts the attack by going backwards through time, everything happens in the opposite action: "A nine millimeter slug rips out of a wall and flies through the heart of the last student, inflating his lungs as it passes. Eric and Dylan's cackling laughter rushes down their throats..." The video transitions to the poets sitting down in classroom desks. DeWolf and Trenchard discuss how both had felt that the "battered boy" within them thought that someone had finally "stolen the script to my fantasy life and made a movie without me on the set." Ideas edged towards the taboo. "They did it. Somebody finally did it," DeWolf whispers. They sympathize with the killers but also point out the flaws in the boys' reasoning for their act.

DeWolf ended the night with a poem about his great grandfather, L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology. I found the contrast between Hubbard and DeWolf's occupations fascinating. "No sun big enough to escape his shadow," DeWolf said.

Proposed Poem for Making the Video Poem

Ducks

By chance I saw some birds by a pond

Whose water wore ripples like dragon scales.

Streams of tiny stars trailed from the shadows,

As teardrops of ducks skimmed over the setting sun.

They wavered over scattered trees

Wrinkling blue into compressed ellipses.

Each one like the next, easy to forget.

Like flying ships on a fallen sky,

They tucked their heads under their wings,

Listening to murmurs of the waves.

It felt too cold out here for leaves to burn

As grey and blue smoke ruffled in the water's surface.

Each busy vibration behind the reeds

And nasally call from across the plane
And trivial, concentrated concern

Failed to change too much.

For the pond still shoved itself along

With and without its birds,

A surface so flexible much like the world above

So accustomed to change

That one ripple counters many.

Video Poem of the Day: "Rigged Game" by Dylan Garity

I chose this poem mostly because I've always been interested in finding ways to improve the education system in the United States. I've hoped too much that organizations like Teach for America could be the one fix that we need to bring everyone up to the same level. I once saw a picture of a wall that said, "What if the cure to cancer is trapped in the mind of someone who can't afford an education?" This question resonates deeply. I love Garity's analogy with the slaughterhouses because it reminded me of the 2009 documentary Race to Nowhere, which follows students with more financial backing than the ones in Garity's poem but also points to the many flaws in today's schools.
I'm extremely lucky. Although I can technically call English my second language, the gap between it and my first language is negligible. I never truly struggled in school because what I was good at was what the system wanted. The "rigged game" works fine for me, and unfortunately for plenty of other winners, that's all that seems to matter.
Also I showed this video to my mother... she started laughing and thought that Garity was supposed to be funny since he makes a lot of gestures and talks too fast for her to understand.

Also if anyone wants to watch a "The Tell-Tale Heart" video click here.
Also this (another Minnesota dude!) was going to be the back up poem if someone had already chosen my poem as the video poem of the day before I got to present my video poem of the day.

Flutter Poetry Journal

Flutter Poetry Journal probably flourishes during this time of year, because its dark header and Gothic background wallpaper fits well with Halloween. The editor of the journal mentions on the first page that she had recently redesigned the website to its current look. However, I don't feel like the straight and even font of the poems matches the tone of the rest of the website, so hopefully that could be adjusted in the future. Each one of their issues has a picture to accompany it, and the one that in the October 2013 issue might give me nightmares. I looked back at previous issues, and thankfully they don't always have such terrifying images for their poems.

Most of the poems in the October 2013 issue don't scream joyfulness. "Regret" by Dave Malone starts with a pleasant image: "Western Oklahoma blooms blue sky," but later the poem darkens with "slants of sunshine grow brittle" and "the ash sky, burnished once in hope." I find the difference in line size between the first and last stanzas intriguing; shorter lines encourage simplicity, which helps set up concrete background, while longer lines allow more room for continuous thought and reflection. I looked up Leonard Cohen on Wikipedia, and turns out he's a musician. So, why did Malone say "lines of Leonard" instead of "lyrics of Leonard"? In Malone's biography, he states that he likes alliteration, but both "lines" and "lyrics" begin with "L." Perhaps I'm concerned with a detail too small to matter.

"Skin Like Bedsheets" also has a Halloween-ish tone, with references to bones and knives. The haunting quality of the poem comes from the contrast between the strict comfort that the narrator's mother offers near the beginning and the metaphorical digging into a person's insides at the end. The bed referenced in the poem may represent the narrator, and "When my mother made the bed, she pulled it tight" could mean that the narrator's mother secured the narrator under a firm childhood. The impersonal "goose-down stuffing" in the last line shows that the narrator has been "stretched" to perfection so much that she feels that her true personality, or "heart" and "soul," have disappeared.

