Neil Hilborn is a 26 year old slam poet originally from Minnesota. Graduating with an honours degree in creative writing in 2011, Hilborn has written 2 books and ranked high in multiple slam poetry competitions nationwide. He has co-founded a literary magazine and now does workshops and classes in colleges and high schools. Although his is not an extremely popular and has not changed the game for poetry everywhere,he is breathing some much needed life into the art form with his slam poetry. He draws in a younger audience than many of the classic poets of the last century, bringing “street cred” to what some may refer to as a dying art.Hilborn, like many poets, writes about what he knows. However, many older poets cover topics that are less …show more content…
There is nothing that joins them together in the way that the poems are laid out. Although wordplay and flow are used heavily in the works. He has no rhyme scheme to his writing. Each of them are free verse poems in that way. It is almost as if Hilborn is merely talking to his audience. His lines are better described as his sentences; each sentence providing vital information to add to the poem. Some of his stanzas consist of many short sentences. In “ Audiobook”, Hilborn discusses how one must ruin their own life in order to become famous and be popular. In the poem, Hilborn uses short instructional phrases as he provides steps for how to ruin one’s life, stating things like, “Step Two/Fall in …show more content…
These poems often ramble on about the girl that the speaker is seemingly always in love with. His poems on love can either be very lighthearted. For example, in the poem “Static Electricity”, Hilborn talks about his feelings for a girl through saying that his mind wants him to tell her silly things just by being with her. He goes on the talk about what kissing her is like and just how much he enjoys it. The pure silliness of his comparisons are the main point of the poem. He describes her kisses as being shot in the chest by hummingbirds coming out of a gun made out of hummingbirds; that when their lips meet the “cartoon devil and angel on my shoulders’/climb into my ears/and lick all my neurons”( lines 27-30). These comparisons create a light heartedness that might come with new love. In his poems where he has lost of is losing love, however,the tone that he takes is much different. In those, it is more often than not that the girl leaves the speaker, leaving him heartbroken and lonely. In his poem, “Future Tense”, Hilborn takes just this attitude when right at the very beginning he comes out with ,”And when your fourth love leaves you/You will want to kill yourself, but you won't/Because you no longer think of suicide/As a house you will build on day./Your fourth love, who is your first real love,/Who brought you peace when your whole body was a gun./When she leaves you, ask your roommate to hide the
When I read poetry, I often tend to look first at its meaning and second at how it is written, or its form. The mistake I make when I do this is in assuming that the two are separate, when, in fact, often the meaning of poetry is supported or even defined by its form. I will discuss two poems that embody this close connection between meaning and form in their central use of imagery and repetition. One is a tribute to Janis Joplin, written in 1983 by Alice Fulton, entitled “You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain.” The second is a section from Walt Whitman’s 1,336-line masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” first published in 1855. The imagery in each poem differs in purpose and effect, and the rhythms, though created through repetition in both poems, are quite different as well. As I reach the end of each poem, however, I am left with a powerful human presence lingering in the words. In Fulton’s poem, that presence is the live-hard-and-die-young Janis Joplin; in Whitman’s poem, the presence created is an aspect of the poet himself.
Billy Collins is one of the most credited poets of this century and last. He is a man of many talents, most recognized though by his provocative and riveting poetry. As John McEnroe was to the sport of tennis, Billy Collins has done the same for the world of poetry. Collin’s rejected the old ways of poetry, created his own form, broke all the rules, and still retains the love and respect of the poet community. Collins has received the title of Poet Laureate of the United States twice and also has received countless awards and acknowledgements. He has achieved this through a style of poetry that is not over-interpreted and hard to understand to most, but that of the complete opposite, his poetry is hospitable and playful.
Kevin Young expressed and introduced several powerful ideas about poetry. For instance, he suggested that the form of poetry occurs organically; the form suggested fuels the subject for which poems he planned to write. This further confirmed the work our class does on essays whenever we explain how the subject the poet writes about is further suggested within the poem’s form. Kevin Young opened my eyes to the external effects on poetry. For example, Kevin Young described things about his office. I found it interesting how he would keep little things around that inspired an idea about a poem or further enhanced a thought of his. On the other hand, Kevin Young stated that not everything external effects his work. He explained that watching television and listening to several different types of music in the background doesn’t necessarily always effect his writing. Additionally, Kevin Young revealed that poetry doesn’t always come easy. For instance, he responded to a students question about line breaks by stating
Love plays an important role in most physical and emotional relationships. Love is a word that can prove difficult to define or even compare to other emotions. This is due to the diversity of meaning and the complexity of the emotion itself. Everyone has been in love at least once before and has gotten a taste of all the good and bad things that come with it. Christina Rossetti’s “Song” presents some of the good parts of love while Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed” shows us some of the bad parts of love. Larkin’s poem presents a failing relationship where communication has failed between a couple and things are getting more and more difficult. Rossetti’s poem presents a wholly different view on love; it is told from the viewpoint of someone talking to his or her lover about what said lover should do after the speaker dies. The love between them seems better, more powerful and good. The two poems also present wholly different attitudes towards “The End,” whether that is the end of life or the end of the relationship. Larkin presents the end as something dark and sad, difficult to cope with. Rossetti, on the other hand, talks about the end as just another beginning, a chance to start over in a new world. Finally, the two poems represent remembrance in different ways. Larkin’s presents memory as something extremely important while Rossetti implies that it does not matter whether we remember or not.
