Cottonmouth Country

The poem “Cottonmouth Country” was kind of weird… When reading it I got this weird sense from it. I didn’t know where Hatteras was and I also wondered why the poet chose that place to put in the poem. I found that Hatteras is a place on the east coast of North Carolina and it is called the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because of such dangerous shipping conditions there. Then the next thing I didn’t know was what a cottonmouth was? I knew that it definitely not that nasty dry feeling like a cotton ball is in a persons mouth, so I looked it up and it is actually a snake, and a kind of dangerous one at that. The cottonmouth is not the typical snake, this snake lives on the east coast, and it goes in water and even the Atlantic Ocean. From that, this place Hatteras sounds like a not very fun place at all. All the description such as fish bones, death, cottonmouth, and pollution, etc. that makes the reader feel like this isn’t a happy place. The author obviously doesn’t like it there. The last two lines bring things together a bit more, “Birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.” From the build up of the description of Hatteras and what it is like there, with the death of many in the ocean, the snakes, the fish bones, and the pollution, this place sounds horrible and I think that is where the “birth, not death, is the hard loss” comes in. I think the author was trying to say there that being born in a crappy place is harder than dying in a crappy place. When a person is born in a place like that they usually stay there all throughout there childhood without a choice and have to kind of suffer there. Then death on the other hand, if they are dying in a place like this they must have made the decision to stay there. I kind of look at it the opposite from the poem. I look at being born there a person has no control and they just deal with it a leave when they get older, but then I look at dying there and I would think it would be harder to look back with regret that I didn’t leave a place like that? The last line reveals that the author lived there and left there… leaving only skin behind like a snake; they shed their skin as a symbol that the place is no longer a part of them, and that they are starting fresh somewhere new. Looking at the poem as a whole, I noticed that it is only one stanza and it only has eight lines, and think that it contributes to the meaning, showing that the author doesn’t see the place as something important to them and just dreary and boring. In the end, I thought the poem was kind of interesting and I liked how the author described the place where they were born in such a different way than many would have expected.

The Book

I think we did the poem “The Book” by Miller Williams last class, and since then I have thought about it quite a bit. One of the ideas I liked quite a bit was the thought that it was a person living in someone else skin rather than his own, or that he had become a different person. I felt the poem came from a war because the book was found in a fallen bunker. The part that revealed that he used it as a diary and a sketchbook means a lot. When a person uses something like that, they let their guard down and show who they really are. Finding out what that book really was―a book bound by human skin, and knowing what it held I think maybe made the soldier question himself and who he had become. The last lines describe it perfectly,“I stared at the changing book and a horror grew, I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is, how beautiful it was until I knew.” From that, there is that sense that the soldier is now lost, and he is questioning all that he thought he was and what he knew. Maybe that book allowed him to change and become a different person after the war, and then to find out that the place that his new self was, was not what he thought it was, it made him question his new self altogether. So, then the question comes would it have been better to have not found out at all? There is no clear answer, but I am not sure even what I would want? Find out my changed life is based on a something else from what I thought, I don’t know if I could overcome that? The book alone was not the only horror, the thought of where does he go from here only added even more to the overall horror…and that what was once beautiful and good was not anymore...

Alone

The poem Alone, by Edgar Allan Poe, is exactly what we all expect from Poe― sad. One of the first things I noticed when reading the poem was the rhyme of the last word in every two lines. It is a pretty interesting structure to the poem, and it is kind of strange but it makes the poem seem a bit matter-of-fact? So, obviously the poem is about being alone. The reason for him being alone is said in the first line, “Form childhood’s hour I have not been as others were.” So, he was always a different from the other kids when he was a kid. Next he said, “I have not seen as others saw,” and that makes me think that he had unusual things happen as a child that a normal child would not have seen, and for that he was maybe more mature than the other kids, making him be alone. It seems that no matter what he did he could not find joy in others, “I could not awaken my heart to joy at the same tone― And all i lov’d―I loved alone―” The last two lines really sum everything up, “(When the rest of Heaven was blue) of a demon in my view―” From that it makes me think that it doesn’t bother him that he is alone, and that it is something he has learned to deal with. When everyone had happy images like heaven he always had those different and unhappy dark images like demons. At the end of the day, the poem is seen sad to someone like me, but to someone like him it seems like something he has just learned to deal with and it doesn’t faze him anymore which is even more sad.

Personal Helicon

“Personal Helicon” by Seamus Heaney can be seen as a pretty straight forward poem, but looking into the poem a bit more I found a bit of a deeper meaning. The very first thing I asked myself after reading the poem was what is a Helicon? I found that in Greece it is a mountain, and it is believed to be a source of poetic inspiration and the home of the muses. So, after finding out what a Helicon was, I began to look at the poem and pick out what his muse was; what was his source of inspiration? As a child it began that his muse was a well, and all the buckets, moss, and all the childhood memories that came along with it. There was a name that I didn’t know, and I felt there must have some importance to it because it looked like it was possibly a Greek name. The name was Narcissus, and I found that it was a Greek name, and he was a man in a myth that fell in love with his reflection in a pool and pined away, and he became the flower which bears his name now. This allusion to the myth of Narcissus really brings the whole poem together. “Now I pry into roots, to finger slime, to star, big-eyed Narcissus, into spring is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme to see myself, to set the darkness echoing,” with that first line it becomes a bit more clear that the well was his muse in to poem, and maybe that well represented his childhood and likeNarcissus, he fell in love with that child that he was. The parts, “Now I pry into roots” and “darkness echoing” I believe represents him in adulthood and him looking back through the memories of his childhood that he loved, his muse, and how it is fading… The sadness of his fading memories is represented perfectly by the tone with his use of dark words like “dark drop” and “trapped sky” and “dank moss,”ect. The sad tone also makes me think that maybe he is a little lost in adulthood because he uses dark words a lot, and I look at dark like being lost because nothing is clear in the dark. In the end, the poem was a cool, yet it was sad because of fading memories and him being a little lost in adulthood.

