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I selected the book, The Power, by Naomi Alderman for my project because my AP lit class has spent a lot of time talking about the social struggle of men vs women. In society, it is typically found that men are held above women and are seen as stronger, smarter, and overall more important. Women are typically seen as objects rather than people, and we see regularly how dangerous this is for women. We have seen how dangerous this power complex can be The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, where women aren’t treated as anything more than baby-makers. The Power takes a different approach to this idea of who has power by giving women all over the world the power to inflict pain and even death on others. It introduces a world where men can’t take power away from women and how society handles it. I’m excited to read this book and read Alderman’s take on this idea.

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With this being a relatively short poem, there isn’t a lot to it overall. Yet, it strikes somewhat close to home because of how true it really is. The Truth talks about failure in the respect that you had a dream, and you let the possibility of it coming true slip away, and then you having to deal with that mentally and emotional. Your dreams don’t leave you unless you realize that you don’t need them, like they were a hope but not really a goal. But when you have a dream that is ultimately a goal you wish to achieve, and you don’t, that can mentally weigh on you when reevaluating your life’s decisions and how you got to where you are in the present and when trying to figure out where you want to be. The life lesson of this poem in itself is heavy and pushes the reader really evaluate what they are doing in their life, which makes the poem highly effective despite its shortness in length.

I noticed right away Schultz’s word choice in this poem, for the words he chose stick out noticeably for they are somewhat abstract. Words such as “greasy” to describe a dream is very interesting because I’m not completely sure what he meant. Greasy isn’t a word I’d use to describe a dream typically, making me wonder the type of dreams he’s referring to. “Contrite and fearful” to describe the speaker’s feeling of guilt about the situation of him not fulfilling his dreams adds an interesting depth to the idea of possible jealousy of those who have more than him, for there’s no one to really blame for them having more but himself. The phrasing of sentences sticks out in the same way the word choice does. “it’s there in the unquiet ideas that drag and plead one lonely argument at a time” caught my attention because to say that an idea can drag and plead is a personification, but also makes it sound like an annoying and dreadful creature that follows you around like it’s in pain, which is both terrifying and understandable. Schultz wanted the fears and guilt of failure to come alive, and with his descriptive words and phrasing, they do in a somewhat haunting way.

This quote reminded me of the poem because of how helpless a person can typically feel when they can’t achieve their dream. They typically feel trapped and like they have no control, which typically leads to depression and a sense of being a failure overall.

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Cheating

For the week, I cheated on Schultz with Jericho Brown. The difference between the two of them is very evident in the fact that Schultz talks a lot about death and loss to where I feel like Brown talks a lot more about things that have been taken.

In the poem, “Duplex,” I honestly felt a little lost to the themes and overall meaning behind it. I had skimmed some of the other poems about lies being told and rape and so on and this was the first poem that I found that evidently showed a light within the darkness. Beginning with, “ I begin with love, hoping to end there,” caught my eye immediately because Brown LITERALLY began by beginning with it, which is an interesting choice that I appreciated. One of the other things I noticed from the very beginning was the format of the poem, since it’s divided up into chunks of two lines, and every line connects each chunk to another chunk with repetition. This format made the title, “Duplex,” make sense since the title means a house divided into two apartments with separate doors, meaning that they’re separate but connected. The poem works the same way. The thing that really confuses me is the repetition within the poem. It’s a move Brown made on purpose, and I guess in a way it makes sense since it connects the separate pieces, but it also makes the poem seem highly repetitive in a way that I don’t fully understand. I also don’t fully understand the overall point of them poem. It gives off a lot of “lost on thought” vibes, like it’s not one cohesive thought but a bunch of different thoughts floating close together and the writer was just bouncing from thought to thought. I felt like Brown was caught in a daze. Perhaps that was the point.

This is what I picture Brown looking like right before they wrote this poem.

