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EN347: Modern American Poetry: "imaginary gardens…

- - - - The Fish (1918,1935) "wade / through black jade / Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps / adjusting the ash-heaps; / opening and shutting itself like" (1-5)
        
        The first line in this poem always starts with one syllable, the second with three syllables, the third with nine syllables, the fourth with six syllables, and the fifth with eight syllables.
        
        The repeating line variations within each stanza depict the movement within the ocean she describes. Moore’s ocean is not a stagnant entity; it is constantly flowing and changing.
      - Poetry (1919, 1951) "I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this / fiddle. / Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine" (1-4)
        
        The syllabic structure in this poem emphasizes the complicated forms poems often have, those which the speaker "dislikes" (1).
  - - - "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet black bough" (1-2)
      - -Paints a picture of one quick moment (only two lines). A fleeting, vague "image" that is open to interpretation by the reader
      - -Paints similarity between two seemingly different ideas through a semi colon and a slant rhyme ("crowd" & "bough")
    - - Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective
      - To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to presentation
      - As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not metronome
  - - - Three Musicians by Pablo Picasso
    - - Susie Asado (1922)
        
        The excessive repetition of "sweet" (1) here reduces the term to its sound, as "sweet" (1) begins to lose its meaning after so many repetitions.
        
        "Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. / Susie Asado. / Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea. / Susie Asado." (1-4)
      - If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso (1924)
        
        The repetition of "They cannot." (87) begins to lose its meaning, highlighting the changes in the lines between the repetitions. The transmutation of "note" (88) into "denote" (94) experiments with sound to show similarity with words that are not necessarily semantically related.
        
        "They cannot. / A note. / They cannot. / A float. / They cannot. / They dote. / They cannot. / They as denote." (88-94)
- - - - Birches (1916)
        
        Even though this meter and form is the same as Shakespeare, the two are very different. The accessibility of the language of Frost adds to the simplistic lifestyle he describes of New England.
        
        "When I see birches bend to left and right / Across the lines of straighter darker trees, / I like to think some boy's been swinging them"
        
        Paints a bucolic image of a boy exploring and loving nature
  - - - I, being born a woman and distressed (1921)
        
        "Think not for this, however the poor treason of my stout blood against my staggering brain" (9-10) is a traditional volta, where the speaker makes a significant shift in mood or topic. In this case, Millay uses the volta to assert her agency over the male to which she speaks.
        
        A poem describing a female speaker's feelings after a one night stand- she takes it upon herself to declare there is "insufficient reason / for conversation when we meet again" (13-14), signifying she does not depend upon this man.
  - - - [i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] (1952)
        
        This poem has a traditional romantic message for the sonnet form, expressing eternal love through celestial, "you are whatever a moon has always meant" (8), and natural imagery, "here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud" (9).
        
        The insertions of small statements in the parenthetical distort the traditional sonnet form, such that statements in the parenthetical modify and comment on the speaker's statements
    - - [my sweet old etcetera] (1926)
        
        Throughout the poem, the word "etcetera" is inserted at seemingly unnecessary moments. "Etcetera" serves to represent additional, associated items that are not even worth saying when associated with a given subject, ones that the speaker does not even bother adding.
        
        Overall, "etcetera" acts as a cue for these other related items to activate within the reader's mental lexicon.
  - - - The Lynching (1922)
        
        Typically, sonnet poetry is written about romance or time, yet McKay chooses a very disturbing moment to discuss in this poem.
        
        Uses the ending rhyming couplet, "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Dance round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee" (12-13), to emphasize the tragedy and horror of the lynching process.
- - - - Portrait in Georgia (1923)
        
        Compares a white woman's body to the tools used for lynching, induces white guilt. Additionally, the poem illustrates how both whiteness and blackness are implicated in racially charged structures
        
        "her slim body, white as the ash / of black flesh after flame" (6-7) shows how all races are the same after death: blackness turns to the whiteness of ash
  - - - Dream Boogie (1951)
        
        "Dream Boogie" also has a blues rhythm to appeal to the African American audience for which he wrote.
        
        "The boogie-woogie rumble / Of a dream deferred?" has a musical meter, which implicates the speaker in a Harlem-like location
      - The Weary Blues (1926)
        
        This poem both discusses the blues and imitates the rhythms of the blues.
        
        Speaks to a distinctly African American music tradition, along with what Hughes outlined in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain"
  - - - Sea Rose (1916)
        
        Compares a small, meagre flower (sea rose) to a more typically beautiful flower (spice rose), which represent the traditionally unfeminine and traditionally feminine respectively.
        
        H.D. expresses preference for this type of rose, thereby showing women do not have to adhere to societal gender norms to be loved by the speaker.
      - Sheltered Garden (1916)
        
        The short line lengths in this poem, associated with imagism, add to the speaker's feeling of entrapment by social standards of femininity and heterosexuality.
  - - - Parturition (1914)
        
        This poem details the hardships and empowerment associated with child birth. The speaker describes "climbing a distorted mountain of agony," a pain which men will never know.
        
        She also describes "The irresponsibility of the male / Leaves woman her superior Inferiority," which directly calls out men for having little understanding of the grueling nature of childbirth
      - The Feminist Manifesto (1914)
        
        Throughout the piece, she varies in font size and some phrases are bolded and underlined for emphasis, creating a desperation for change within the feminist movement.
        
        She claims that the feminist movement in the early 1900s was not sufficient, women should be striving for "absolute demolition of patriarchal structures
        
        Like "The Negro Artist + The Racial Mountain," Loy expresses disdain for working (and creating art) within patriarchal white structures #
  - - - Kitchenette Building (1945)
        
        The speaker describes that the poverty of the African American community limits dreams such that people do not have time to "let it in, / Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,"
        
        The outlook for the speaker is not super positive, as she is not concerned with her dreams at the end of the poem, so much as a bathtub filled with "lukewarm water, hop[ing] to get in it"
- - - - Implicates a small, seemingly meaningless wheelbarrow, into the grand scheme of the world. "So much depends upon" this red wheelbarrow. Even though the poem is short, the speaker is able to use a small amount of words to portray the importance of this object
      - Even though this poem is brief, it still conveys themes relating to American identity, pastoral life, and even race (the poem is widely thought to be about a black street vendor named Thaddeus Marshall). The ability to implicate race in such a small poem mirrors Jean Toomer's "Portrait in Georgia" #
  - - - Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917)
        
        Each stanza was a different permutation of a viewpoint to a blackbird, almost like Gertrude Stein #
        
        The thirteen permutations indicate the speaker's frustration with inability to accurately represent the blackbird in sight
    - - The Emperor of Ice Cream (1923)
        
        The lack of spirituality in this poem is emphasized by the speaker's description of the dead body. Her body is not just lacking life, "[she] is cold, and dumb."
        
        The dichotomy between the term "emperor" and "ice-cream" is somewhat paradoxical. The "emperor" tends to refer to the leader of something large and important whereas "ice-cream" is a simple reflection of the basic American life.
  - - - Pound edited "The Waste Land," making it more succinct and straightforward (imagism). Pound does away with the structure of the poem, as he was not concerned with a rhyme scheme or meter #
    - - Arguably, one of the most important poems of the 20th century. Though the poem deals with many concurrent themes, the most notable is the aftermath of World War I.
      - The Waste Land is fragmentary, adding to the destructive, complicated depiction of life after the first major World War.
      - Eliot switches between subjects, speakers, and settings frequently and often without warning.