The Day Millicent Found the World- Poem response 22

We discussed this poem in class, and I thought I would do my blog about it because it really stood out in my mind. The three longer stanzas kind of act like a story. The first stanza is where she goes past her comfort zone, far away, deep into the forest where she is lost. Then the second stanza is where she really comes to realize the beauty of the forest and of the world. With vivid metaphores like "...the round at her feet had a velvet nearness," or " She felt caught up and breathing in a great powerful embrace," really help to make the poem interact with the reader. The last stanza is where something snaps her back to reality, yet her new found knowledge makes her a different person. I really liked the style of the poem being more of a story, but the meaning behind it was also really cool. The whole concept of immersing oneself into the natural world to actually discover a unity. Cool idea. :)

Cottonmouth Country- Poem response 21

This poem is pretty intense! First off, a cottonmouth, is a really poisonous snake, found in swamps. Also, Hatteras (which I have never heard of before) is a place on the shore of North Carolina. Cape Hatteras actually. So thoe two things help to better understand the poem. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcd. It is all one stanza. The poem is about death, clearly, with lines like "fish bones walked the waves," it just gives this image of a bunch of dead fish in the tide of the ocean floating along. So the combination of dea fish in the water, and cottonmouth snakes slithering in the grass, "An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss," gives this sense of death and danger at every turn. The author talks about how death was there on land or in the water. The author also talks about the pollution of Hatteras, and that could possibly by why there are dead fish. I don't completely understand the lines about birth being loss, but I think that it means, the child being born already lost because they are born right into this place of death. I could be wrong. I know a lot of other blogs thought it was about changes, and I could see that side as well. I like the last line about leaving a skin there, because it brings the poem back around to the title refereeing to a snakely habit. the author left a skin in Hatteras, and knows the losses she suffered?

Sort of a Song- poem reponse 20

Sort of a Song

by William Carlos Williams

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.

—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

I am trying to do more poetic terms, and
analyze the structure using
the notes we got in class. This was the
poem that Steph and I taught this week.
the poem is very short, divided into two
 stanzas, composed of 6 lines each. There
is no rhyme scheme. The flow of the poem, musically
speaking, is very sticatto
(spelling??). As a reader, I found myself speaking
 in a very short and light manner.
It is because of his line breaks, which provide
 a sort of punctuation. The breaks
between under/weed/writing in the first stanza create
 this kind of sticatto sense,
whichreflects nicely back to the title of
the poem, "Sort of a Song."
The 2 lines of the poem break the mold
 of the first stanza, but they
alone have their own rhythm.Williams broke the
 line at "splits" which
I think  is very cool, because not only
 does the
image of this flower splitting a rock come
 to mind,
but also the actual line is
 broken at the word split.

Steph and I determined that this poem was about a poet, who is
being compared
to a snake, and how he comes
up with different things, and writes them down
quickly as to invent a new idea. These ideas are so
powerful, that they can split someone's mind.
Compose, and invent are used to produce this idea that a poet has
the ability to write something that is completely
brand new, and can be used.

This is a really cool poem!

It was a dream -response 19

First a little BK on the author, Lucille Clifton was an African American poet as well as equal rights activist for blacks and women. In this poem Clifton uses so much description through figurative language to really paint the picture of the dream she had. It was a reflection upon her life, and asking the questions challenging if she had lead a fulfilling life. she mentions her "greater self." I thin this is a strong opening because we all have that ideal image of our selves, and wish we could rise to be the greatest. Her greater self is creaming things that she could have done differently in real life. This short poem gets right to the point that we all try and figure out what we could have done differently in our lives to get certain things accomplished, or reach certain goals, yet sometimes we fall short. By the sound of things Clifton was successful in her endeavors, so I guess she was just struggling with a lot of internal conflict. The poem does a good job pointing out that we as people usually ask what we could have done, after it is already too late. I liked this poem, and it was interesting to read about the author.