City Eclogue & Poetry Packet

In the book City Eclogue written by Ed Patterson he focuses on the drastic change of his city which went from thriving to merely nothing. This caused the people who were living comfortably to struggle suddenly to feed their families. Many of the poems symbolized poverty, race segregation, and most importantly the city he was raised in, Pittsburgh. The city was highly spoken about as he writes in his poem "Untitled" he describes the scene, "Sky walls and white neoclassical moulding cloud wedgewood days room after room of palace season" (Page 117). I analyzed this poem as a description of a place he used to visit often that was in sight of water. I had a hard time reading through this book because the poems were not written in straight lines in several of them as well as the educated language and large vocabulary he used is beyond my understanding.

The poetry packet full of sonnets and regular poems has been on average moderate to understand. I wrote in my last blog entry about Shakespeare and Harryette Mullen's sonnets in detail so i'll stay away from those in this entry. The poem written by Susan Howe titled "Singolarities" is a very unique poem because of its style. The poem is repeated on two pages except on the second it is reversed and flipped upside down. The theme of the poem is war and conflict and I believe that the style she wrote this poem in directly correlated to the message she was trying to portray to her audience. There were many lines in the poem that made me believe that she was speaking about war but the one that first caught my attention was when she wrote, "picked up arrowhead." The poem is confusing and chaotic but I enjoyed the message and the style the way it immediately caught my attention.

The other poem that I found interesting was Children's Rhyme's written by Langston Hughes because of the foreshadowing and history he used in the poem. The key to a great poem is to have a good first line and Hughes caught my attention immediately with his line, "When I was a chile we used to play.." (Page 223). I like this because he uses slang and for my personal style I prefer the more casual poems. The theme of his poem was that there was still not equal right for races and the injustices blacks had for white kids growing up. The look of the poems itself was visually different because of the indents and italicized words which made the poem unique. Even after the Civil Rights Movement there was not much of a change and I have a large amount of respect for Hughes to write this specific poem to spread his message of equality among the world.

9/11/13 Blog Response 1

Shakespeare's sonnet 130 assaults his mistress in the beginning and then ends it by admitting his love for her flaws. He notices his woman's flaws but accepts them and does not let them bother him. He describes his mistress with a dark skin tone when he says, "If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun" but then ends the sonnet saying, "and yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare." Shakespeare is insisting that not all women need to be beautiful to receive love and that love can be real without external beauty but rather internal.

Harryette Mullen's sonnet from Sleeping With the Dictionary, "Dim Lady" is similar to Shakespeare's because it is a modernized version of it. Both of the sonnets are written by men who have a strong love for women who do not fit societies standard definition of beauty. Mullen uses several different comparisons including peppers, Red Lobster, slinkys, and twinkies for his "lover" which is much more blunt and understandable then Shakespeare's sonnet. My favorite line he uses is at the very end Mullen states, "And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who's hyped beyond belief." I love the way Shakespeare and Mullen talk about their "unattractive" mistresses as gold medals in their eyes and how both sonnets have a playful tone.

Ted Berrigan's sonnet LIII is primarily about temptations and struggles that humans face. This sonnet specifically focuses on the temptations of sexual desires and how although humans know the consequence of sex they still choose to do so. The sonnet begins with "belly to hot belly we have laid" and then goes on to suggest that pregnancy is looked down upon as he writes, "Everyone's suddenly pregnant and no one is glad" and then ends the sonnet with a common human thought, "Fucking is so very lovely, Who can say no to it later?" Berrigan's sonnet is the epitome of human nature in the sense that we know the consequences yet we do not think deeply about them, we simply do what everyone else around us is doing and we do it carelessly.

Intro to KP

I wish I could introduce myself in a way that would truly describe my character, but once I begin thinking about who I am I find myself lost, aimlessly searching for words that could accurately describe myself. My names Kaitlyn Price and in my world there aren't many things better in life then a great book. I am excited for college because not only do I expected to discover a career that I enjoy and follow after college, but I also hope to find more out about myself. I strive to gain knowledge from my peers in the classroom and share my ideas to learn more about what I can do better with my personal writing style. I am looking forward to this course and the diversified opinion's of the students in the classroom.