Word count- 277

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“Self-Portrait with a Missing Tongue” by Tjawangwa Dema

This poem required me to read through it a few times to get the full understanding of what Dema was trying to say. So to summarize, this poem is about Dema, or the speaker in the poem, having an inner battle on deciding where their voice fits in. She thinks that her words will have a lot of meaning, but to a man they mean nothing because he just claims that he doesn’t understand her. So she buries her thoughts and words (her tongue), so that no one can come and take what she values from her.

A quote that really stood out to me was: 

“Who amongst us knows whether our mothers truly favor silence

or whether the price of asking a man where he has been

is far greater than the shame of knowing?”

This quote helped put Dema’s ideas into perspective, by comparing the original statements of keeping quiet to a marriage. Dema also chose to use the word “shame” in this quote which is very interesting because shame is caused by wrong or foolish behavior; this implies that by her asking the question, she put herself in the position of humiliation.

Another really interesting part of this poem is how Dema started it. She opened with a statement in Southern Sotho that was italicized “Monna ga a botswe kwa a tswang teng”, which directly translates to “the man is not questioned where he came from”. I feel that this quote directly correlates with my previous quote, in the sense that no one ever shames the man in those types of situations but for a woman to question a mans behavior is shameful. The only question I would have with this piece is why Dema chose to write it in Southern Sotho, did it add more significance to the piece?  

A common metaphor Dema used in this poem was the comparison of her tongue to her voice. She did this to show that losing her voice would be as painful as losing a body part or part of yourself.

This poem made me think of the saying “the cats got your tongue” because of the idea that men can control what you say, and how a tongue is what helps you speak.

375 words

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Poetry Blog 2

This poem was harder for me to pick apart than my first poem. “Failure” is about a man talking about the failures of his father, and in some ways, reflects those failures on himself. The title was the first thing I noticed because of the fact that it leads directly into the poem. Most poems have the title separated or the title is mentioned later on in the poem, but Schultz made it directly part of the poem itself and used it repetitively throughout the poem.

The shifts in this poem are not as obvious as many other poems we’ve looked at have been. The best I could tell was when Schultz changed who his father had failed in some way. The rabbi, who his father failed by not being religious so when the rabbi spoke at the funeral, Schultz found it obvious the rabbi didn’t know his father at all. Then, with his uncle, who his father failed to love and honor. And then with his family because of his father’s lack of beliefs. The only time the tone within these switches felt personal was at the very end, when Schultz said “I left town but failed to get away.” Speaking of his own failures in a poem written about his father’s failures connects them in a father-son type of way. As the saying goes, like father like son. Though I feel that there are some levels of shame in this connection, for there are no positive aspects connected between his father and the failures in his life, and I can’t imagine Schultz seeing his own failures any differently.

This quote reminds me a lot of the poem from the father’s perspective. Schultz spoke of his father’s many failed business ventures and his overall failure in his life itself. I wonder if this was how he felt when he died. (311)

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“A New Gun Folds Up to Look Just Like a Smartphone” by Brandon Amico

The first feature that caught my eye was the anaphora, or repetition of the same phrase at the beginning of each line. Each line is a different variation of a “gun that folds into” something else. I was very confused why Amico decided to use that particular sentence stem because I thought it was oddly specific, just like the title. Later, I searched up the title of this poem in order to find a link to an online version. The first search result was an article published by the Huffington Post on March 30, 2016, but it was not about this poem like I had first assumed. It was a news article about a gun that folded up like a smartphone in order to make the weapon less conspicuous. Amico repeats this phrase from the article to comment on the article itself and gun violence in the U.S. 

Many of the objects that Amico alludes to are related to gun violence, usually mass shootings, that have occurred recently. Amico describes a “gun that folds into legislation- folds and folds until so thick it can’t physically be folded again.” This line brings to mind images of legislation and failed bills, with piles so thick that they cannot be folded any further. Figuratively, the legislation can be weaponized into a folded gun- a weapon of the 2nd amendment. Amico criticizes the endless debates on gun rights that end with little real action against the mass gun violence in the U.S.

