Monday, September 3, 2018

Poetry

These are just some questions that I have. It is not necessary for you to answer all of these questions. Choose which ones you find most interesting to explore. You may have others. Ask them!

"March of the Hanged Men":


  • Youn makes reference to Italian Renaissance painter Piero's Resurrection:



What significance does the painting have in the poem?

"from "Winehouse":

This is a persona poem, a poem written from the perspective of a real-life person, in this case the singer Amy Winehouse who died young (and has a great documentary about her called Amy). How does Young use the italicized words? 

"Why Poetry"? 

How is this an autobiography? What do you make of the third and fourth stanzas? Speaking of stanzas, almost every stanza breaks a sentence off midway. Why does the poet choose to do this? We wouldn't continue a sentence between two paragraphs, would we? Why does he do this in a poem? 

10 comments:

  1. Good afternoon Professor Talbird,

    In regards to the poem “From Winehouse”

    I personally have an admiration for Amy Winehouse, I loved her voice, music and spirit. She had a lot of demons in her closet due to her father leaving her mother at a young age and always looking for love to replace that hurt. She had been a normal person like you and I, who turn into a famous singer. I recently watched a documentary on her life where they explained a lot of her trails and addictions which lead to her demise.

    The poet Mr Young really grasp the idea of how depressed Amy was and how she used alcohol to deal with life. In the second stanza he states “Even in deal I flirt”, she knew that consuming so much alcohol would end her life but she continued to abuse her body and mind. It was like she had no cares in the world and wasn’t living for tomorrow but living for today. A lot of addicts tend to forget the real world and live in their own created fantasy. They don’t care about family or work, they just look forward for the next chance they can return to their world.

    Mr. Young grasp that concept in this poem, which is hard for someone to understand if you haven’t been there yourself. It makes me wonder if he is dealing with the same demons as Amy?

    I really enjoyed reading.
    -Amanda

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  2. Good afternoon Professor Talbird,

    In regards to the poem “From Winehouse”

    I personally have an admiration for Amy Winehouse, I loved her voice, music and spirit. She had a lot of demons in her closet due to her father leaving her mother at a young age and always looking for love to replace that hurt. She had been a normal person like you and I, who turn into a famous singer. I recently watched a documentary on her life where they explained a lot of her trails and addictions which lead to her demise.

    The poet Mr Young really grasp the idea of how depressed Amy was and how she used alcohol to deal with life. In the second stanza he states “Even in deal I flirt”, she knew that consuming so much alcohol would end her life but she continued to abuse her body and mind. It was like she had no cares in the world and wasn’t living for tomorrow but living for today. A lot of addicts tend to forget the real world and live in their own created fantasy. They don’t care about family or work, they just look forward for the next chance they can return to their world.

    Mr. Young grasp that concept in this poem, which is hard for someone to understand if you haven’t been there yourself. It makes me wonder if he is dealing with the same demons as Amy?

    I really enjoyed reading.
    -Amanda

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi all,

    Like Amanda, I also went for the excerpt from "Winehouse". My intent for this comment is to analyze my interpretation of the poem.
    The rhythm Young used was mirroring Amy's, whose lyrics are the italicized words. I notice Young used two songs from her second full length album- this causes me to wonder if he was listening to it while writing the poem. However, considering it's a persona poem, I think the effect Young is trying to give his reader is of Amy in her songwriting process. The first stanza represents writing for one song ("Back to Black", as the italicized lyrics for this song follow this stanza), the following stanzas for "Rehab". If I'm wrong about the lyrics, sorry : ) please correct me if this is the case.
    On that note, I'll be honest and say though I like Amy very much, I never got into her stuff...first of all, like her, I'm a little old lady and I held a strong, and pretty arrogant : ) stance against listening to music from my own time, since I was a kid up until a few years ago. Additionally, there's always been a little disconnect between myself and her rhythm. It's the same disconnect I feel with the rhythm of Billie Holiday's. I listen to the voices of them both as though they're singing in their own respective private worlds, not to "match" the world around them, which I admire. I wont get further into it but after watching Amy's documentary last night, I thought about it as I saw it still distracts me.
    It was mentioned in the documentary that Amy's lyrics were highly personal, and though she always wrote poems, she was hesitant about writing songs for others to listen to. I wonder if Young suggests in "Winehouse" that her songwriting process turned out to be just as personal, then replaced by lyrics that were more accessible for pop radio, or that gave her a tough persona to hide behind.

    I also enjoyed reading this.

    Best wishes,
    Stacey Shapiro

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    1. I agree with you, how Young used the italicized words in the poem from her songs. It made the poem much easier to interpret because was referring to Amy and the pain and suffering she went through. I believe she express her feelings through her song, just like how a poet would express what they are feeling.
      Being a famous star can add a lot of pressure to ones life and drive them to do unimaginable things to themselves. I think Young was expressing that in the first and third stanza and linking it to the lyrics of her songs. Also, when he mention he is in love with the lights, it made me think of a concert settings. Like for Amy, maybe that was like her happiness,to sing, perform, connect and to feel love by her fans although she was hurt.

