For my final project I do want to take the traditional approach with a chapbook. I know a really good book making place that allows me to what I want and put what I want on the page. I’d really like to have my poem on a page in different forms and structures, with a picture/pictures in the back ground that would allow me to fully encapsulate my poems (with nature specifically). I’d take all the pictures at different locations, much like I did with my video project. But I’d go to different locations or back to the locations that inspired my poem. Like the poem ‘the park’ which is the park right by my house that is beautiful in winter. I’d want to take pictures there, around my house, in the empty rundown buildings in lower town, more train tracks, and another place that really tries to mix both, which I haven’t found yet.

 ‘THEthe poetry’ takes its name from Wallace Stevens poems, but encourages a cultural mixture of writers and critics, writing poems, posts, debating, and analyzing each others writing. The blog name draws the reader in with its seemingly obscure title, but the inclusiveness and recognition by everyone involved in the blog that there are many different forms of poetry brings a new feel to poetry I hadn't experienced before.

“The land of ABCs, we abracadabra to acacia accordion.” The first line of Gene Tanta’s poem ‘The Poem of A with no Beginning grabbed my right away because of the euphory she uses. I thought it was my favorite line in the poem until I got to this one.  ‘The river was like watching silent film alone with nothing to alphabet the amen.’ I can’t put the image this gives me in words. It made me think about how we contemplate silently inside our own minds without using language to describe it to ourselves. We just know.

However, I was very intrigued by Aimee Suzara’s poem ‘Tiny Fires.’ Her interpretation of free verse really caught my eye. The disorganization and confusion allows for the poem to be read in a number of different ways. Not just with tone like other poems can, but literally in the order of the words. I found it quite interesting how she did this. What I really like though was the paragraph in the middle of the poem. I think this poem defines what free verse is in the best way possible. 

Confusion

Creator created craze

Calming caesura

Claustrophobic change

Channeling concussed clashing

Ceasing certain certainties

Curtain calls calling

Cauterizing calamity

Criticizing cities crackle

Chasing chitchat claiming

Chastising charging Christians

Compact clanging clamor

Compare compromised component

Closing cues clue

Craze created creator

The inevitable Reality

It’s the first big step in the direction of your life path.

If it’s so important how can I be so torn?

One second hating school and begging for college,

Then feeling lonely the next, just thinking about leaving everyone.

The numbers precariously grow smaller,

Invisibly counting down the days.

It will be creating lifelong friends in college that I am looking forward to most,

While losing touch with the ones I already have causes sadness.

We will be set free from the bars of SPA that protect us from the real world,

And then realize that we don’t want to leave.

It’ll be Purging the nest that will be the hardest.

Leaving the same house I’ve been in for fifteen years,

No longer having seemingly infinite resources,

Not having a purring kitty greet me every day after school

And not seeing the people and teachers I see every day at school.

That’ll be the hardest.

Yet it is an inevitable reality, coming for us all.

We have just months left to prepare for the real world,

And all that hardships, joy, sadness, and disappointment that make up life,

Will be waiting for us to turn onto Randolph avenue on June 8^th, college bound.

Journal Response to Chris Martin

            Martin clearly is a fan of short, meaningful lines. My own style doesn’t agree with it but his style works well for him. He is able to get important meaning across about whatever his subject is. He also can use a lot of caesura even though he has those short lines. They make the poem choppier, but this allows the poem to get more to the point. To the true energy of the writing that Martin seems to try to center his writing around. I was very intrigued by his ‘Time’ poems. All the different ones just called ‘Time.’ That in of its self is quite interesting to me. How this series shows how time is always there with something different happening in each moment.

            These poems to me are harder to follow and seem much more abstract. With more of a broad meaning, the clarity of the poem is lost but the sounds seem to be what matters. For example, in The Bubble, the lines “doubling bubbling bubble/we grow young/who sing/endless babble/who add only/another flawed wing/aloft in our Merzbau.” Then it’s not just the physical aspects of the poem such as line set up, length, stanza use etc, but it is the way the poem sounds that becoming intriguing. I find it quite interesting how much more power a poem has when read aloud versus when it is just words on a page. It says the same thing but can have multiple different meaning after being read aloud. 

Ben Morris

10/8/13

Poetry

Mr. Wensman

WE wear the mask that grins and lies, 
    It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— 
    This debt we pay to human guile; 
    With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, 
    And mouth with myriad subtleties.

    Why should the world be over-wise, 
    In counting all our tears and sighs? 
    Nay, let them only see us, while 
            We wear the mask.

    We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries 
    To thee from tortured souls arise. 
    We sing, but oh the clay is vile 
    Beneath our feet, and long the mile; 
    But let the world dream otherwise, 
            We wear the mask!

Poetry Analysis of ‘We Wear the Mask’ by Paul Laurence Dunbar

WHAT?

                “We Wear the Mask” has three stanzas with an ABABC/DDEF/ GGHHIJ rhyme scheme. In the first stanza Dunbar is clearly using the mask as a metaphorical representation of our own face, yet he exploits how we use this mask to deceive everyone around us. The first stanza has many details pertaining to the face and how it act, showing one thing when we feel another. How we lie to each other with a smile and what makes this more interesting is that the wearing of the mask seems voluntary. Dunbar here is seemingly trying to exploit how deception and lying is already engrained in our human nature.

                The second stanza has fewer lines than the rest but has a very clear message. Dunbar openly states that we use our face to literally mask our emotions from both others but also the world. That we have to be closed off to everyone and we only truly feel comfortable wearing the mask of deception.

                The third stanza is the most powerful of the three. Dunbar brings religion into his poem in the first line of the stanza, calling out to him for his relief of the opposition towards African Americans and their struggle to gain equal rights. The clay is a symbol, showing how his race as a whole is seemingly stuck in this ‘vile clay’ and that the ‘mile’ of clay they have to get through is to gain equal rights. But that no matter what they would wear the mask.

WHY

                Dunbar is seemingly trying to explain that there is more to a person than just what their face or ‘mask’ tells you.  This mask may say one thing when the person is feeling the exact opposite way on the inside. The mask is hiding the people’s deepest secrets, fears, and harsh realities. Yet he favors wearing the mask even though it is a detrimental attribute that humans have

WHO

                ‘We Wear the Mask’ is written in first person and written with a longing and almost suffering tone to it. A tone of defeat. It implies he feels like his culture has to wear a mask of happiness while they are being subject to awful treatment being slaves.

WHERE/WHEN

                It was written in 1896 when African Americans were not still slaves yet were fighting for equal rights. This is very significant because the poems foundation is upon racism and how the culture feels they have to act. This poem was very dangerous to write since at the time speaking out against whites could result in being murdered.

HOW?

                The breaking up with the stanzas fits how the flow of the poem works. The first stanza reveals how Dunbar believes that all people as a whole do is deceive each other. And how the African American race feels it the most at the time. The second stanza is shorter, and allows Dunbar to say how he feels that their race should keep the mask on with almost a feeling of defeat and contempt. The Final stanza captures how they feel stuck as a culture. That they are in the thick of it in the ‘vile clay’ and must continue on towards their goal of equality.

SO WHAT?

               

                The Metaphor of the mask hiding the essential pieces of the face that reveal emotion is the perfect one for explaining how he and his race felt. It allows for him to indirectly say how the African Americans of the time had just gained their freedom but yet are still not equal.

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

'If'' by Rudyard Kipling 

I chose this poem for poem of the day because it spoke virtue in the most concise form possible.