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The Poem You Asked For By Larry Levis

Decent Essays
Prompt 2: “The Poem You Asked For”
In “The Poem You Asked For” by Larry Levis, he is comparing writing a poem by comparing it to a plant, stubborn person, and toad. Larry Levis, a 20th-century writer is well known for his brevity and surprise approach in poetry. This poem magnifies the complications that authors may face while trying to write something of such importance. The speaker uses an abundant amount of figurative language to personify how writing is so difficult, and can lead to many difficulties and dead ends. The author uses figurative language to portray the theme of difficulties in the writing process such as: difficulties prewriting, writers block, and how hard it is to let go of writing as an author.
Larry Levis ' poem, "The Poem You Asked For," illustrates how difficult the pre-writing process can be. In the poem, Lewis starts out by saying, "My poem would eat nothing. / I tried giving it water / but it said no" (1-3). When the speaker says “My poem would eat nothing” (Levis 1), it seems that none of the speaker’s techniques for writing have worked. When it comes to pre-writing, it is important to sit down and plan out the topic. One must make sure to brainstorm, because when one is presented with a topic it may seem to not make sense, or that the topic could be hard to find information on. If one doesn 't properly pre-write, then they will spend a lot of time procrastinating and stuck in the same spot for an abundance of time. In lines 1-3, Levis introduces
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