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  4. Why Poetry is an autobiography because Craig Morgan writes in first person. He clearly uses the word ‘I” repeatedly throughout the poem discussing his experiences. The third and fourth stanza are breaking it to the reader that he feels like he does not belong, in other words he feels different compared to others. He stated he felt incorrect playing baseball. He compared it to a bear cup moving in with turtles. My question would be why baseball and why was he expected to play that sport specifically since it’s clear that it had a big impact on him. I find it very interesting when he stated that could not learn to become his mother for reasons that were not obvious to him. As I kept on reading I felt that when he stated that he wanted to be like his mother, he meant he wanted to be a woman. I don’t know if that is just me. This goes back to baseball since it isn’t a very feminine sport. It is very interesting how he decided to finish a stanza midway through a sentence. Could this be a form of representation or symbolism referring to him feeling incomplete throughout his life? Since this is a poem, I feel like there is less rules that someone has to follow compared to an essay let’s say. One is free to write whichever way they please.

    -Anayeli

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  5. Anayeli: This is a very good reading. I think your question about Teicher's sense of gender is very apt. According to the internet, he has a wife and children. This doesn't mean that he didn't want to be a woman when he was a child. But I wonder if it could suggest that he was uncomfortable in filling the traditional definition of "manhood" when he was younger?

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    1. Knowing that Teicher has a family, it is more fitting that he might have felt a certain way about manhood rather than wanting to be a woman. As I reread the poem it does make sense to apply that idea.

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  6. I was originally going to comment about the "March of the Hanged Man" due to reference of the black ants and their presence carrying a militaristic conduct that induces chaos on it's witnesses, or as I perceived.

    However, "Why Poetry" caught my full attention as a particular spark appeared in my head as I tried to understand the bizarre placement of his stanzas.

    In the first stanza of page 243, in which it says "As if in answer to a primordial urge, I longed for something to which to..." which then continued to "apprentice myself".
    This gave me the impression that the Author seek to learn skills. In other words, I believe that the Author was talentless or lacking something that he could recognize as a skill.

    He couldn't even feel fit in with the other boys during his involvement within the world of baseball, going as far as to say in page 243 which was "I felt as incorrect playing baseball as a bear cub moving in with a family of turtles, this goes to show that he is largely different than the rest, or he was convinced that he was.

    However, I was then given another impression that he was self-aware of the differences between him and his teammates, believing that it wasn't as desire for superiority but rather a desperate act for self-assurances. Using the author as a punching bag rather than themselves to make their inner demons leave. This can be shown on page 244 on stanza 7 through 9, consisting of "I now think, they knew better and hoped that by attacking and shaming the fear resident in me, in my self, they might drive away the dark within theirs".

    This may be the reason that led to the author to choose poetry, as a way of punching his own darkness without inflicting harm to himself. This can be evident in page 245 of the first through the last stanza in which included "hence I was a good candidate for poetry into which one's latent monstrousness can seep like moisture into good wood for decades, a lifetime. My dark is rotting harmlessly in my poetry. I've saved myself and my life and those I love for light". If I were to summarize the story with my own words, I was say that it was about an talentless individual with a with a pained past that he stored and saved as paint. He found a dry canvas that was empty, and the canvas found a person with lots of paint. The two were made for each other, fitting as any eye could see. Like the fish in the sea, and the bird in the skies, similarly to a painter and a canvas, the author has found himself to be a good candidate for poetry just as poetry found itself a good candidate for the author. This encounter would create a result we would see as a poem, like the one we see now.

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    1. Now, for the questions.

      "How is this an autobiography?"
      I think it would be an autobiography as it include details of a person telling his audience about events that occurred in his life and what were on his thoughts that day as the event was being carried out. Though that may not be an answer but rather a definition of what an auto-biography even is.
      Another detail would be the first-person stance that the author referred to himself as "I" as Mr/Ms. Palacios mentioned.

      "What do you make of the third and fourth stanzas?"
      I think the author brilliantly explained about his innocence of the matter, or more appropriately, his complete inexperience and lack of knowledge of the matter. "I could not learn to become my mother for obvious reasons that were not obvious to me, so I waited". This mean that it took the author time to understand what it was he couldn't understand earlier since all others were able to know from first glance about what may be wrong, but he would be that one kid in a classroom that wouldn't understand what everyone is even talking about.

      "Speaking of stanzas, almost every stanza breaks a sentence off midway. Why does the poet choose to do this? We wouldn't continue a sentence between two paragraphs, would we? Why does he do this in a poem?"
      This part is what mainly attracted me to comment on the poem to begin with. I thought up of two answers. The first would be that his placement stanzas is made in a way that is not usually characteristic of stanzas was to symbolize his own issues in his childhood, in that he believed himself to be unusual (more preferable description than unfitting) and not characteristic of what a boy is. The unusualness of the stanza represents the unusualness that the author views himself as a child. This, in my opinion, is astoundingly genius. The answer would be that the placement represents his talentless, as I mentioned earlier. He longed for something to apprentice himself, so the placement of the stanzas that one would normally see as unacceptable was laid intentionally to show the author inexperience in the matter, in that he is new to this world of poetry that he found himself to be fitting with. He may not be a master, but rather an apprentice that's getting a chance of concocting his own poetry. So it all comes down to symbolism within my answers.

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  7. In regard to the poem "why poetry" I think it could count as a autobiography due to author mentioning his childhood and emotions to explain why he chose poetry. I feel like the author put the break between the third and fourth stanza in order to emphasize how he feels different compared to other people around him.

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