Chose three of the poets below and the assigned readings attached to them
This week, there was A LOT of poetry. Hopefully, some of it “spoke” to you for one reason or another, which is the focus of this post.
Chose three of the poets below and the assigned readings attached to them. In at least two short paragraphs, be sure to answer the questions in complete, correct, detailed, and well-supported sentences. First, begin with some basic explanation of both the poet and the works included; then, explain why these poems/poets stood out to you? Why did you connect with them or why did they speak to you? What did these poems make you think about? How did they make you feel? What did they remind you of? Did they connect with any other works? Does the form of the poem stand out? Did they remind you of something in your life? You do not need to answer all these reader response questions; think of them as prompts. Here are some more ideas to think about when responding to poetry. https://writing.wisc.
READINGS WEEK 13:
Denise Levertov “The Ache of Marriage” https://www.
“The Evening Train” https://danielrisberg.
Rita Dove “Persephone, Falling” https://poets.org/
“Rosa” https://www.
“‘I’ve have been a strange in a strange land'” https://www.poemhunter.
Joy Harjo “When the World As We Knew It Ended” https://
“The Path to the Milky Way Leads Through Los Angeles” https://genius.com/
Julia Alvarez “Bilingual Sestina” https://www.
“From 33″
https://www.facebook.com/
Eavan Boland “Anorexic” http://
“The Muse Mother” https://ponyo1994.
“The Pomegranate” https://poets.
Sharon Olds “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” https://www.
“Rite of Passage” https://www.
June Jordan “Poem about Police Violence” https://verse.press/
“The Runaway Lil Bit Poem”
Please respond to two students with 5-7 sentence if you agree, disagree or try to either challenge or expand on what it is that they are trying to say to their post and explain why.
PLEASE NOTE: I WILL PROVIDE THE STUDENTS DISSCUSSIONS ONCE THEY POST
Student 1 Kiara
In this week’s reading the poems were all interesting but had different meanings. The three poems that stood out to me was ” The Ache of Marriage” by Dennis Levertov, “Anorexic ” by Eavan Boland, and “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” by Sharon Old. In the poem, “The Ache of Marriage” it explains the pain her marriage experiences. It defined the different pains from it being emotional and physical. She explains how deep the pain she feels damaged her wants and needs with every part of the body. In the poem, “Anorexic” it explains an Irish woman poet who was interested in her own life experiences in poetry. As a female poet she wanted to show through her writings her own experiences which happened to be a woman’s life experiences. In the poem, “The Death of Marilyn Monroe focuses on how the ambulance men transported her body and how after that their lives wasn’t the same. The three men becomes depressed, useless, one grows alienated from his job and changes his thoughts on mortality, and one finds his attitude toward his wife subtly altered.
The poem ” The Ache of Marriage” stood out to me because it explained the emotions of being married in how it controlled the body and mind. I connected with this poem because of the marriage experiences and how it affects both emotional and physical states of your well-being. The poem ” Anorexic” stood out to me because women are supposed to have perfectly, flawless bodies in the eye of society, but their looks are not things that they can control. I connected with this poem because this makes women feel worthless or have low self-esteem if they can’t make themselves this perfect person who doesn’t even exist. In the poem, “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” stood out to me because it showed how men lives could change within a blink of an eye. I connected with this poem because it shows the true physical loss of a star and the loss of the figurative values that she represented.
All three of these poems made me think about different aspects of life. “The Ache of Marriage” made me think about the life of being a wife someday, and its kind of made me feel worried about the future and the pains of marriage I may or may not experience. “Anorexic” made me think about my early adulthood years, being a recent high school graduate technically still a kid in many people’s eyes and dealing with and supporting a friend who was dealing with a seriousness of Anorexia. In the beginning “Anorexic” had me think about some painful memories but I then felt a sense of gratefulness because my friend is no longer battling anorexia and is now healthier than ever.” The Death of Marilyn Monroe” made me think of how death can really impact not only a family members life but also the ones working in that field. The Death of Marilyn Monroe made me see the limited minds of men. Sharon Old writes “these men were never the same” I know that Marilyn still means sex symbol to everyone including women. We as females must endure labels even in death. I love how Sharon shows the human nature questioning the lack of understanding that ultimately, she was a woman just like the men’s wives who had normal everyday things to do including be there just their breath.
Student 2 Discussion Ariel
Three of the poet’s and their work that stood out to me was Julia Alvarez, June Jordan, and Sharon Olds. Julia Alvarez is a Dominican-American writer and poet. She was born in the United States, her parents went back to the Dominican Republic, but came back to the States after her father got into some trouble. She describes the hyphen in “Dominican-American” as “the place where two worlds collide or blend together.” (1341) This collision of two worlds is exactly the theme of her poem “Bilingual Sestina.” She discusses how both her American culture and Dominican culture are apart of her, but that they are both diluted because of the intertwining of both. Because of this intertwining she isn’t able to experience the full capacity of either culture, but she is able to take something from each of them. Her work stood out to me because I can relate to her experience with two cultures as a Mexican-American.
June Jordan, a writer and poet, known for writing about resistance to racism and the appreciation of black culture. Her mother was from Panama and her dad from Jamaica. She went to a predominantly white high school. She used her writing as a means to cope with the domestic abuse she witnessed at home. Her work, “Poem About Police Violence”, stood out to me because these are issues that are still relevant today. One would think this war on racism would be over by now, but it seems as though more racists are feeling free to be open about their racism. Police violence is still something we see or hear about on the news. Something else that stood out to me was how she repeatedly stated “what you think would happen if every time they [cop] kill a black boy then we kill a cop” (1095), because the cops who are killing black men are getting away with it and I think it is important to point out that if there were appropriate and strict repercussions for these murders the number of black men being killed were drop. The resistance she wrote about is something many are still trying to resist.
Sharon Olds is defined as heroic with her work and known for examining the politics of family life. In both “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” and “Rite of Passage” she discusses the dynamics of the boys to men passage. In “Rite of Passage” she discusses how she’s viewed the way boys bond with each other at her son’s birthday party, “we could easily kill a two year old, he [her son] says in a clear voice.” (1281) Which leads to the other six and seven year old boys to agree with him after they all were just trying to exert their “manliness” over each other. The reader sees an end to that exertion of manliness in “The Death of Marilyn Monroe.” These men who saw Marilyn Monroe right after she died are obviously deeply affected by death. When they attempt to go back to their lives everything is different for them, “these men were never the same. they went out afterwards, as they always did, for a drink or two, but they could not meet each other’s eyes.” (1279) This is an interesting point because at the beginning of their manhood, at six and seven years old, they bond over their ability to “kill a two year old”, but when faced with actual death it is difficult for them.
Answer preview Chose three of the poets below and the assigned readings attached to them
APA
592 words