To read my response to Thrush Poetry Journal, click here.

Louis Jenkins Visit Preparation

Louis Jenkins's poems look like prose within a skinny book. He doesn't capitalize the beginning of each line, and his lines all have pretty much the same length. Jenkins's poems don't reference very many trees and birds and nature-y whatevers, but instead staples of modernity: shoes, football, CDs, drain pipes, and cars. These "normal' objects of everyday life allow Jenkins to reach closer to the average person. 

I especially liked the contrast between "The State of the Economy," whose straightforward language illustrate the frugality of people during a poor economy, and "Gravity," which broadens out from a simple drain pipe to a "what is life" concept. Both poems approach serious situations or ideas with common items and address their audiences directly. 

In "The State of the Economy," Jenkins focuses on searching for and conserving money in a list-like fashion without many poetic devices. The poem's narrator is less of someone concerned about existential truths and more of someone trying to make ends meet in ordinary ways. "I'm expecting a check sometime next week, which, if we are careful, will get us through to payday," Jenkins writes. The poem refuses to say phrases such as "the economy suffers" or "we struggle to buy food" but instead shows it through directions to the audience. The shortness and simplicity of the poem could fit into a casual email between one spouse and another. The last line, "On second thought, forget the newspaper" really highlights the desperation of the narrator to save money, especially since newspapers cost so little. 

"Gravity" takes a more investigative standpoint than "The State of Economy" and involves more abstract ideas and devices. The first sentence outlines a very concrete map of water from a sink, while the second sentence uses two different definitions of gravity and treats them as the same. Then, the poem transitions to a wider view of life as a detached whole and uses the metaphor of a famous Shakespearean line: "The world is a stage. But don't try to move anything. You might hurt yourself, besides that's a job for the stagehands and union rules are strict," Jenkins writes. 

I wonder, were these two very different poems from different "periods" in Jenkins's career? Or does he consistently write with a variety of styles?

MEA Weekend! and poems

Photoshop
Vibrant grass sharpens under the dial
A search for the glow in her cheeks
Reveals shades hidden by poor lighting
Sepia ages apples into pale sentimentality
The gradient scatters into checkered gray
Trees scrape away into postcard palms
Lies layering on a picture
Layers within layers
Until everyone and everything
Inhabits another world.

Balance
I like to believe that the balance
Leans towards more good than bad

But then why does fear
Edge its way through every inch of happiness

Telling me,
Everything evens out
And this will subside

One extreme met by another
Until ying and yang has stretched into a line
Tipping up and down
Failing to stay still.

(these poems are also currently in the Draft section of this blog)

THRUSH Poetry Journal

TRUSH Poetry Journal posts six issues each year on a cute little beige-colored website guarded by two thrushes under its navigation bar. Its July 2013 issue contains seventeen different poets, although many of the poets had titled their work as "Three Poems" and "Two Poems" which doesn't provide much variety on the outside. However, when I opened up the pages of every single poem in that issue, I saw that each poet had his/her distinct line structure and form. Cynthia Atkin scared me with her lack of true line breaks, while Joshua Young reduced himself to the very simple without any capitalization.  

Two poems stood out to be the most: "Vanishing Point" by Corianna McClanahan Schroeder and "Broad Wings Above the Tall Grass" by Tracy Zeman mostly because both pinpointed imagery very well. 

"Vanishing Point" begins with what many of us know too well: mornings and family members heading to work. Then, it transitions to the author "teaching" herself (and by default, the audience, too) the names of the organisms in her yard. Soon, ordinary birds and spiders weave into art that few people take the time to appreciate. 

Schroeder's "needles shuttering like chimes of light" and "red-bellied woodpeckers" with "checkerboard wings" combine multiple forms of imagery into a single poem, and sometimes even a single phrase or sentence. I especially admired how this poem scatters the narrator's thoughts throughout its descriptions, such as "There's too much to lose through the needle's eye" in the sixth stanza and "We were two breaths among millions--and I was nearly breathless." This dialogue between the narrator and nature places a human factor into the lines so that they avoid becoming a flowers-are-pretty-and-animals-are-pretty-too monologue. The density of lives in such a small space astonishes the narrator, much like how the density of description in the poem can astonish the reader. 

Zeman's "Broad Wings Above the Tall Grass" relaxes less than Schroeder's poem. The strange formatting and spacing inside lines set up punctuation-less caesuras and force the reader's eyes to move. This makes the poem feel active with life without the use of thick imagery. It also emphasizes certain words, such as "possess" and "swirling mass" by separating them with space but without totally disconnecting them in the way more traditional line breaks or periods would do.

