Sunday, June 3, 2012

Creative 6-1-12

Classes are done time to celebrate.
This is the last we will see of quarters.
All that's left are finals and graduation.
Now that awaits some, are semesters
The rest are going to start their jobs

Everyone's out tonight
Going to be out all night long
Dollar shots for the whole table
Take one and pass them down
Order another round
The last girls night of the year
Before we go our separate ways
Chicago, Columbus, Texas, Athens
Now there will be places to visit

Four years went by way to fast
These are going to be the ones
We'll remember. The friends we
Can't forget. So let's enjoy the night.
Taking pictures to hold our memories.
Laughing about all the good times
we had, and even the bad.

Friday, June 1, 2012

Critical 6-1-12


. Before this quarter I had never really written a poem so starting out I didn’t think I was going to be able to do a great job. As the quarter went on I actually was having fun with it. I seemed to do my best work after the due date and usually the ideas came while I was in my afternoon class on Tuesday’s and Thursday’s. While trying to revise some of my poems I had some difficulty because I couldn’t figure out where I wanted the poem to go. Then I just started fooling around with different lines and changing them and I think I have fixed them in a good way. I hope to continue writing poems and maybe fixing the ones I have already written even more.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Creative 5-25-12


Revised:
We’re driving along down the road
Heading to an early meeting
The GPS says wrong way, turn around
So we listen and end up with no more signal
We decide to continue on this way
Heading on a winding windy road
In the middle of no where
A shack, a run-down house
Are the only things we see,
We come across a small town
There is no one in sight, so we
Keep on heading down this winding road
Trying to find just where we needed to go
Another dreary empty town
It feels like we’ve been here before
Going in circles, with only a half hour past
It seems like much longer than that
Just when we were worried most
The signal updates and we realize
We’ve been heading in the right direction all along
No longer lost, we head on through
To the place we needed to be

A week later all over the news
A man killed by wild animals,
Who are no longer caged. All this happening
In the place where we just were
This gives our journey such an eerie feeling
What could have happened if it had been last week
It might have made the trip more worth telling
Instead this is the end and never will we go
Back through that town again

Original:
We were driving along down the road
Heading to the symposium
The GPS said wrong way turn around
So we did and ended up with no more signal
It's decided to continue on this way
We are heading down a windy road
In the middle of no where
A shack, a run down house
are the only things we see for miles
We come across a small town
There is no one in sight so we
Keep on heading down this windy road
Trying to find just where we need to be
Just then the GPS signal updates
We have been heading in the right direction after all
No longer lost we head on through
To Zanesville and find the place we needed to go

Critical 5-25-12

After the peer review in class the other day I got some good ideas on how I am going to structure the rest of my paper. I am going to continue to work on it day by day adding little bits whenever I think of a new idea to add to the paper. One of the poems that we just read by Anne Carson about memory and her father' dementia is actually going to work really well in my paper. So I will be rearranging my paper a little bit to be able to include this poem. I think it will work really well to bring my philosophy of poetry together. 

Friday, May 18, 2012

Criticial 5-18-12


Several of the poems we read all talk about memory. So for my final paper I want to focus on the topic of memory and the different types of memory portrayed in the poems we have read this quarter. In Virginia Woolf’s essay “From a Sketch of the Past”, it talks about a very early memory that she experienced. W.H. Auden writes about a specific day and the memory of how it felt on that day in his “September 1, 1939” poem. In Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room”, she is talking about the memory of going with her aunt to the dentist. “Piano” by D.H. Lawrence was about how a women singing sparked a memory of his childhood with a piano.

Creative 5-18-12

One of the best memories I have
was when I marched down
Main Street of Disney World
People were cheering, cameras were flashing
My mom and dad were in the crowd
We were about to march and everyone was
In an amazing mood, having the time of our lives
In this once in a lifetime opportunity.
I remember feeling nervous and excited all at once
Here I was about to perform all the songs we had
Practiced the whole year at Football games
This was somehow different, the thousands
Of people that were waiting for us to come around
the corner and march and play the music right up in
front of the Magic Kingdom. 