Another loaded line in this poem is a “gun that folds into a crane, into another crane, into a history lesson.” This immediately reminded me of “A Thousand Cranes” and the narratives of those who survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and those who didn’t. Those detonated nuclear bombs are now a “history lesson”- a warning of the horrors of war. Every time there is a mass shooting, it is treated as a lesson to save more lives the next time it happens, but that means that we expect a “next time”- when did that become a reality? We supposedly “learned” from the nuclear bombings in Japan, but we still lie on the brink of worldwide nuclear war and mutually assured destruction. Each mass shooting brings new legislation on school safety, new investments in security systems, and new purchases of bulletproof backpacks, but we still hear of so many mass shootings that the casualty numbers become blurred in our minds. 

The last line concluded the poem with a full circle back to the title- a “gun that folds into a cell phone”- but with an additional clause- a “gun that calls your children home.” A cell phone literally can “call” the children to come home, but Amico uses another connotation of “call” in the second clause- a gun calling your children home is an unsettling euphemism for the lives cut short in school shootings.

Link to Huffington Post Article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ideal-conceal-gun-smartphone_n_56fab0c4e4b0a372181b0c0f

Song: “American Elegy” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY6TGPi_qwQ

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“The Elegy of the Half-Done Quilt” by Tjawangwa Dema

This poem is an elegy that tells the story of 3 daughters who didn’t show much care for their mother until she had passed. Dema uses her words to indirectly show time change. For example in this line she states “There she is bent over the candlelight, prom dress draped over her knee” and later she says “batting on time, to pad three layers each for her daughters’ wedding quilts”. In the first quote she mentions her mother making prom dresses, which are typically related to high school and younger girls. Then later in the second quote she creates an image of her mother making her and her sisters wedding dresses, these two lines help create the contrast in time throughout the story/poem. Another thing that Dema did that really caught my eye was referencing things she’s said in the past. She says, “We are sorry we never said sorry” and later in the story the mother says “say sorry to your sister. It’s what you say to someone you love.” So she used the concept of the daughters all saying sorry to their mother to convey the emotion of love.

The title used here is great because it starts off by stating exactly what the poem is, an elegy; which is a poem of reflection on those who are dead. The title also says “the half done quilt”, which is a great representation of the mothers life, if she had finished one sewing project there was always another one only half done.

There were some parts of this poem that were difficult for me to understand, one being that I didn’t know what an elegy was. For that issue I just had to google it but others I had to use the TPCASTT method to come to a full understanding of what was going on.

This poem had reminded me of the song “Supermarket Flowers” by Ed Sheeran because both are about remembering a dead mother and relying on other family members to help get you through the emotions.

https://youtu.be/bIB8EWqCPrQ - Supermarket Flowers

340 words

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“Equisite With Agony” by Philip Schultz

“Only the guilty ask why

they deserve such punishment,

only the stupid expect kindness.

Always it comes to this:

how much pain we can tolerate.”

This poem was particularly intense. I picked it based on google number generator because I didn’t know where to start with my poet. So, I let google start for me and google smacked me with a poem about a two-year-old girl drowning. Always a great way to start your Sunday mornings.

This poem put me in a very strange mood that I can’t quite express. Schultz was able to put a weight on my shoulders from an experience that wasn’t even my own. His word and phrasing choices mixed with his philosophical approach to death and grief are sitting on my heart as I write this. He spends the first half of the poem explaining the situation and asking the two questions that weigh on the mind the most after a tragedy; what could have happened differently for this to have never occurred, and “how much pain we can tolerate.” He states this matter-of-factly rather than as a question, knowing that it may be the only questions that gets asked consistantly when in comes to grieving. The part of this poem that truly enticed me was after the switch, which occurs at “Three generations of womanhood...”, because the tone shifts from trying to cope to a tone I feel the priest often uses when talking at a funeral. It felt like Schultz was almost directly quoting a priest based on the philosophical, almost “higher power” tone of it. He even concludes the poem with “Lord!”, furthering my feelings that Schultz probably attended the funeral and may have included a few direct lines from the priest himself.

