Emily's+Poetry+Log+(August)

Poetry Log (August)
Favorite Line(s): "the white cumuli dreaming there below/warm fronts and cold fronts streaming through the sky/the mesmerizing rose-and-purple glow." || Favorite Line(s): "Untroubling and untroubled where I lie/the grass below--above the vaulted sky." || Favorite Line(s): "Not a curtains drawn by angels borne/'what a nice way to go' death." || Favorite Line(s): "The caged bird sings with a fearful trill/of things unknown but longed for still/and his tune is heard on the distant hill/for the caged bird sings of freedom." || Favorite Line(s): "Listen! You hear the grating roar/of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling" || Favorite Line(s): "I whispered //to the rescue.//" || Favorite Line(s): "The changing colors of its fruit/Have dowered the stars with merry light" || Favorite Line(s): "The world has room to make a bear feel free;/The universe seems cramped to you and me." || Favorite Line(s): "Then it drags its spiral shell, its adopted history,/sideways, scrabbling across the wet sand." || Favorite Line(s): "hooting its soundless whistle,/and sending on up toward the stars/its smoke, which is pungent and cold." || Favorite Line(s): "then you, and I, and the raven/could eat the body of the old soul that swam so far,/then its roe, its tiny stars, the possibilities." || Favorite Line(s): "I wanted to ask them,///Do you think we can create a void in a supercollider/and destroy not just the world but the night sky?//" || Favorite Line(s): "the moon descends, the world goes colorless,/shadows disappear, and one same darkness/falls on hill and valley." || Favorite Line(s): "when you hopscotched the chalked side-walks of our chromosomes" || Favorite Line(s): "In ideal cities your neighbor sells pot to the cops/for a living, though you've never seen him do it & most days/he wears a caftan to glue rhinestones on the cement frogs." || Favorite Line(s): "we trundle along the pink quartz shore/to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea." || Favorite Line(s): "We are vine and hummingbird,/eucalyptus root and centipede,/junco and blue-belly lizard." || Favorite Line(s): "These bodies: their contours/uncertain. Just a general cast to the light." || Favorite Line(s):"a creature./Off amid cliffs and hills/some unfleshed force roamed free." || Favorite Line(s): "We drove a bad car to the beach./At dusk, a lone scrub pine--/clear, like a Japanese print. In the real sky, the moon/ slid through clouds that were cinder-colored." || Favorite Line(s): "The sea turns bucket-galvanize./We toss shells out on the rocks again/We eat day and sea,/the coastline's living tongue." || Favorite Line(s): "You rejoice for the frog./Stupidly, also sadly, you/sing your own bright springtime song." || Favorite Line(s): "May anyone who likes to mend, come mend." || Favorite Line(s): "Out to sea, through the Golden Gate,/[...]/sail west, west, towards China." ||
 * || **Date** || **Title** || **Poet** || **Comments** ||
 * 1 || August 12, 2011 || [|Flying] || Sarah Arvio || "Flying" describes the bittersweet experience of flying in an airplane, with the "cramped rows of seats" as well as the "mesmerizing rose-and-purple glow" of the sky outside. Much like religious prayer or a dream, airplanes cause the traveler to leave the earth for a while, as if "nowhere else exists," and often leads a person to forget what he or she has left behind. The speaker reveals the myriad reasons and emotions of travelers and shows that some enjoy the experience while others wish to return home, emphasizing the bittersweet nature of flying.
 * 2 || August 13, 2011 || [|I Am] || John Clare || "I Am" refers to one of the many names God possesses. This poem speaks of the way that people have betrayed God despite His never-ending love towards them, and His disappointment towards such human behaviors. The last stanza of the poem makes reference to God's human life and form on earth as Jesus Christ as well as a longing for people to abide by Him.
 * 3 || August 13, 2011 || [|Let Me Die A Youngman's Death] || Roger McGough || In the poem "Let Me Die A Youngman's Death," the speaker conveys that despite his old age he wishes to die as a young man would, by being run over by a car, attacked by a gang, or even killed when his mistress catches him with her daughter. The speaker suggests that although he is old, he still wants to participate in youthful activities and live a full, adventurous life rather than the mollified life of an ordinary old man who passes away silently and peacefully.