Monday, May 7, 2012

Critical 5-7-12


In her book “Ka-Ching”, Denise Duhamel uses several different forms of poetry. She wrote a villanelle “Please don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen”. The repeating lines in this poem were “remember to pamper, remember to preen”, “Don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen”. Denise wrote this poem based on graffiti inside of a ladies’ bathroom. She did a pretty good job of making fun of what society thinks about women and attempting to show women to take pride in themselves. This poem proves to be limited because she has to rhyme everything with preen and queen. Some of the stanzas don’t quite go together and seem forced. “Smile, especially when you’re feeling mean. Keep your top down when you take your car for a whirl”, these lines have nothing to do with each other. The first line is basically saying bite your tongue if you’re angry and just put on a smile and the other is talking about when you are in your car going for a drive. Duhamel has also used the word ‘girl’ to rhyme all the middle lines of the stanzas. This is limiting her to certain words as well and I think when she used the line with whirl she was just trying for something to rhyme with girl.
Denise wrote a sestina about Sean Penn in her poem “Delta Flight 659”.  When I first read this I wouldn’t have understood why every line ended with ‘pen’ if it hadn’t been for her lines “maybe this should be in iambic pentameter rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in Penn”. These lines made the rest of the poem more understandable, in the sense of using Penn at the end of each line. A couple of her lines seem out of place in the theme of 9/11. Her line “poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula of glamour like so many menacing penguins” doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems like she is stretching it out just to be able to get the ‘pen’. The poem seems to be about the differences between her political beliefs and the political beliefs of Sean Penn.
Duhamel’s first 10 poems are all the same type, which are unlike any other in the book. They are more in paragraph form then in the shape of a typical poem. These stood out to me because they were uniquely written, sideways in the book. Every title is a dollar amount. Every single one of these poems talks about money in some shape or form. When I first saw that the titles were dollar amount and went up to the by 100,000 until they reached 1,000,000, I thought they were going to be stories told in a consecutive order. They seem almost random though. Each one talks about something different. This was a surprise to me, I am not sure why Denise did these poems this way other than the fact they all talk about money. I really liked her sentence in the $100,000 “there is a metaphor here somewhere, that making money can be messy and aggressive, that wimps like me will never truly take a hammer to a gift”. This sentence stuck out because some kids don’t want to break their piggy banks that they received as gifts but there are others who don’t care all they want is the money out of it.

Friday, May 4, 2012

Creative 5-4-12

Words thought in daylight turned to actions at midnight
When the night falls you line up, show ID not sure what you'll find
Inside there's plenty to see
A girl on the table, camera flashes
Two guys throwing them back
There's a couple dancing, if you can call it that
Many more talk with each other, ready to unwind
When the clock strikes midnight, everything changes
One, two, three, four are ordered and passed around
It starts to get crowded, it's about to get rowdy
A fight breaks out between two guys
Fighting over a passed out girl
Then sirens sounds close by


This is all I could get, Emily if there's anything I should add or change let me know!

Friday, April 27, 2012

Creative 4-27-12

Revised:

Take a walk, holding daddy’s hand
To the park we’d go
Where we would spend the day
On the jungle gym and swings

He would tell me jokes that made me laugh
Could get me out of any tree I climbed
Sat next to me while I picked flowers
We would talk about the butterflies
Watching them from the beginning
When they were just little caterpillars
Until the day they would come out of their cocoons
Into the beautiful thing they are
Once they were ready to go
We would watch them fly into the sun

Daddy knew how to make the day fun
Picking me up from school to go on the run
Museums, parks, movies and possibly to the aquarium
When I was with him there was nowhere I’d rather be

Now I am grown up and on my own
There are times when I look back
And remember how simple it was
When there was nothing to worry about
Except where the next adventure would take us


Original:
Once Upon a Time

Take a walk, holding daddy's hand
To the park we would go
Where we would spend the day
On the jungle gym and swings

He always knew how to make me laugh
Could coax me out of any tree I climbed
We would talk about the butterflies
They were my favorite to see

We would lay there talking and
He told stories that he had memorized

Daddy knew how to make the day fun
Picking me up from school to go on the run
Museums, parks, movies and more
When I was with him I would soar

Now I am grown up and on my own
I look back and remember all the days
We would pick up and go somewhere fun
I wish I could go back to once upon a time.

