COEVORDEN, The Heroes: Poem Analysis

“Chris Orr was a good respectful young kid, there was nothing wrong with him except he was a heroin addict” stated Rick Anderson, local pier bowl merchant and longtime San Clemente local. Personally, I remember growing up in San Clemente, CA and waking up each morning and walking out on to my family deck and looking out onto the beach, thinking to myself how lucky my family was for the opportunity to be by the beach. I loved the beach, the feel of the ocean’s spray upon my face, the sand beneath my toes, but it wasn’t until heroin began to directly affect the lives of people around me that I truly began to understand that something darker lingered along the shoreline. For example, Chris was my friend, we grew up together, we played together as kids, and as we got older, we partied together. For a short while Chris even lived at my house. His sweet personality and loving heart made him hard to resist. No matter how much we loved him, he had a problem and he just couldn’t seem to overcome it. Finally, Chris lost his struggle with addiction in 2002. Many people mourned the light that was extinguished on that day, thought of what could have and what should have been done differently to prevent such a tragic death. Since his death, I have lost several friends to heroin use and the numbers are growing in this small beach community. In examining the reasons behind the recent increase heroin use in Orange County, including the impact on the youth, available medical

A traumatic event will never define a person’s identity, it will never prove character, or show weaknesses. A person is defined by much more than a single life event. Natasha Trethewey uses her confusion and hurt that she experienced as pieces for an artwork that has yet to be finished. By writing Native Guard, Trethewey recreates herself like a disjointed collage. Using gut-wrenching poetry as her medium, Trethewey uses her words to represent a self portrait of her struggles. Giving the reader a chance to immerse themselves completely within “Native Guard”, her audience is a key element throughout the book. You, as the reader, become an empty shell for Trethewey to build herself anew; a skeleton structure for a new identity.

Originally named The Muleskinners, The Hamilton County Bluegrass band was founded by a group of university students in Auckland in 1962.[9] For the young members, their first encounter with bluegrass would be the theme song “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” from the television show The Beverly Hillbillies. The show was one of the few American shows airing on New Zealand television at the time. The Flatt and Scruggs theme tune and Scruggs style banjo influenced player Paul Trenwith, who said “that’s how I wanted to learn banjo, and we found out there was a whole music genre that went with that, so we chased that up.”[10] Television was one of the key ways that the bluegrass genre was and still is transmitted internationally. The dominance of

In “Conte” by Marilyn Hacker, Cinderella shows the reader a glimpse of her life after the childhood tale ends, a less happier ending than the original story implies. She feels trapped in a constant state of misery and boredom in the royal palace. Without life experience guiding her, Cinderella is in a dilemma caused by her ignorance of the potential consequences of her actions. With the use of irony, structure, and diction, “Conte” shows how innocence and naïveté result in regrettable mistakes that create life experience.

The Anglo-Saxons believed that when a man was injured or killed wrongfully, he should be avenged by his kinsmen. One form of atonement for a wrongful death was the wer-gild, which means “man gold” where the family of the deceased was paid a sum to compensate them. Given that the Anglo-Saxons believed heavily in honor and leaving a legacy, since they had no afterlife, not paying the wer-gild was an extremely disrespectful action. This is displayed in Beowolf narrated as “…long against Hrothgar / Grendel struggled: his grudges he cherished, / murderous malice, many a winter, / strife unremitting, and peacefully wished he / life-woe to lift from no liegeman at all of the men of / the Dane-folk, for money to settle, / no counsellor needed count for a moment / on handsome amends at the hands of the murderer;” (Beowolf), meaning that Grendel was brutally murdering Hrothgar’s men for many winters and would give no money to settle the wer-gild, bringing dishonor to the lord’s name.

“Ancestral lines” by John Barker is a book about the anthropologist’s experience in the Uiaku village located in Papua New Guinea. In the first chapter, Barker tells his readers briefly about him and his education, his and his wife’s experience with the Maisin community, and talks in great detail about the Maisin and their culture in the Uiaku village.

