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.