Cricital 4-27-12


In Terrance Hayes’ book “Lighthead” a reoccurring theme thatI noticed was language. In several of the poems there was talk about specific languageas well as the big picture of language. Language in Terrance Hayes’ “Lighthead”includes the changes in structure and tone, the use of repetition and thehistory of language.

The first poem I want to talk about is “Lighthead’s Guide tothe Galaxy”. In this poem Hayes writes “I know all words come from preexistingwords and divide until our pronouncements develop selves”. This was a greatline that talks about the uses of words and how they all come from other words.He is making an announcement to the people and stating that language divides upuntil it can develop itself in the present. I took this to mean that eventhough there are some words that are used now from the past they may not havethe same meanings now. I also liked the lines “Not what you see, but what youperceive: that’s poetry”. This summed up what we are doing in our class when wediscuss the poems we’ve read. It’s not just the words on the page |(not whatyou see) but it is the meaning behind what is written (what you perceive) that makes a piece of writing poetry.

The language in “Support the Troops” is a little strange butI really liked the line about “And I admit my awe looking on the marine with atalent for making the eagle tattooed across his back rear his talons”. To me, thedescription paints a picture in your mind of what this would actually look like.|I think that is what language does. When you use descriptive language, youpaint a picture for the reader.

I also wanted to talk about the repetition used in “Lighthead’sGuide to Addiction”. The writer states “I am addicted to repetition which is aform of history”. In this poem he uses the repetition of being addicted to onething then there is this solution, but once you’re addicted to the solution thenyou have to find another solution. This form of repetition that he uses in thispoem is very powerful and shows the vicious cycle of addiction. When he statesthat repetition is a form of history it brings up another good point about language.Language has been around a long time and the interpretations of it havechanged. We interpret these poems in a certain way because of how we werebrought up and in the time period we were brought up in. In the future thesepoems might be interpreted differently, especially the poems about certain eventsthat happened in our history. The poem about Katrina is something that weremember very clearly because it didn’t happen that long ago and we know howdifficult it was for those families. If someone were to read this poem in thefuture it might not have the same affect on them because they are not as familiarwith the story.

The changes in tone in the poems from the beginning section to the end section are very noticeable. In the first section the language was more abstract and was not really talkingabout specifics. In the second section it seemed to have a more dramatic tone.These were the poems that seemed to talk about specific events and tragedies. Overall,language was proven to be a major theme in “Lighthead”. Language was usedthrough the changes in tone, the history and the use of repetition.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Attempted Villanelle

Revised: 

There is the house of childhood dreams
A beauty inside and out, broken at the seams
No longer a place that can be called home

Half a life was spent there
So much has happened to bear
There is the house of childhood dreams

People come to see
What a great place it could be
No longer a place that can be called home

Always somewhere to fall back on
Now all that’s left is the pond
There is the house of childhood dreams

Nothing will ever be the same
But there is no one to blame
No longer a place that can be called home

Now it stands only as a memory
It wasn’t a place that I wanted to leave
There is the house of childhood dreams
No longer a place that can be called home


Original:
 Villanelle

There stood the house of childhood dreams
A beauty inside and out but broken at the seams
No longer a place that can be called home

Half a life was spent there
So much has happened to bare
There stood the house of childhood dreams

People come to look and see
What a great place that it could be
No longer a place that can be called home

Always somewhere to fall back on
Now all that's left is the pond
There stood the house of childhood dreams

Nothing will ever be the same
But there is no one to blame
No longer a place that can be called home

Now it will only be a sweet memory
That is what it has come to be
There stood the house of childhood dreams
No longer a place that can be called home