 * 4 || August 13, 2011 || **[|I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings]** || Maya Angelou || The poem "I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings" is a simple poem comparing the lives of a free bird and a caged bird. While the free bird can enjoy all the luxury it has in the world, the caged bird is trapped. The only freedom the bird has is to sing; "the caged bird sings of freedom." After reading this poem, I felt that the comparison between the two birds is analogous to real world situations. Those who are not free or lack certain rights speak out in protests and various forms of movements while those who possess freedom often remain silent and enjoy the luxuries of freedom. An example is evident in the mid-1800's when the Women's Rights Movement began in the United States, fighting for women's rights to vote. During this time, men, who possessed the right to vote, did not often "sing" or speak out to the public.
 * 5 || August 14, 2011 || [|Dover Beach] || Matthew Arnold || The ocean in "Dover Beach" serves as an image, first showing the beauty of the moon and the water. Then, the ocean becomes more violent, with the "grating roar" and "tremulous cadence" that eventually leads to "human misery" and sadness described in the second stanza. In the third stanza, the ocean becomes a metaphor for "The Sea of Faith," which refers to a time when the principles of science did not interfere with people's religious beliefs. Now, as religion is increasingly neglected by people, the waves of the "Sea of Faith" retreat, leaving us in a "confused" and violent darkness. The structure of the poem also follows the rise and fall of ocean waves. In the first stanza, the ocean transitions from a calm sea to a violent, roaring sea before returning to a melancholic tranquility. The exclamatory remark and the asyndetons in the final stanza also suggest another climax in the motion of the ocean waves, with the last three lines of the poem acting as the receding waves that leave us in darkness.
 * 6 || August 14, 2011 || [|Dead Brother Superhero] || Michael Dickman || In "Dead Brother Superhero," the speaker creates an imaginary paradigm where his brother watches over him from "outer space" and, allowing him to feel calm and safe so that the speaker "[does not] need to be afraid anymore." The speaker imagines that his brother "saved his brain from its burning building" and controlled "the bullet in [his] heart," suggesting that imagining his brother is a superhero relieves the speaker's sadness regarding his brother's absence.
 * 7 || August 15, 2011 || [|The Two Trees] || William Butler Yeats || In the poem "The Two Trees," the trees serve as metaphors for darkness and light respectively, the opposite aspects of life, heaven and hell, good and evil. The first tree is described in the first stanza and represents light, with love, beauty and purity included in descriptions of mythical and divine ideas. In contrast to the first, the second tree is described with bitterness, emptiness, and deception through mention of demons. While the two trees represent opposite aspects of life, the first tree, described also as "trembling" and "ignorant" seems to be slightly contaminated with the ideas of the second, suggesting that even the purest things in life have been contaminated by sin.
 * 8 || August 15, 2011 || [|The Bear] || Robert Frost || Like Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," Robert Frost's "The Bear" compares a caged creature with a wild one. While Angelou's poem compares two similar creatures however, Frost describes a wild bear and uses the caged bear as a metaphor for human behavior. The wild bear is free to roam wherever it pleases, while like a caged bear humans are "cramped" in the universe, with our constant pondering of knowledge and "scientific tread." Like a caged bear we pace back and forth, taking a short break now and then to"sway [our] head through ninety odd degrees of arc."
 * 9 || August 15, 2011 || [|Hermit] || Gail Mazur || The hermit crab described in "Hermit" seems to be a metaphor for human history. In the early ages, humans theoretically lived alone and could "withdraw into the desert and praise his gods in solitude." As time passed, however, the hermit crab would grow out of his old home and move on in search of a new one, much like a king's journey to expand his empire. Like a king's conquest of other lands and territories, the hermit crab will "extract the old inhabitant--usually a dead, or dying, or less aggressive crab." During high tide, the crab is forced to deal with his new, larger shell just as a ruler must now handle the problems of a much larger area of land, and cannot abandon it no matter his regret. The speaker reveals that like man's home, a crab's home will never fully satisfy it, and it must eventually move on to a new home by new conquests. At the end of the poem, the poet leaves a message for herself, asking her to consider whether, despite her old age (and her own decision to settle), she will still have the desire to move on again, just as the hermit crab inevitably does.
 * 10 || August 15, 2011 || **[|Landscape with Grief Train]** || David Young || The locomotive in "Landscape with Grief Train" serves as a metaphor for the sad memories one carries throughout a lifetime. With every new grievance, another car is added to the "ugly" locomotive. This train has a "long distance to travel," as it remains a memory forever. Sometimes the train becomes hidden by the landscape of mountains and rivers, but other times, often at random moments, it is sighted and brings back a bitter memory. The train is often forgotten, just as people can "forget" sad moments of their lives. However, the train will still remain somewhere in the near distance "sending on up towards the starts,/its smoke, which is pungent cold."
