What we write about when we write about poetry. ( Antioch Review )
Let us begin by recognizing that one comes to a poem--or ought to come- -in openness and expectancy and acceptance. For a poem is an adventure, for both the poet and the reader: a venture into the as yet-unseen, the as-yet unexperienced. At the heart of it is the notknowing. It is search. It is discovery. It is existence entered. "You are lost the instant you know what the result will be," says the painter Juan Gris, speaking or and to painters. But what he is speaking of is true of art in general, is as appropriate to poetry as to painting. What he is reminding us of is the need to remain open to discovery, to largess--the need to give over our desire to define, to interpret, to reduce, to translate, We need to remind ourselves, in short, that in a poem we find the world happening not as concept but as percept. It is the world happening. The world becoming. The world allowed to be--itself. Another way of putting the same thing, this time from the per-spective of thinking (the perspective of the mind in its engagement of the world), would be to say that the poem is an enactment of thinking itself: the mind in motion. Not merely a collection of thoughts, but rather the act of thought itself, the mind in action. The poem is not trying to be about something, it is trying to be something. It is trying to incorporate, to realize. Not ideas about the thing, writes Wallace Stevens, but the thing itself. As Denise Levertov has said, "The substance, the means, of an art, is am incarnation--not reference but phenomenon."
This is of course what gives to poetry, to good poetry, a feeling of aliveness. Touch its body--the body of this particular "thinking" --and you will feel it pulse with hidden life. Which in a sense is much the same as saying that it will pulse with mystery. For what is more mysterious than the fact of life? I mean life actually encountered, its own self-sustaining presence. What greater difference than that between a living being and the corpse of that being, the life gone out of it? One moment it is a living presence of mystery. The next, it is something completely other, something best defined by absence, by what is not there.
Poetry is something that is to be read delicately and cautiously if one wanted to find meaning through the words. Readers have to be gentle and patiently ponder about what they are reading in order to find any significance in the poem. If someone is not patient with reading, they will not feel impacted by poetry and will not want to read it. In Billy Collins’, “Introduction to Poetry,” he uses figurative language to help readers see that the way to enjoy and understand poetry is by reading between the lines and being patient with how each individual relates to the readings.
Good poetry provides meaningful commentary. One indication of a poem’s success in this is the depth of thought the reader has as a result of the poem. The poems I anthologized may take different
Poetry has a way of making us feel every range of emotion, in some cases better than other forms of entertainment. Unlike a novel, which gives a wide field of vision on any subject, poems have a more focused look mostly on the raw emotion of any one topic. Understanding poetry is an art onto itself, to be able to peel back the words and feel the emotions within them is truly its own work. Harder yet is the ability to dissect and explain these ideas to another person (in this case through an essay)and have them feel and see the poem and the topic it brings to light in the same way that you do. The poem that we will explore is powerful and thought provoking, because it brings the ugly subject of oppression to the front of your mind and forces you to engage in a conversation that you have no control over. It makes you feel hopeless and angry at the same time. In the poem Unwanted by Edward Field we are going to explore the parts of the poem but mainly we will
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
“I look to poetry, with its built-in capacity for compressed and multivalent language, as a place where many senses can be made of the world. If this is true, and I’ve built a life around the notion that it is, poetry can get us closer to reality in all its fluidity and complexity.”
Reading is part of everyday life, but understanding what you have read is something less common. There are a lot of different types of literate that you can read. One of the most popular types of reading that people do would be to read poetry, but almost everyone that reads poetry reads the most common type; the ones that rhyme and are easy to read. These are very good poems, but when you begin to read different types of poetry you start to figure out that a lot of it seems to be nonsense and this is not the case. “Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.” (Auden) This is a very good point because poetry is something that seems to be very clear, until you get to feelings and everyone has different feelings. Poetry is something that can be written in a lot of different ways, in fact there is even poetry about how to write poetry. Archibald MacLeish and Marianne Moore all manage to tie in how poetry is supposed to work in their own poetry. They both do have conflict in some of their ideas in how to write poetry and some ideas are the same. Marianne Moore, and Archibald MacLeish share the same love and passion for poetry but have different opinions on how they should be different.
Over the course of the century chronicling the helm of slavery, the emancipation, and the push for civil, equal, and human rights, black literary scholars have pressed to have their voice heard in the midst a country that would dare classify a black as a second class citizen. Often, literary modes of communication were employed to accomplish just that. Black scholars used the often little education they received to produce a body of works that would seek to beckon the cause of freedom and help blacks tarry through the cruelties, inadequacies, and inconveniences of their oppressed condition. To capture the black experience in America was one of the sole aims of black literature. However, we as scholars of these bodies of works today are often unsure as to whether or not we can indeed coin the phrase “Black Literature” or, in this case, “Black poetry”. Is there such a thing? If so, how do we define the term, and what body of writing can we use to determine the validity of the definition. Such is the aim of this essay because we can indeed call a poem “Black”. We can define “Black poetry” as a body of writing written by an African-American in the United States that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of an experience or set of experiences inextricably linked to black people, characterizes a furious call or pursuit of freedom, and attempts to capture the black condition in a language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. An examination of several works of poetry by various Black scholars should suffice to prove that the definition does hold and that “Black Poetry” is a term that we can use.