Zeman's poem also doesn't aim to please with niceties: "swim in runoff & moss," "hedge-apple smashed roadside," and "to cut one's teeth on comfort" portray the rough sides of nature. The dead deer in the second stanza and old windmill in the third also suggest that nature exposes the weaknesses of what most usually see as beautiful. 

Robert Bly might as well be my neighbor's grandpa

"I don't understand the meaning of that last line."
"That was deep." 

These types of words usually come out of the mouth of a teen skimming through poems for homework, not a poet laureate reading his own work. However, tonight, Robert Bly poked fun at himself while maintaining the air of an experienced artist. 

The crowd at Wiley Hall consisted of many gray hairs and balding heads, so I (and the other SPA poetry students there) stood out a little. Across from me sat another young face, who, before the reading began, slowly strummed a guitar made of more duct tape than wood. I usually come to Wiley Hall for lectures on the shape of the universe and mathematical cryptography, so the contrast between STEM geeks and poet geeks definitely hit me the moment I walked in. 

Introductions for Bly lasted almost twenty minutes, as I wondered if the guy had actually managed to show up at his own poetry reading.

Finally: 

If the auditorium shrank down to Bly and his friend holding his mic next to him, it would just need a furry rug and a fireplace to feel like a living room. Bly looked a lot older than I expected, and the depth, tone, and age of his voice matched that of a Robert Burns poem. His Norwegian heritage surprised me, since his voice had tricked me into thinking of him as Scottish.

"That's enough wisdom for tonight," he said quickly after reading several poems, before his friend holding the mic reminded him that he had planned more poems to read. Moments like this sent trembles of laughter through the audience. 

Here's a clip from my iPhone of him reading (to the audience, and more surprisingly, also to himself):

Bly ended the evening with the namesake of his latest poetry collection, "Stealing Sugar from the Castle." 

We are poor students who stay after school to study joy.

We are like those birds in the India mountains.
I am a widow whose child is her only joy.

The only thing I hold in my ant-like head
Is the builder's plan of the castle of sugar.
Just to steal one grain of sugar is a joy!

Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall,
Which is lit with singing, then fly out again.
Being shut out of the warm hall is also a joy.

I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot. But I love
To read about those who caught one glimpse
Of the Face, and died twenty years later in joy.

I don't mind your saying I will die soon.
Even in the sound of the word soon, I hear
The word you which begins every sentence of joy.

"You're a thief!" the judge said. "Let's see
Your hands!" I showed my callused hands in court.
My sentence was a thousand years of joy.

When Bly read the beginning of the third stanza, he stated that "Like a bird, we fly out of darkness into the hall, / Which is lit with singing, then fly out again" represented the brevity of life. In this poem, the narrator explains that little things, such as a single grain of sugar, a single word, or a glimpse, can cause happiness. "We are poor students who stay after school to study joy" means that the narrator does not have a constant source of joy that he/she may take for granted, and so happiness must spring from unexpected places, such as "being shut out of the warm hall." The narrator diminishes him/herself to the size of an ant, so that the "grain of sugar" that he/she obtains can seem bigger. This figurative idea could transfer to reality by advising people to focus more on the positive and less on the negative, so that positives take up more mental space. I love the breaking of alliteration and rhythm in the line "I am a laggard, a loafer, and an idiot," because it lets the word "idiot" really sink in. 

Bly has the whimsical wink of a purposely grumpy grandfather. As he read this last poem, I considered his age and hoped that he would continue a "sentence" of "a thousand years of joy."

Later, he signed books during the reception:

Chris Martin Visit Preparation

(So this Chris Martin is Chris Martin the poet, not Chris Martin the Coldplay singer? Ohhhhhhh....)

Initial observation: like the pigs and Sleeping Beauty's fairies, Martin's lines in his poems clump into trios. The single line at the end acts like a landing point, so I wonder, does he ever struggle fitting his poems into 3n+1 lines?

His poems move along like trains pulling cars of different shapes and sizes. The different faces inside flash by one after another, because enjambment and a lack of periods prevent eyes from resting on a single element for too long. His poems brim with tired laughs at life, with lines such as "Moonlighting as both / Actor and director in a film / About the fantastic terror / Of existence, a comedy / Of course, and you get so fucking lost" in "The True Meaning of Pictures." "Jokes for Strangers," too, speaks of deeper truth while using words with light-hearted connotations, such as in "All twenty-first-century / Day long I compose these jokes / For myself and strangers."