 * 11 || August 16, 2011 || [|Raven] || D.M. Gordon || D.M. Gordon's "Raven" seems to serve, like it does in popular culture, as a symbol of the heinous aspects of the world, much like the second tree in Yeat's "The Two Trees." The birth of the raven on the speaker's hand comes when the speaker is "young and uninformed," suggesting his childlike innocence. As a metaphor for sin, the raven grows and accompanies the speaker for all his life as he witnesses other sinful beings "raise generations of shadows," in other words, generations of sinful people. Upon this witness, the speaker "squirm[s]," suggesting his reluctance to and fear of following the raven's instincts and plans. The only channel of escape from the raven sin is in sleep, when sin rests. However, by the last stanza of the poem, the speaker reveals that he, like those ravens who have "raised generations of shadows," has become sinful and has the desire to spread the raven's ways to the reader (this also alludes to the biblical idea of Satan's desire to spread sin in the world). In the last few lines of the poem, the speaker states that upon catching a salmon "from the river as it left the sea, [the reader], and [the speaker], and the raven could eat the body of the old soul that swam so far, then its roe, its tiny stars, the possibilities." The salmon in these last lines acts as a metaphor for the hopes and dreams and hard work that has and will be destroyed by the raven and by sin.
 * 12 || August 16, 2011 || [|The Next Apartment] || D. Nurske || "The Next Apartment" contrasts the life of the speaker, who lives alone, with that of the couple who lives in the next apartment. The speaker describes the habitual cycles of the couple, to fight, reconcile, and eventually apologize to the speaker for the chaos "yesterday" or "tomorrow," upon which after a brief conversation, the neighbors would return to their respective quarters; the couple as "the same person enter[ing] their tiny room" and the speaker entering sleep." Despite the speaker's apparent tone of general apathy as he describes these experiences, one cannot help but hear a hint of sorrow as the speaker contrasts his neighbor's lives with his own life of solitude. While the speaker seems to attempt to cover his melancholy and inner pain with "sleep," it is evident that in spite of the chaotic lives of the couple next door, he does have some desire for the happiness and unification that his neighbors experience.
 * 13 || August 21, 2011 || **[|The Setting of the Moon]** || Giacomo Leopardi (translated from Italian by Jonathan Galassi) || "The Setting of the Moon" acts as a metaphor for the maturing of man and thus the loss of youthfulness. The the moon serves as a symbol of children's fantastical dreams and stories of "insubstantial images and phantoms." It stands for childhood and youth, guiding young minds through the night and protecting them from the fear of the darkness. "The Setting of the Moon" represents the maturing of youth. When the moon sets, the night is left dark and the people blind in the pitch black as "youth fades out" and "The shadows/and the shapes of glad illusions/flee, and distant hopes,/[...] give way." The darkness of the night leaves man forlorn and joyless until the sun finally rises. Man bathes in the light of the sun, but our previous youthfulness has died, those times now "in the grave."
 * 14 || August 21, 2011 || [|Prologue, Epilogue] || Steve Gehrke || In the poem "Prologue, Epilogue" the speaker illustrates the difficulty of creating a child through various puns and wordplay involving childhood activities. The speaker also conveys the ups and downs, the joyful and disappointing moments in the attempts towards creating a child; "when you were a syntax,/a structure, the perfect rhyme, the one that worked,/the eureka in our laboratory of sighs, when you/were unjointed, unmade, unbecome, bodiless,/vagabond, a clapper in need of a bell." The entire poem is structured with only commas until the final line which ends in a question mark, which conveys the breathlessness and weariness of the journey as well as the victory of the end and mystery of the future.
 * 15 || August 21, 2011 || [|Ideal Cities] || Erika Meitner || The speaker describes "Ideal Cities" as ones of peace where people are unaware of crimes and uncaring of the trials and tribulations we are irritated by in our cities. People are free to think without criticism, no matter how ridiculous the thought might be ("my neighbor thinks/his house is haunted"). People are free to commit crimes such as "selling pot" although nobody would ever see him. The speaker conveys that in her ideal city, it doesn't matter what people do, since the things you don't know won't hurt you. The ideal city is a place where nobody judges anyone else for who they are, what they do for a living, or what they think. In short, in the speaker's ideal city everyone gets along harmoniously by treating everyone, even a robber or a drug dealer, as a neighbor or a friend.
