Blog Assignment #2
1) Many emotions come to mind when I got done reading the poems. One was the feeling of hopelessness and the feeling that I was alone. A nasty dark feeling that can only be described as having complete darkness take over me.
2) The images that I picked are dark just like the poems themselves.
http://www.fotosearch.com/photos-images/darkness.html
We Real Cool
Sun hidden behind clouds in dark sky at sunset
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Portrait of a Young Woman in a Dark Tropical Landscape
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
Old boot in Dark Railway Tunnels
Monday, October 5, 2009
Blog Assignment #1:
1) Poetry is the feeling that you get when you express your deep thoughts and feeling in writing or lyrical versus.
2) To me if you’re going to write a poem you need to have a reason or a statement that can be expressed in your poem. A poem has to have passion behind it. Something that is not a poem would be something that is dry and has no real meaning behind it. It wouldn’t make you think or even make you want to express yourself.
3) Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.
Gary Soto Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California, in April, 1952, to working-class Mexican-American parents. He studied poetry at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned his MFA in 1976. Influenced by a variety of poets, including Pablo Neruda and Edward Field, Soto writes poems that focus on daily experiences, often reflecting on his life as a Chicano. "Gary Soto's poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life."
These poems to me express deep thought that to me are some of the key essentials when it comes to poetry.
1) Poetry is the feeling that you get when you express your deep thoughts and feeling in writing or lyrical versus.
2) To me if you’re going to write a poem you need to have a reason or a statement that can be expressed in your poem. A poem has to have passion behind it. Something that is not a poem would be something that is dry and has no real meaning behind it. It wouldn’t make you think or even make you want to express yourself.
3) Gwendolyn Brooks Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.
Gary Soto Gary Soto was born in Fresno, California, in April, 1952, to working-class Mexican-American parents. He studied poetry at the University of California, Irvine, where he earned his MFA in 1976. Influenced by a variety of poets, including Pablo Neruda and Edward Field, Soto writes poems that focus on daily experiences, often reflecting on his life as a Chicano. "Gary Soto's poems are fast, funny, heartening, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life."
These poems to me express deep thought that to me are some of the key essentials when it comes to poetry.
the sonnet-ballad
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate--and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate--and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
Who Will Know Us?
by Gary Soto
for Jaroslav Seifert
It is cold, bitter as a penny.
I'm on a train, rocking toward the cemetery
To visit the dead who now
Breathe through the grass, through me,
Through relatives who will come
And ask, Where are you?
Cold. The train with its cargo
Of icy coal, the conductor
With his loose buttons like heads of crucified saints,
His mad puncher biting zeros through tickets.
The window that looks onto its slate of old snow.
Cows. The barbed fences throat-deep in white.
Farm houses dark, one wagon
With a shivering horse.
This is my country, white with no words,
House of silence, horse that won't budge
To cast a new shadow. Fence posts
That are the people, spotted cows the machinery
That feed Officials. I have nothing
Good to say. I love Paris
And write, "Long Live Paris!"
I love Athens and write,
"The great book is still in her lap."
Bats have intrigued me,
The pink vein in a lilac.
I've longed to open an umbrella
In an English rain, smoke
And not give myself away,
Drink and call a friend across the room,
Stomp my feet at the smallest joke.
But this is my country.
I walk a lot, sleep.
I eat in my room, read in my room,
And make up women in my head —
Nostalgia, the cigarette lighter from before the war,
Beauty, tears that flow inward to feed its roots.
The train. Red coal of evil.
We are its passengers, the old and young alike.
Who will know us when we breathe through the grass?
by Gary Soto
for Jaroslav Seifert
It is cold, bitter as a penny.
I'm on a train, rocking toward the cemetery
To visit the dead who now
Breathe through the grass, through me,
Through relatives who will come
And ask, Where are you?
Cold. The train with its cargo
Of icy coal, the conductor
With his loose buttons like heads of crucified saints,
His mad puncher biting zeros through tickets.
The window that looks onto its slate of old snow.
Cows. The barbed fences throat-deep in white.
Farm houses dark, one wagon
With a shivering horse.
This is my country, white with no words,
House of silence, horse that won't budge
To cast a new shadow. Fence posts
That are the people, spotted cows the machinery
That feed Officials. I have nothing
Good to say. I love Paris
And write, "Long Live Paris!"
I love Athens and write,
"The great book is still in her lap."
Bats have intrigued me,
The pink vein in a lilac.
I've longed to open an umbrella
In an English rain, smoke
And not give myself away,
Drink and call a friend across the room,
Stomp my feet at the smallest joke.
But this is my country.
I walk a lot, sleep.
I eat in my room, read in my room,
And make up women in my head —
Nostalgia, the cigarette lighter from before the war,
Beauty, tears that flow inward to feed its roots.
The train. Red coal of evil.
We are its passengers, the old and young alike.
Who will know us when we breathe through the grass?
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