Right after the line, “final uneasiness.” (16) the poem’s intended audience changes. The audience shifts from lovers and their experience with love to a more specific person/intended individual love to him. This is important to understand because it further demonstrates the emotions the speaker has. After the shift, the speaker says “Love, if you love me,/….Be for me, like rain,” (17-19). In this he is demanding that if someone wants to love him or be with him they need to be like rain. The image of rain falling outside is something simple and beautiful. Rain, to some people can be a calming sensation to feel on their cheeks. It is interesting how rain is used in a positive light to describe love because rain is not something one would typically assimilate to love. Rain is beautiful, like love, but to compare the two to illustrate a meaning is thought-provoking. Why would the speaker use rain to describe love? Possibly because it is beautiful like love and has characteristics one may desire in love? This may be true, but conversely it can be assumed that love is difficult to comprehend and that through the use of something out of the ordinary maybe some understanding of the abstract emotion can be facilitated. At the end of the poem the speaker leaves his intended audience with the final phrase of “Be wet/ with a decent happiness.” (23-24). This final phrase is significant because it tells the audience and those who desire
The poetry of Brian Turner, Charlotte Mew, and T. S. Eliot all turned poetry from the status of great to world re-making; they transformed the poetry of their era to poetry that could be read decades later yet still have a profound impact on its audience. I believe that world making lies in a poet’s ability to take any situation, any speaker, and any context that is personally important to them, and create a poem that deeply affects its audience--one with the ability to completely transcribe emotion from a text to the heart.
In all poems the theme of Disappointment in love is seen throughout. Duffy focuses on the pain, despair and acrimony that love can bring, whereas Larkin focuses on the dissatisfaction before, during, and after a romantic relationship. Both Duffy and Larkin differ in tone. Duffy takes a more aggressive and dark stance to portray what love can do to a person after a disappointing love life. Duffy also uses this sinister and aggressive stance to try and convey sympathy for the persona from the audience in ‘Never Go Back’ and ‘Havisham’ Whereas Larkin conveys his discontent in love through his nonchalant and dismissive tone, but still concealing the pain that has been brought by love in ‘Wild Oats’ and ‘Talking in bed’.
The writings of both poets can be described as both simple and complex at the same time, just like the world they’re writing about. While on a purely literal level you may be reading about loss, family, traveling, or nature, all of the poems have a deeper meaning about these topics that the poet leaves the reader to discover.
When reading the title, we often associate a love song as something jaunty, pleasureable, and celebrating, or its other extreme, regretting, nostalgic, and full of pity for the singer’s troubles in love. With Williams the singer, the main idea revolves around the concept of an incomplete union in first person point of view, which makes the reading more personal as the reader is using I instead you or he. From this concept stem the ideas that this poem is about hopelessness or happiness, communal sex or masturbation. Delving into history, literary techniques, association with the author, and own opinion of it, there is easily more to it than meets the eye.
Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California, 1998.
On the other side, “Love Poem” is very different from the previous poem. This seven stanza poem is based on a man describing the imperfections of his lover. In this, the speaker uses stylistic devices, such as alliteration and personification to impact more on reader, for example as the speaker shows “your lipstick ginning on our coat,”(17) ...
Both poems represent the despairs and failures of the love they hone for their beloved, with brings a touch of sadness to the poems. From this the reader can feel almost sympathetic to the unrequited lovers, and gain an understanding of the perils and repercussions of love.
...to help express the theme of the poems by illustrating the role the subject matter played in the life of the persona during their grieving period. Furthermore, metaphors helped communicate the thoughts and feelings of the personas by providing the reader with insight into the relationships and emotions covert in the poem. All in all, the poetic devices incorporated in each individual poetic composition played vital roles in the emotional and dramatic impact of these poems. And who knows, the immaculate use of these fundamental literary devices could be the key to successful love poems all around the world.
Kennedy, X. J., and Dana Gioia, eds. An Introduction to Poetry. 13th ed. New York: Longman, 2010. 21. Print.
By using references of her grief or her losses, Browning creates a more realistic view of her love suggesting that her love is sincere as it comes from a grieved person, which differs to the positive and idealistic feelings portray in the first octave. The poet then talks about her fondness of her love, revealing that her she lives for her love “ I love thee with the breath, / smiles, tears, of all my life;” (line 12-13), the asyndetic listings of the verbs ‘breath’, ‘smiles’ and ‘tears’, implying that her love can stem from different emotions she feels such as happiness and sadness, suggesting to her beloved that her love comes from good and sad points of her life.