My favorite poem from this selection was Margaret Atwood’s piece “Bored.” It resonated with me because as a child my mother told me I was never allowed to say that word unless I wanted to be given a chore to do. Needless to say, I never said I was bored-but I often felt it. As kids it is easy to be ‘bored’ when we aren’t doing something we want to be doing, whether that is playing or watching tv or eating. The narrator in the poem discusses all the times she spent with her father, wishing she could be doing something else, but she looks back now and knows better. Looking back she can recognize that the time they spent together was precious and important and not boring. This piece could have been written as an essay, but writing it as a poem allowed her to pick and choose small moments to focus on and group together and do beautiful repetitions and lists: “Or sat in the back/ of the car, or sat still in boats,/ sat, sat while at the prow, stern, wheel/ he drove, steered, paddled.” This is often how I like to write my poems and fiction or nonfiction pieces. Lists are concrete and help create imagery and connection.
A theme I noticed throughout the works was enjambment, where the lines flow one into the next without any punctuation. In Cesar Vallejo’s poem “Black Stone Lying On A White Stone,” (a very odd, out-of-body experience poem about dying) the line “they beat him hard with a stick and hard also/ with a rope” is split into two stanzas. This is probably my least favorite poetic form because I get so confused as to where a thought begins and ends. I appreciate the dashes, commas, and periods because they mark the end of a line or thought. Thinking about space, I understand why an author would feel compelled to connect different lines and stanzas without punctuation in order to keep them similar in length and width, but I prefer clarity over symmetry.
I was also stumped by the structure and spacing of May Oliver’s poem, “Bone.” While I enjoyed the piece and the personification of the soul, I did not understand numbering it into 4 different sections. It would break in the middle of a line and I didn’t notice a new thought that would require a new section. The message of the poem, looking for something you know you’ll never find or asking questions with impossible answers (so many biblical puzzlements come to mind) and the beautiful language (“dark-knit glare”) Oliver uses was overwhelmed by the perplexing numerical separations.
A number of the poems used personification. Pablo Neruda’s “Bird” opens with “It was passed from one bird to another, the whole gift of the day.” A “day” is not a physically solid object that can be passed around or given as a gift. A day is 24 hours. A day is abstract and filled with sunlight. I enjoyed the second stanza of the poem, where the narrator discusses figuring out how things work, observing, and learning the secrets of the universe and not knowing how to put them into words. The poem “New Road Station” by Tracy K. Smith also personified the idea of history, describing it as “mov[ing] like a woman/Corralling her children onto a crowded bus” or “the bus that will only wait so long.” I appreciate Smith’s similes because they are strong comparisons that readers can visualize and unite with the abstract idea of ‘history’. Though we are not writing poems for this class, it is a good idea to keep up with new works and authors and see what we can learn from them-like using lists, personification, and unique spacing.
-Katie Huffman
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