 * 16 || August 21, 2011 || [|Genealogy] || Caki Wilkinson || The poem "Genealogy" traces the family tree of what begins with a miserable and lonely couple, unhappy with their inheritance of "nearsightedness, short fuses, long regrets." Misery lead the woman to become pregnant, and the child grows up in the footsteps of her parents, because the child, "lonely's poor," "is worse" off than her parents. As the generations progress, the children continue to follow the footsteps of their parents, the inability to accept their characteristics and the misery of being surrounded by rumors of their parents' infidelity. Each daughter can't stand it, finds a source of comfort (however temporary), and ends up alone with a child who is then raised with misery and anger. This poem effectively illustrates the inability of the human race to learn from the previous generation; the human race is destined to continue the bad habits of the past, unable to reach the goals of the future. ||
 * 17 || August 21, 2011 || **[|Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the]**
 * [|Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London]** || Michael Derrick Hudson || In the poem "Feeling Sorry for Myself While Standing Before the Stegosaurus at the Natural History Museum in London," the speaker's imagination of the stegosaurus's prehistoric life serves as a metaphor for his own tiresome human life. The speaker states that like the stegosaurus, he has also experienced the "//thud thud thud//" of a monotonous life. Every day, the speaker becomes increasingly tired of his routine, "One stumpy/footprint after another, tracking the trackless," repeatedly performing the same tasks that lead nowhere. As the stegosaurus "[forgets its] clutch of eggs" due to his daily work, the speaker's suggests that his own occupation has caused him to forget about his family as well. The speaker describes the stegosaurus as having a "tiny gray walnut for a brain and [a] fat black tongue tough as a bootsole," suggesting the speaker's own feeling of stupidity and at times, perhaps tongue-tied nature during his day. At the end of the poem, the speaker empathizes with the stegosaurus, saying that they both "trundle along the pink quartz shore/ to sip at the lukewarm edge of yet another evaporating sea." This closing line conveys that even after a job is done, both the speaker and the stegosaurus merely move on to another pointless and monotonous task alone.
 * 18 || August 21, 2011 || [|Territory] || Ada Limon || The poem "Territory" seems to express nostalgia towards our old homes, nature. When "we long gone tree leaners" finally "make our way to the creek bed," as if returning to visit our old homes. We suddenly feel a sense of longing for our lost territory, lying "our flightless selves" down in the river rocks; we are no longer the free-flying creatures we used to be, but trapped in our man-made civilizations. The speaker describes this nature as a "precious territory," and insists that soon we will be begging to return to our native environments.
 * 19 || August 21, 2011 || [|Landscape with Figures Partially Erased] || D. A. Powell || "Landscape with Figures Partially Erased" describes the changes on earth that have cut out the perfect world we used to live in. Perhaps because of war, development, or even sin in general, the "faces disappear" and people lose limbs, riddling their "contours uncertain." The world used to be beautiful, but our industrialization and invention created weapons of destruction. Initially we were awed, as the speaker admits that he was "awed by the vapor" of the gas his father used to pour onto the ground. But all these things "beguiled" him, and soon "whole villages burned with a single spritz," murdering the beauty of the world and thus truly creating a "Landscape with Figures Partially Erased."
 * 20 || August 27, 2011 || [|Elk at Tomales Bay] || Tess Taylor || In the poem "Elk at Tomales Bay," the speaker suggests human interference has caused the beauty of nature to be destroyed. The speaker begins standing by, watching the natural habitat of a herd of elk as they feed, until one male elk suddenly "rears/squaring to look at us/his antlers and his gaze/held suddenly motionless," as if the elk stops in shock or horror. The elk's astonishment seems to be explained when the speaker continues and notices "the skeleton" of a dead elk, laying on its own hide, "ribs fanned open/hollow, empty of organs." The male elk's behavior towards the speaker seems to accuse her of harming its kin, suggesting that this violent and grotesque death noted by the speaker was caused by human violence towards nature. The speaker further suggests man's role in the death of this elk by illustrating the elk's appearance with humanistic descriptions such as "that fur the red-brown color/of a young boy's head" and "the eye's rim sagged/flat as a bicycle tire." In the end, the speaker suggests that although man's actions have destroyed a part of the world's beauty, this beauty still lives on, roaming free far from our contaminated world.