“Exquisite with Agony” was a title that caught my eye from the very beginning, and only made more sense after reading the poem. Exquisite, meaning extremely beautiful and often delicate, and agony, meaning extreme suffering, the title comes together to say extremely delicate with extreme suffering. I didn’t understand the full meaning of this until reading through the poem in its entirety. It’s said that there is no greater pain than that of losing a child, and that’s exactly what happened. I can only imagine the pain of losing someone who was suppose to out-life you. (362)

I’m sad now, have a nice day.

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My Mentor Poet - Tjawangwa Dema

Before I had landed on TJ as my mentor poet, I had considered using Neil Hilborn because I loved the way he performed each of his poems with such emotion. Though I did love Neil, I was already familiar with his poems, which is one factor that pushed me towards TJ. But it wasn’t because I was unfamiliar with TJ that I chose her, it was more because she was able to present her poems, like Neil, but in such a different way. For Neil, it was almost like he was acting, but with TJ she used her surroundings to tell a story and move the listener/reader. The first poem of TJ’s that I saw was “Dreams”

Dreams                                                                                                        Dreams are evil I prefer nightmares They show you what goes on in here Reflects what goes on out there

That stanza, right off the bat, caught my attention. She took dreams, something most of us see as positive, and called them evil compared them to nightmares. By bringing such an interesting topic to the table, Dema had automatically drawn me in. But the poem that made me fully commit to her as my mentor poet was “Neon Poem”.

https://youtu.be/ACSWgZcV4DQ

This is where she truly used her surroundings when performing her poem to draw in the listener. She also used such a challenging topic for a poem, poems. 

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My Mentor Poet- Philip Schultz

I feel this is going to sound somewhat shallow, but the first thing that caught my eye about my poet was his name. I recognized it and decided to take a closer look. His poems were intriguing in a a way I don’t typically find with the poets I regularly read. I also looked at Camille Rankine but I felt that Schultz’s work had more wisdom within it and the moves he chose for his poetry really help you to relate to what he talks about, even if the exact events aren’t always something you directly relate to. The nicest thing about poetry is it can be left to the interpretation of the reader and they can make what they wish with it to help them relate with their own experience. With Schultz being an older poet with a lifetime of experiences to talk about and me only being a senior in high school trying to get my college applications in order, I like the idea that maybe he can teach me more about the world and the people within it from a more grown and matured approach.

It’s Sunday Morning In Early November

and there are a lot of leaves already.

I could rake and get a head start.

The boys’ summer toys need to be put

in the basement. I could clean it out

or fix the broken storm window.

When Eli gets home from Sunday school,

I could take him fishing. I don’t fish

but I could learn to. I could show him

how much fun it is. We don’t do as much

as we used to do. And my wife, there’s

so much I haven’t told her lately,

about how quickly my soul is aging,

how it feels like a basement I keep filling

everything I’m tired of surviving.

I could take a walk with my wife and try

to explain the ghosts I can’t stop speaking to.

Or I could read all those books piling up

about the beginning of the end of understanding…

Meanwhile, it’s such a beautiful morning,

the changing colors, the hypnotic light.

I could sit by the window watching the leaves,

which seem to know exactly how to fall

from one moment to the next. Or I could lose

everything and have to begin over again.

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Adults/elders now: “THESE YOUNGER GENERATIONS ARE SCREWING EVERYTHING UP!! THEY’RE OFFENDED LITTLE BABIES WHO DON’T KNOW JACKSHIT ABOUT ANYTHING!!”

The generation: * Says thank you even if it’s the employee’s job

* Give decent tips because we understand that jobs that rely on tips suck and pay next to nothing

* Try and learn about the world around us and try to avoid bias

* Tries to figure out morals and our worldview

* Thinks debates on how to help the world and the people in it

* Are more likely to create rather than sit back and let others do the entertainment for us

* Want the world to be an easier, happier place for everyone

* Isn’t taught how to manage money, communicate with others, or how to deal with personal struggles, so the fact we got this far is amazing.