The poem opened up with the mythology of Britain’s foundings being rooted in the fall of Troy. Following the fall of Troy, Romulus quickly founded Rome which led to having Ticius founded Tuscany and Langobard did the same with Lombardy. Soon after the founding of the three nations, as the myth goes, Felix Brutus founded Britain after the French floods. Soon after the founding of Britain, the nation raised children as soldiers; they were fighting machines in a troubled time filled with turmoil. Among all of the kings, there was one prodigy named Arthur; Arthur stood among the highest; almost untouchable from his fellow peers. His courage and aptitude for ruling were ever so present during his time as king, gaining the respect from his

Individuals have been brought to believe that the only way to end their griefs and sorrows is to end their lives. Though suicide has become a detriment and devastating issue, it has not been presumed to be an effortless or painless act. In society, people become their own threats as they tend to isolate themselves from others which often increases this devastating issue of unsubstantial pain and long-suffering. In the poem, Tuesday 9:00 am, by Denver Butson, individuals are unable to speak and move because of their own specific problems which are burdening them and their ability to help others. The poet is enforcing the idea that individuals need to open up their eyes and be aware of others relentless despair and their struggle to reach out.

For the first two sentences, the speaker relies on memory to express remembrance and perhaps fondness in his tone. He attempts to recall Perry as he was, how he was perceived by those around him, not how he appears now as a ruthless killer. This was likely used in an attempt to bond with Perry again as he once did.

Poetry is a powerful expression of human experience that can impact political actions and have major repercussions on a global scale. Siegfried Sassoon was a poet that realized the true power and capabilities of poetry and what it could accomplish. Sassoon used his gift of poetry to advance humanity’s views on war and help them better understand the terrifying imprint it left on the world.

Richard Blanco is a Cuban- American poet who was given the oppurunity to write an inaugaration poem for Barack Obama's second swearing-in. He wrote a poem titled "One Today" that praised the good and unique things about the United States and also the everyday people who's daily routines help to make America the proud country that it is.

Upon first reading “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” it might seem like an imaginative fantasy and nothing else. The story focuses on the daughters of a pack of werewolves, and it takes place in a world where the werewolves and their daughters are nothing out of the ordinary. But upon closer examination, this is a story rooted in reality. This inventive tale parallels several real world phenomena. Karen Russell uses allegory in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” to objectify western society’s views of people outside of that society and of outsiders in general, and compare them to the views that people have of wild animals.

Surrogating while storytelling is quite common in the Deaf world. It is when you take on the role of someone else in a story. A big part of storytelling is role shifting; now known as surrogating. When you surrogate; you are taking on the personality of the character. When you surrogate you take the story from a narrative perspective to first person perspective, as if you were actually there to witness what happened. The function of space and the story’s perspective can change how the audience understands it.

“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” declared by an influential leader Martin Luther King Jr. As a soldier againsts unfairness, King strongly states that people should fight for freedom. Driven by human nature, humans are always chasing freedom. In “A Century Later,” the Pakistan-born British poet Imtiaz Dharker uses the poetic devices of symbolism, diction, and allusion to explore how perseverance drives freedom.

Fairy tales are full of tropes and stereotypes that exist from story to story, one of the main ones being the “happily ever after” ending. Most fairy tales, especially the traditional Perrault or Grimm versions, fall prey to this trope where the main goal is for the princess to find her prince, get married, and live happily ever after. Many critics, particularly feminist critics, find this trope to be problematic because of the extreme emphasis placed on marriage as women’s main, if not only, objective in life. Karen Rowe, for example, states in her essay “Feminism and Fairy Tales”, that “fairy tales perpetuate the patriarchal status quo by making female subordination seem a romantically desirable, indeed an inescapable fate” (342). In other words, Rowe relates the “romanticizations of marriage” portrayed in fairy tales with promotions of “passivity, dependency, and self-sacrifice” expected of women in their everyday lives (342). However, it can be dangerous to assume that every fairy tale conforms to the singular promotion of marriage as women’s only option. While early fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty” tend to glorify the romantic ideal of marriage, and in turn female subordination, contemporary tales and adaptations such as Brave and Frozen, are working to give women a more powerful position.