Martin isn't afraid to use polysyllable words like those in "I Am Not a Cinematographer" with "Disembodied, a woman's narrow / Currinesque nose bifurcating the slope" or in "Blood on the Tarmac" with "Vaults its merciless / Incomprehensibility from the shallow." Martin also gives us heavy glimpses of brief moments. "A blossom of birds issues / From an abandoned skyscraper or traffic / Enacts its unwitting algorithms / Of pulse, it is in" not only contains four short lines of the poem "American Music" but also two complete pictures of birds and traffic, each worth the usual thousand words.

Some of Martin's poems contain more narrative than others. The first half of "Grandpa Was a Salesman" makes the reader question the purpose of the title of the poem, as it jumps from "At Fire Island, the gleam / In the glasses of the Business Man Business / Man peddling Duracell AAS" to "About a robot made entirely / Of panthers, yesterday I" to "Constantly until my braces / Were removed, my dad." Like the train analogy earlier, the constant blending of completely different scenes allows Martin's poems to act like a dream. The dreamer doesn't react to any discrepancies or drastic changes in plot while asleep, much like how Martin maneuvers smoothly through his ideas.

Another Poem of the Day for 10/7

Not Waving But Drowning
by Stevie Smith

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

----------------------------------------

I chose this as the poem of the day because it reminded me of Mary Merrill's poem of the day, "Richard Cory," and because I had recently read a short story that referenced this poem. In the story, which was also titled "Not Waving But Drowning," a girl received a prediction that she would die like this. In the third and fourth lines of this poem, the dead man says what he had failed to say during his life: everyone around him had perceived him incorrectly. This poem lacks quotation marks for the dead man and the people around him referenced as "they," and the purpose of that may be for this to sound more straightforward and direct than a dialogue. The repetitiveness of several phrases also makes this poem a little bit singsong-y, which contrasts with the topic of the poem and makes it even more morbid.

Poetry of Place

This poem is a response to prompt #2. 

The Seventh Most Populous City
The concept of one out of over
One hundred seven billion, six hundred two million, seven hundred seven thousand, seven hundred ninety one
Lives that have ever blinked on this planet
Hits me hard as I close the taxi's yellow door
And face the endless stream of Beijing on a sultry afternoon. 
How can one teenage girl
Become anything more than average
In a pool so vast? 
The sunless skies and the ads on the streets
Engulf the city 
Until even the crowds have diminished
To short breaths in eternity
And the impact of the
Squat, smoky noodle shop on the corner of
Two redundant streets
Is the same as the impact of me.

Note: 107,602,707,791 is the number of people who have ever been born according to this article here. Beijing is the seventh most populous city in the world according to this.

A Wannabe Sonnet Before... and After... and After...

Latest Draft of the Wannabe Sonnet:
First Semester

The imitation of sunsets on leaves

Warms the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze.

As the night extends and the sunshine grieves,

Persephone sparks nature’s own disease.

When the curl of old petals cannot last

And the light chatter of the woods must pause,

The evenings, blanched like photos of the past,

Accent the aging of silhouette claws.

Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole

Snatching the air amid autumn’s brief show.

The morning, blue like a departed soul,

Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow.

Shivers run deep outside the tired school,

Where there cabin fever is no less cruel. 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before
The imitation of sunsets on leaves Warm the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze. As the night extends and the sunshine grieves, Persephone sparks nature’s own disease. Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole Snatching the air amid autumn’s brief show. The morning, blue like a departed soul, Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow. The evenings, blanched like photos of the past, Accent the aging of silhouette claws. Aw no my friend these old rhymes cannot last ‘Cause a couplet remains ‘fore I may pause.
My creativity’s drained, help me please, What rhymes with please, cheddar cheese or chemise?

1st Time After

The imitation of sunsets on leaves

Warm the cautious chill of autumn’s breeze.

As the night extends and the sunshine grieves,

Persephone sparks nature’s own disease.

Summer’s hellish heart winter’s cold greed stole

Snatching the air amid autumn’s brief show.

The morning, blue like a departed soul,

Drowns the gentle white of yesterday’s snow.

When the curl of old petals cannot last

And the light chatter of the woods must pause,

The evenings, blanched like photos of the past,

Accent the aging of silhouette claws.

Though shivers run deep outside my abode

Closer we huddle la dee da la –ode AHHHHH.