It was a dream

“It was a dream” was a simple poem by Lucille Clifton. Clifton describes her dream, taking an outside view looking at herself and what she has done with her life. There is a sense of anger with her self throughout the whole poem. Clifton starts the poem like this, “in which my greater self rose up before me accusing me of my life with her extra finger whirling in a gyre of rage at what my days had to come to.” From the start, it is revealed that obviously she hasn’t become exactly what she wanted, and her “greater self,” the one who knows she could have reached her dreams if she would have tried harder confronts her defeated self. I picture the same girl but one is business like, looks better off, and then I picture one who looks sloppy and a little lost, and the better off of the two is pointing a finger with rage not understanding why it was so hard to try harder. The second part of the poem is basically her reaction to what her greater self had said to her. “what, i pleaded with her, could i do, oh what could I have done? and she twisted her wild hair and sparkled her wild eyes and screamed as long as i could hear her This. This. This.” For this second part the angry tone is heightened, and the frustration from the greater self has become even greater. Thegreater self is showing that she isn’t going to accept the excuses and that there were so many things she could have done to better her self... there is always something. This poem has that angry tone, but I also think it has that fear in it too because of the word “pleaded,” and the lack of capitalization of “i,” and at the beginning of sentences gives off that sense of being fearful, belittled, or very unsure. If I were to interpret this dream I would think that this just represents the fear in a person of not realizing their dream when there were so many things that can be done to reach those dreams in life. In a couple of ways it reminds me of us seniors and going off to college, it scares a lot of us and the fear of failure and not reaching our dreams is scary and what can we say if we don’t succeed… what could have we done… who wants to admit that theydidn’t try hard enough? At the end of the day, this sounds less like a dream and more like a nightmare, for the realization of the possibility of failure can scare anyone and bring out a lot of anger within oneself.

Introduction to Poetry

“Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins is the perfect description of how I was with poetry in the beginning of the year. Collins describes how he wants people to read a poem and talks about how a poem should be understood. “I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out,” meaning he asks readers to really get a sense for the poem, discover what it is about, and search for the meaning. “Or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” By that I believe Collins is describing how a reader should feel the poem, touch the poem, and be able to feel the feelings the poet wanted to portray. “I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.” Basically, the poet wants the reader to have fun with the poem, enjoy it like they would waterskiing, and not whine at the sight of a poem. Collins describes what I did at the beginning of the year so perfectly, “But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it.” This is crazy how true this statement is because it is like from a young age we have been taught that there is always one meaning to a poem and only one. But when you get older and the poems get more complicated one will find that there are many of ways any given poem can be interpreted. Some still don’t get that, and they are in constant search for the overall meaning, and then that is when poetry becomes no fun and groans fill the room at the sight of it. My Dad put it like this, “A poet is like a man who makes a very nice sports car. He wants you to feel the engine and it’s power, he wants you to enjoy it, and he wants you to discover what the car has to offer. But he doesn’twant you to buy it only to take it home and tear it apart because then you have missed the fun and have missed out on why he really made that car.” A poet does have meaning behind every poem, but it is their own meaning, and when they think of the readers they hope that they can come up with their own meaning and enjoy it rather than suffer through it… beating it with a hose to find out what it really means…

The Hat Lady

“The Hat Lady,” by Linda Pastan, was a sad poem that took the reader through the death of a cancer patient with the use of hats. The “hat lady” possibly represents a doctor or a care giver for this lady who has cancer. She comes and “measures” for the mother’s hat, and it represents the docter measuring her health and how long the patient has left. “Last year when the chemicals took my mother’s hair, she wrapped a towel around her head. And the Hat Lady came, a bracelet of needles on each arm, and led her to a place where my father and grandfather waited, (…)” This is the part where the doctor or care giver takes the “needles and pins,” and gives the patient the drugs to help her slip peacfully into a different place and pass a way. When it says, “led her to a place,” I ultimatly think that references the care giver helping the cancer patient pass over to heaven. This poem takes hats and I don’t really know how else to describe it, but it makes them show death in a way? The first stanza helps describe my thinking, “In a childhoodof hats— my uncles in homburgs and derbies, Fred Astaire in high black silk, the yarmulke my grandfather wore like the palm of a hand cradling the back of his head— only my father went hatless, even in winter.” In this stanza I believe the hats represent the many that the poet knows who have had cancer and it has taken their life. She says that her father went hatless… so I can only conclude that he didn’t ever have cancer, but still is no longer with her because her mother meets her father again in heaven in the last stanza. At the end of the day, this poem was sad, yet it was very interesting; it really makes the reader think about cancer and how it affects many people in the world.