Rupi Kaur, an Instagram poet, wrote a poem named, “where the depression came from”. This poem is informal and uses no standard punctuation or capitalization to signify complete sentences. Her poem has meaning and depth that airs the complexity of human emotions. Where does depression come from? Can you tie down this emotion to one […]
Michael S. Harper, Image Source: africanamerianpoetry.orgMichael S. Harper’s poem “American History” is a haunting nine line poem. The poem’s use of concrete images coupled with it’s compact brevity works to speak not only to America’s racist past, but of also to the treatment of history in America. The poem opens with reference to the Baptist […]
Patricia Smith’s poem, “Blond White Women”, resonates with me as I, too, always admired blond little girls and women growing up. I grew up in the 80s and all I saw on my television screens were blonde images of beauty. Smith’s poem seems to move towards truth and clarity, and she uses great tempo and […]
Ellen Gwin Dr. Anton Vander Zee American Poetry 18 October 2022 Sticky Labels Danez Smith, author of Don’t Call us Dead (2017), Boy (2014) and the chapbook hands on ya knees (2013), is an African American writer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective, a multi-genre, […]
Right away Robert Hayden’s poem drew me in with the “A quivering cry. A Screech owl?” I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going to go from there, but it did a great job of capturing that haunted sort of night. I also appreciated the way the question was worded in a way that realistically […]
In “Black and Blues Configurations,” Walton Muyumba argues that Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem “Tu Do Street” replaces notions of “oppositions” and “hierarchical arrangements” common within Black poetry at the time with a “palimpsest,” a pair or group of scenes or realities overlaid one on top of the other so that each one is extant at the […]
“Self-Help” by Charles Bernstein is an emotional whirlwind on each line. It reads to me as, “oh my gosh disaster!” Then, “oh, well, it’s actually not so bad”. Bernstein has created a poem that personifies people we all know and can be read many ways. We can read this poem as two friends in conversation […]
Language poetry to me felt more like a post-modern philosophy of language, a constant experiment, rather than poetry as I normally understand it or try to grasp. I feel like this writing really requires time to get used to reading just because it is so different than what people normally read. As soon as one […]
Julia Alvarez’s poem, “How I Learned to Sweep” feels as if she is sharing how she learned to sweep or she could be talking about the anxiety she felt while watching a war going on in the news which led to her sweeping away death. How Alvarez conveys the true meaning of her poem can […]
Ellen Gwin Dr. Anton Vander Zee American Poetry 4 October 2022 Apathetic Obsession Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, 1954. Estate of Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop has been described as someone who did not write prolifically but rather spent her time polishing her work (Elizabeth Bishop). This type of writing fits in perfectly with […]