Joyce Sutphen Visit Preparation

Death Becomes Me
by Joyce Sutphen

Death has been checking me out,
making himself at home in my body,
as if he needed to know his way
through the skin, faintly rippling
over the cheekbone to the hollow
beneath my eyes, loosening
the tightly wound ligaments
in the arm, the leg,
infirming the muscle
with his subtle caress,
traveling along the nerve,
leaping from one synapse
to the next, weaving his dark threads
into the chord that holds me tall.
Death is counting my hair,
figuring out the linear equation
of my veins and arteries,
the raised power
of a million capillaries,
acquainting himself with the
calculus of my heart,
accessing the archives
of memory, reading them
forward and backward,
finding his name everywhere.
Death comes to rest in my womb,
slaking away the rich velvet
of those walls, silently halting
the descending pearls,
as if he could burrow in
and make himself my mother,
as if he could bare my bones
and bring me to that other birth.

Source can be found here. 

This poem stood out from the rest mostly because it shares the same topic as the “Death Inc.” poem posted on the class blog. However, it assigns Death a very different personality. Mr. Wensman wrote in his response that the two poems create Death as a “familiar and close” character (apostrophe!), but really, the tone in “Death Becomes Me” sounds too threatening to really contain any comfort that familiarity or regularity should bring. Spotting Death browsing through the Star Tribune at a bus stop lacks the creepiness of having him turn around and begin “checking me out, / making himself at home in my body.” Death crawling under one’s skin inspires as much appeal as a burglar taking the time to feed the dog before fleeing, even if Sutphen softens the poem down with words like “caress” and “rest” to describe Death’s actions. The detail with which Death proceeds while inhabiting the narrator makes it so that Death understands the narrator better than the narrator understands him/herself. In a way, Death acts like a secretary on the surface, but as he becomes more involved with the narrator’s more sacred parts, such as the heart and memory, he transforms into someone capable of playing as the puppeteer. At the end of the poem,  he “brings me to the other birth,” forming an image of Death acting the dominant role in the narrator’s later steps. The lack of traditional capitalization at the beginning of each line allows the reader to focus on Death as the sole beginning of each idea, perhaps reflecting the way the narrator has centered her mind and body around him. 

My initial reaction to reading “Death Becomes Me” led a Wikipedia search of Elizabeth I. A quick scroll to the bottom of the page reveals a unforgettable painting of the queen that fits perfectly with my interpretation of Sutphen’s poem.  (Here is a link to the painting.) The dark hues and Elizabeth’s bony face suggest Death has already seeped into the queen, calculating her blood cells and whatnot.

Reading several of Sutphen’s other poems astonished me because she writes about a variety of topics, ranging from natural subjects like “A Bird in County Clare” to advice for readers in “How to Listen.” Do poets write with certain trends in certain years, like the painter Picasso with his Blue Period, Rose Period, etc? Or do they scatter themes across decades of work? Also, why did Sutphen choose “How to Listen” and “Just for the Record” as the two poems for her website? 

Poem of the Day

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

__________________________________________________________

Why I chose this poem:

I remembered this poem way before my day to present the Poem of the Day and was too excited to wait to post it on my blog. I read this poem for the first time when I read Sharon Creech's book Love That Dog back in elementary school. I like this poem mostly because when spoken out loud, it "sounds" like a solid, firm staircase. Each line falls into the next without much complexity and the scene that the poem paints is very serene. I also like this poem because it raises the question of "What depends on this wheelbarrow with its rainwater and chickens?" Maybe I could write a poem response to that...
(Also it must be weird to have William Williams as your name.)

The farmers who didn't farm

Willows curve over the streets

Humming

With flies from the open air markets.

T-shirts on the kids and plastic tricycles in the crumbling courtyard

Are symptoms of the West

Leaking into the East.

The old farmers with their decayed teeth

Sit on the steps outside their doors

And guard the village from the skyscrapers

Bursting

Out of Beijing.

The teens who trudged down aisles of grain

Now study in musty classrooms with cracked walls.

Accents thick in their English, they leave for the capital

Seeking

Blinking lights and shopping malls

Instead of the gravel roads of home.

The advice on form and imagery stood out to me in the “Voice and Style” chapter. I never really know when to start a new line when writing poems, so in the first poem that I published on my blog, I experimented with isolating some words in their own line. In future poems I hope to keep in mind the discussion of abstract statements versus images, since I feel that I can describe an image pretty well but lack the depth in using statements to connect those images back to a general concept. Highlighted ideas from the reading included the perspective twist utilized in “Skinhead” by Patricia Smith. I will probably look back at the list of possible questions to ask during revision in “The Energy of Revision” whenever writer’s block hits me. 

Update: So when I was little they hadn't gotten a newfangled plastic trike for me... :(