Contemporary female poets are a very powerful group of female poets that with their poems shows major events and issues in society. Contemporary female poets usually all have an underlying theme of politics, women rights, life events, and sexuality. Contemporary means living or occurring at the same time and some contemporary female poets are, Adrienne Rich, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Adrienne Rich, Nikki Giovanni, and Gwendolyn Brooks were all writing in the late 1900s. The Women Rights movement and the Civil Rights movement were two events that occurred during the time of the late 1900s. These two movements was heavily incorporated in each Brooks’, Rich’s, and Giovanni’s life and influenced their writings. Each of these women put their personal feelings about political issues in their poems, which makes the theme of their work politics. The theme of these three women work is different aspects of politics, such as women empowerment and women rights, and racial pride. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” by Adrienne Rich, “Nikki-Rosa” by Nikki Giovanni, and “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks are the three poems that each represent the theme of politics regarding women rights and empowerment, and racial pride.
When reading or listening to poetry, the main objective for me is to feel moved. Happiness, longing, sadness are some of the feelings that can be achieved just by listening to others’ words. It is within these words that creates another world, or separates us from our own. Words all have a certain kind of attachment to them, so if used properly an author can stimulate a reader beyond belief.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay, entitled " The Poet", takes the reader into a new awareness concerning an artistic writer. This essay created new insight about a writer's handicraft. Emerson shows us how a poet uses his gift to connect a non-artist of words to feelings that he is unable to express. A poet uses his God-given ingredient, the soul, to describe the things that engulf our lives. We, that do not have this talent, are given this connection by the writings in "The Poet".
Restlessness is the main focus of Phillips’ article, it is the title of his article and in his opinion it is the reason why poems exist at all. “Poetry is the results of a generative restlessness of imagination… uncertainties become obsessions to be wrestled with, and with luck, the result is poetry…” (Phillips 132) Phillips, in summary of his article, claims uncertainties in life trouble our minds until the uncertainties become obsessions. We become restless in our quest to understand the uncertainties we face and by writing poems we can organize our thoughts and try to understand the things we do not. Phillips furthers his explains his claim by admitting “ I write poetry for the same reason that I read it, both as a way of being alive and as a way of trying to understand what it means—how it feels—to be alive.” (Phillips 133).
For example, it sparked the idea, or memory of how much I love nature and the outdoors, and the great sense of peace it brings to me. In an instant, it showed me how far had drifted from that mind set. I think that this poem has the capability of bringing attention to viewers of how far away all of us have drifted from nature. I think of last week when I visited Sioux Falls for the first time, I was truly shocked as I looked around and saw a large number of people so focused on their various versions of technology that they didn’t see Gods beauty passing by. I think it this piece presents a challenging new idea that the simpler times are truly gone. I believe that it has become uncommon for people to seek out the sense of peace from nature that the author describes in this poem in today’s era. It is truly incredible to me how we can tread along in the mundaneness of life, and then suddenly an old thought is drug from the dark recesses of our minds and becomes new
Poetry in essence is a written artistic form of expression. It allows for writers to reveal their ideas and feelings in a very unique way. Wallace Stevens once said, “Poetry is a destructive force”. In other words poetry has power, I believe this is a very true statement. Another poet by the name of William Carlos Williams once said, “Poetry is a small (or large) machine made out of words.” I also believe this statement to be true, each aspect of a poem is important to its function as a whole, and if something is missing or changed it can no longer work in the same way. The poet Derek Walcott I believe knew these “rules of poetry” and modeled them in his own writing. For example we can see use of these statements in his poem “A City’s Death By Fire”.
In the past, if I was inclined to read poetry I would probably have stopped about line two, rolled my eyes and found something else to do with my time. My view of poetry has now changed the way I read other poet’s work. My exposure to several different chapbooks now allows me to recognize themes within poetry, understand the progression of thought through their verse, and garner a comprehension of the motivation behind the artist process of producing a piece of creative art. The idea of motivation in a chapbook became clearer for me when I re-read The State of the Ship by Le. Goldstein. I originally read it in the beginning when I had no knowledge of how to interpret poetry and decided to pick it back up a few days ago. I wanted to gain a better
... since it deals with the growth of the mind. Therefore, the poet uses syntax and form to emphasize on the important matters that occurred in each stanza.