Joy Harjo

Well I finally made it, the last blog. Today I would like to write about Joy Harjo's "Mourning Song". This format is very different to what I am used to and what we have been reading in the past. This poem was one stanza long with 13 single spaced lines. I felt as though I was reading a paragraph instead of a poem. As I had guessed, the title gave away the poem. It is clear to me that this is about a person who no longer wants to mourn death, but to create a song about it instead, "Make a song for death, a song with yellow teeth and bad breath. For lonliness, / the house guest who eats everything and refuses to leave." (lines 9-11). If you have read any of my blogs, you will know that I generally like to pull a few quotes from the poems we read and share them. Within Joy Harjo's "Mourning Song", I found one inparticular quote that I loved and I still am not sure why. The quote reads as follows, "If we cry more tears we will ruin the land with salt," (lines 8-9). I guess the reason I like this quote so much is it took me back down memory lane when I was a child and would lick my tears. It made me remember just how salty they were and the fact that Harjo related that to death and ruining the land was very creative in my eyes. I don't really have much to say beside thank you for an amazing semester and increasing my ability to understand and analyze poems. I can truly say this course was a valuable learning experience and has increased my knowledge not only of poetry but what is inside the poetry.

Richard Wilbur

Normaly I like to start my post by saying, "Today I would like to write my post about...", but for once I am ahead of schedule. I would like to start today by saying, for tomorrows post, I would like to talk about Richard Wilbur's "Playboy". When I began reading the poems that were assigned to us, I came across this title and was imediatly judgmental. Being a girl, I can say that I have somewhat of a grude agains Playboy, weather it be jealousy or morality. I figured I better read the poem seems how it was assigned to us so I went on and scaned the pages. I read the poem once and became interested. The second time I read the poem, I imagined the setting, a boy sitting atop a ladder at work intrigued in a Playboy magazine, rarely taking his eyes off it. I was shocked because instead of being disgusted by this, I almost found it humerous in the sence that this setting is so modern and real life. I can imagine a handfull of people I know doing this. I was shocked to have a favorite quote out of this poem, one that was actually about the women's body. The lines read as follows, "Nothing escapes him of her body's grace/ Or of her floodlit skin, so sleek and warm/ And yet so strangely like a uniform,/ But what now grips his fancy is her face," (lines 21-24). The first thing I liked about this quote was the way the author describes the women's skin as a uniform, it paints the picture of just how inshape and beautiful this woman is. The part I liked the most about this quote was that it went from looking at her body, typical, to being lost in her face. I believe that the face is a woman's most beautiful asset. I guess the lesson is learned here, don't judge a poem by its title. Well done Richard Wilbur.

Ted Huges

Today I would like to talk about Ted Huges "The Horses". As you already know I picked this poem because it had to do with animals. And if you don't know by now that I am a zoology major, clearly you haven't been going to class. But that's not the only reason I picked this poem. The detail in this porm is amazing, the vivid picture it paints is something much different from that of Elizebeth Bishops who I wrote about last week. Sure she had wonderful detail about the fish and so one, but Huges puts you in that setting and make you feel chills as he breathes into the cold air. One of my favorite quotes from this porm is as follows, "There, still they stood,/But now steaming and glistening under the flow of the light," ( lines 27-28). Not only have I been around horses my entire life but I know just how masculint and powerful these creatures are. I feel that Ted Huges does a very good job of painting that picture of these horses you would see hanging on a wall. Feeling not only his breath but there's as well.