 * 21 || August 27, 2011 || [|Song for El Cerrito] || Tess Taylor || In "Song for El Cerrito," the speaker's newfound appreciation for her hated past serves as a metaphor for the change in our values as we grow older and look back on our past. The speaker admits that she "used to hate [El Cerrito's] working-class bungalows, grid planning" and was ashamed that her parents worked so hard for so little money. As an adult however, the speaker now values all the things from her childhood, refusing to throw these memories away. The speaker takes pleasure in all the small things in her childhood home, "mother's aging books" and even the "bad wood siding." The speaker remembers all the good times she had in this small house and enjoys the old smells, the scenery of the neighborhood. At the end of the poem, the speaker summarizes her experiences through a metaphor; as her childhood home seemed to be terrible, she "drove a bad car to the beach." When the speaker arrived, however, she thoroughly appreciated the journey and bathed in the beauty of the sky and the moon, just as she enjoyed the old memories of her childhood home. In short, the road of life is a bumpy one. But when you finally get to your destination, you will find that the journey was all worthwhile.
 * 22 || August 27, 2011 || [|Low Tide Little River] || Tess Taylor || "Low Tide Little River" is a poem about the destructive nature human habits towards the ocean. The ocean has its own ecosystem, trading its own resources with the land so that it can provide nutrients to satisfy the creatures of the sea. However, greedy as we are, humans arrive as "scavengers." As we "hunker in the sand" and "elbow land and muck," the ocean tries to resist, "suck[ing] and tow[ing]/as if it wants to sink us back/into its primordial muck," perhaps so that we cannot take what we have found. But we persist, and our human products enter the sea, the black oil squelching up the blue sea, and our pollution causing the sea levels to rise. The speaker references the hole in our ozone layer, emphasizing the damage we have done to the earth. However, we continue our old habits, taking food from the sea and dumping pollution and the bones of eaten crustacea back in.
 * 23 || August 27, 2011 || **[|Time on Earth]** || Tess Taylor || In the poem "Time on Earth," the speaker criticizes mankind for living in his own small and limited world. Man is enclosed and protected from the pressing issues of "terrorists," "medical waste," and the "global financial crisis." The world they live in remains unaffected, peaceful, calm, passive. Although man is aware that at some point, he will be affected by these terrible crises, he puts these worries off, simply stating "this is my time on earth" and burning the newspaper, literally admitting that these issues are of no importance. Even then, man takes pleasure in stupid things, like the way titles of books sound instead of the knowledge they hold. Man shows no appreciation for real knowledge, memorizing the names of constellations but "half forget[ting] their stories." And when man sees a tiny frog on his front porch, he "stupidly, also sadly," shouts out nothing but "A frog! A frog!" and rejoices in its presence as if this tiny frog was the most pressing issue on his mind.
 * 24 || August 27, 2011 || [|Route 1 North Woolwich Maine] || Tess Taylor || In the poem "Route 1 North Woolwich Maine," while the speaker expresses cynicism and skepticism towards the run down shops she sees, the poem also suggests the reason for the existence of such places. The speaker criticizes the trinkets the shop sells, such as "worn screens" and an "oil-smeared curtain." The general mindset of the store seems to be, "Don't throw it yet. Someone might want it," and the speaker regards this thought with skepticism: "In real life who’s got time to patch worn screens?" Yet if the store could not survive off of its junky objects, why would it still stand here? Thus, the poem suggest that despite the common person's skepticism towards such run down places and lack of value for worn and used objects, there are still many out there, may these people be artists or those in poverty, who would be more than happy to purchase goods from this store. One man's trash is another man's treasure.
 * 25 || August 27, 2011 || [|World's End: North of San Francisco] || Tess Taylor || The poem "World's End: North of San Francisco" seems to describe Northern California. The speaker makes a reference to the animals common to this area of the state, and alludes to the "Miwok gods," which were incorporated in the religion of Native Americans who used to live in the region. The speaker describes the end of the area as a "Fortress," perhaps referring to the numerous skyscrapers in the metropolitan area, or Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco. (Some irony also surfaces in the second part of the poem, as the speaker "sail[s] west, west, towards China." While the westward direction may appear logical, China is usually referred to as being in the east, suggesting that the speaker is also referring to ChinaTown in the San Francisco area, suggesting the complete transformation of culture that has taken place since the Native Americans lived there). The speaker contrasts the lives the Native Americans used to live, in harmony with nature, with the lives of man today. Now we live amongst ruins of the past; we have replaced the lively and spiritual culture with our fortress for the world's end.