Modern Poets : Lazy Or Genius?

What is poetry? Is poetry about your feelings? Is poetry meant for you to deliberate or read between the lines? Elizabeth Alexander, a black educator that teaches poetry, believes that poetry is where you are your true self and finding yourself. In 2005, she published one of her poems called “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.” She constructed the poem to speak to her students about her meaning of poetry. Poetry causes various emotions, various content, and based on various forms of realities.

Black Swan Green by David Mitchell is a story of a teenager named Jason who writes poetry, and Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke is the story of an experienced poet who gives advice to a young poet looking for some advice. In both stories, ideas of beauty are introduced and developed, and while the idea of “beauty stems from within” are the same, their developments are very different. While some differences are small, these differences create a different mood in the overall presentation of the central themes. These changes in development style showcase each author's literary prowess, but even with all these changes in style and mood, the central idea of beauty still remains the same in each story.

Audre Lorde: “For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

The most effective poems convey the poet’s idea and influence the Reader’s Response. This is certainly true when considering the poetry of John Foulcher is a contemporary Australian poet who writes about his observation of everyday life, people and places, as well as religious history. The poet’s voice is distinctive and he writes in a condensed style where each word and image is very important and has layers of meaning. He also often uses very harsh and violent imagery in his poems, which can be very shocking to the reader. Foulcher uses a range of techniques in his poems to communicate meaning, including similes, metaphors, personification and onomatopoeia. The poems that will be discussed in this essay are Martin and the Hand Grenade

Gloria K. Fiero writes, “The strong association between poetry and music suggests that the human voice [has] a significant influence in both melody and rhythm” (58). The voice of the singer is what gives the song that distinct twist that sets it apart from others, and if the song is originally written as a poem it gives the artist the freedom to interpret and express the lyrics however they see is best fit. Any person is capable of singing or rapping a song, but not everyone is capable of making audiences feel emotions simply through the power and emotion behind their

Poetry is much different than any other style of writing. Poets have a way of communicating their message in a much more indirect way than regular writers. One reader may interpret a poem in a way that is drastically different than another. To truly understand a poem, one must understand the author as well. Sharon Olds, an American poet, who is known for her morbid and unhappy poems, writes about various themes including political violence, family relationships, and sexuality (Gale). In Olds’ poem, “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” we see her examining sexuality not only in 20th century, but in today’s age as well. Olds uses the death of a famous sex icon to really show how women were, and are still being sexualized in society.

A poem is a piece of writing that partakes of the nature of both speech and song that is nearly always rhythmical, usually metaphorical, and that often exhibits such formal elements as meter, rhyme, and stanza structure. In her poem, “Variations of the Word ‘“love”’,” Margaret Atwood introduces to her audience the word “love” from many different perspectives. Google defines “love” as “an intense feeling of deep affection”, or “having a deep feeling or sexual attachment to (someone).” But “love” is not something that can easily be described. Atwood goes on to present and portray the word through different illustrations, beginning with cliché examples and ending with her own personal scenarios. The author’s tone and metaphorical language effectively conveys her perspective of “love”.

Black Swan Green, a story by David Mitchell based on the life of a young boy and aspiring poet named Jason. Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of letters written by poet Rainer Maria Rilke. While they both do differ in the style of writing, Black Swan Green being a novel and such, they do still hold many similarities between one another. Both stories have a very straightforward way of expressing the ideas and central ideas, whether that be through a character or the author. Something that is shared in both pieces and elaborated is the essence of beauty and how it is applied in poetry.

In the poem “An Echo Sonnet”, author Robert Pack writes of a conversation between a person’s voice and its echo. With the use of numerous literary techniques, Pack is able to enhance the meaning of the poem: that we must depend on ourselves for answers because other opinions are just echoes of our own ideas.

Another thought that pondered my mind through the course of this essay, was that of the continuous sense of isolation and confusion being felt by the poet, so early on in their life. This sense of isolation is unfortunately so prevalent in the LGBTQA community where it remains difficult to be who you are, or know where you stand in a world that can be so hateful. In many ways, I am sure we are all very familiar with the feeling of loneliness and needing to isolate in one way or another. It is incredibly difficult to be and feel comfortable with yourself when so many people are telling you how you are supposed to look, feel, be and act all the time. However, it is especially troublesome when you do not have a supportive community around you and that remains the harsh reality for so many people today who live without support.

When reading the title, we often associate a love song as something jaunty,pleasureable, and celebrating, or its other extreme, regretting, nostalgic, and full of pity for the singer’s troubles in love. With Williams the singer, the main idea revolves around the concept of an incomplete union in first person point of view, which makes the reading more personal as the reader is using “I” instead you or he. From this concept stem the ideas that this poem is about hopelessness or happiness, communal sex or masturbation. Delving into history, literary techniques, association with the author, and own opinion of it, there is easily more to it than meets the eye.

Poetry is oftentimes associated with the subjects of love and romance. Poets throughout the ages have used this medium to express their deepest emotions in the most eloquent of ways. Whether the poet is a man or woman is irrelevant. Poets of both genders have succeeded in expressing a heartfelt love to another with a poetic language that speaks volumes in a relatively short amount of text. Two poets from two separate eras each wrote a poem with just such a theme. Anne Bradstreet in “To My Dear and Loving Husband” and Edgar Allan Poe in “Annabel Lee” created magic by writing these poems that express a love for another that transcends time and place.

“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.

Analyzing the word, "beautiful" in this stanza, one should perceive that she is not actually singing about the outside of her, but what she consists of emotionally and mentally on the inside. She reveals that her thoughts and emotions are of worth and value and they are of her opinion. They are consumed through her, and no one else and if anyone disagrees, she does not take that into affect. Her diction is actually pretty precise. To quote a famous cliché, beauty is not skin deep. She explains that the beauty is the sentiment.