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Secondary Source 6: I Lost My Leg to Cancer- Then I Became an Amputee Model- Shape

https://www.shape.com/lifestyle/mind-and-body/jessica-quinn-i-lost-my-leg-cancer-then-became-amputee-model

This article was really interesting to me because her story paralleled in a lot of ways to Josh’s. The insecurity and worry over the fake leg was a big deal for both of them and created this weight that they both had to carry around. The biggest difference between them was that she came to terms completely a lot sooner than he did. Josh still held on to some of his insecurities without even realizing it, and it held him back a lot in life. But once he could come to terms full circle with it, his weight was lifted just like hers.

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I feel like this connects to the mindset that Josh has when he graduated high school and was entering into college. One of the nicest things about this book is how real it is. It’s a real person talking about his experiences through real things and trying to relay real emotions and thoughts and confusions. Books like these remind is that we aren’t the only ones feeling and thinking certain things. That we are not alone in our experiences, but others who are older went through it and those our same age are going through it, all in their own way.

“Here’s to another year. Here’s to new friendships, new promises, new beginnings. Here’s to college life and living away from home for the first time. Here’s to new subjects and new challenges. Here’s to another heartbreak and another one after that. Here’s to drunk nights spent in the club and the nights spent playing card games with tea to keep you warm. Here’s to that one person who has stayed by you all this while, and here’s to that one person who still crosses your mind everyday. Here’s to first jobs and first paychecks. Here’s to horrible bosses we love to curse. Here’s to road trips and shopping sprees; here’s to expensive wines, cheap beer and street foods. Here’s to new relationships and relationships that couldn’t last. Here’s to first apartments and mounds of bills to pay. Here’s to leaving some dreams behind and here’s to finding new ones. Here’s to exploring new places and here’s to living life like we’ve never known before. This time, it will be about celebrating ourselves, about embracing our beauty, accepting ourselves as flawed as we are because we’ll never be as young as we are now. So, raise your glasses; Here’s to another era of our lives.”

— turning twenty.

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af·ter·glow

/ˈaftərˌɡlō/

noun the color left in the sky after the sun has set or good feelings that remain after a successful or pleasurable experience.

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Secondary Source 4: Sierra Burgess is a Loser - Movie

Now, I’ve spoken a lot about how unrealistic romance movies are and it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually stayed any examples of unrealistic romance movies. Sierra Burgess is a Loser is a movie released by Netflix about a girl who finds herself falling in love with a boy who has no idea who she really is; he thinks she’s someone else. It’s an adorable lil love story with a happy ending. The problem is that the things that happen in the movie would never fly in real life. For one, she catfishes a guy and he’s kinda mad but it doesn’t take a lot to forgive her. Also, she does some snakey stuff that makes her friend mad but then her friend just forgives her because of a song she wrote? Sorry, no, that’s not how that works in real life. There are plenty of other reasons but I’m gonna let you watch it to find out the rest because despite its lack of realism, it’s still a cute teenage love story.

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We Should Hang Out Sometime- Pt 7

I finally finished the last chunk of my book and it made me so mad at first but then so happy. Let me explain; Sundquist finally met up with Sasha the beauty queen after meeting with all the other girls and asking what went wrong. The sadest part of this meeting was that she did actually like him back and the only reason she didn’t like him was cuz she was embarrassed after the Miss America pageant. And Josh got so excited, thinking maybe they could make it work only to find out she was engaged. Later in this second of the book was when Josh finally realized what had restricted him for so long. I’m not gonna tell you what it was cuz you should read the book but his realization finally pushed him to take a chance and it paid off. It had a good ending☺️😁

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Secondary Source 3: 500 Days of Summer- Movie

This movie is about a guy who falls in love with this girl. Like, hardcore in love, crying and depressed all the time after she calls it quits. It’s one of those rare romantic movies where the guy DOESNT get the girl. The nice thing about this movie is that yes, the guy is attractive, but that doesn’t mean he gets whatever girl comes into play. And he didn’t necessarily have to do anything wrong to lose her. It shows that sometimes things just don’t work out and you have to find ways to deal with it when it doesn’t. It’s nice to see that his friends and sister help pull him out of his depressed slump afterwards, showing that he wasn’t alone in his fight with his feelings, as many people feel that they are but are, more accurately, not.