Poetry Test - Gwendolyn Brooks to Louise Glück

Gwendolyn Brooks

• Friends with MLK Jr.

• Spent time in NYC and Chicago

• Black woman

• Family oriented poetry

• From Kansas

• Taught at University Wisconsin Madison and City University of NY

• Published Maud Martha

Abortion

What will not let you forget?

Baby

What is the fancy parasite in “The Mother?”

Old People

Who are the “bean eaters?”

As people age, they contribute less to society

What is the message of “the bean eaters?”

We Real Cool

Jazz June. We Die Soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Who wrote about youth pool players living recklessly?

First fight. Then fiddle.

Deaf to music to beauty blind - about social injustice and is a sonnet - gracefully fight

Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Got in trouble with royalty for supporting middle class

• Well known wife (Mary, creator of Frankenstein)

• Wrote a pamphlet on Atheism

• Traveled Ireland speaking about political injustice

• Ode to the West Wind

• Verse Drama - Prometheus Unbound

• Drowned

Ozymandias

Importance of the sculptor and working class - about the Egyptian ruler Ramses

Love's Philosophy

Physical intimacy is natural; mountains kiss, waves clasp, everything comes in pairs

What is all this sweet work worth if thou kiss not me?

John Donne

• Preacher at St. Pauls Cathedral in London

• Wrote worldyl love lyrics at the court of Queen Eliabeth

• His works - Songs and Sonnets

• Metaphysical poetry

The Flea

If blood is already mixed, then why not have sex?

John Donne

Who wrote the Flea?

A Valedictorian: Forbidding Mourning

If you pound gold thin, it’s still gold ; farewell speech

“Song”

Mandrakes, mermaids, and infidelity

“Death, be not proud”

Death is natural, death has no power over human souls

Batter my heart, three-personed God

We are all humans, we all sin, wants God to batter him, beat him up, make him suffer to prove his worth

William Butler Yeats

• Irish; inspired Seamus Heaney

• Studied Painting

• Wrote The Celtic Twilight and The Secret Rose

• Poems about folklore, occult, and Irish legends

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

Transcendentalism; desire to leave urban city and build a cabin

The Second Coming

• World is ending, in chaos and violence

• In the for of a lion with a man head (sphinx)

• Pessimistic view of the world

Leda and the Swan

• The swan is Zeus

• Leda is the mortal woman

• Discusses the power and actions of Gods

• Zeus rapes Leda

Sailing to Byzantium

• Themes of aging, immortality, art, and wisdom

• World is made for the young

• Speaker wishes to die

• Immortality through art and learning

When You are Old

• Dramatic monologue

• Speaker addresses a beloved woman, imaging her as older

• Pilgrim Soul

Adam’s Curse

• Labor

• Effort is required to sustain love

• Beauty takes effort

The Wild Swans at Coole

• Moments are fleeting

• Written after seeing wild swans

• Life is fragile

An Irish Airman Foresees his Death

• World War 1

• Airman thinking about his death

• Irishmen risking their lives for a country they did not own

A Dream of Death

• Mourning

• Importance of Home

• Lonely death

• Her beauty fades as she remains dead

Gary Soto

• Mexican American

• Wrote narratives

• Wanted to be an engineer at first; went to UC Irvine

• Writes about discrimination against Mexican Americans

• Contemporary Poet; Still Alive

Mexicans Begin Jogging

• Border control visits factory

• Soto runs, because they won’t believe he is an American

• Love ling baseball, milkshakes, and the sociologists

• Mexican Americans are underestimated and believed to not be educated

Behind Grandma’s House

• Child lashing out for attention

• Grandma comes to help him

• Children wanting attention in society, especially those without parents in their life?

Making Money: Drought Year in Minkler, California

• Father and Son betting on the age of a car

• Car is a personification of how difficult it is to be a laborer

• Father bets on a plane falling from the sky and exploding

William Wordsworth

• Romantic poet

• Lyrical, sing songy poems (ballads)

• Friends with Samuel Coleridge

• His sister Dorothy inspired him

• Born in Lake District of Northern England

• Connection with nature

The world is too much with us

• Not enough time to enjoy nature

• No one enjoys nature anymore

• Wishes people were Pagans again, not trying to scientifically understand everything

The Solitary Reaper

• Solitary Reaper is a woman in a field reaping grain

• She is singing a sad song, because she is alone

• About how loneliness is deadly and we need fellow humans in life

Lines (Tintern Abbey)

• About Wordsworth visiting the Wye Valley when he was 23 years old

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

• Walk in Lake District

• Sees a strip of daffodils

• Nature and tranquility

It is a beauteous evening

• Sonnet

• A beautiful evening, its quiet

• Calls for the appreciation of nature

• Calais, France

• His daughter is not in awe - but that is because children have god with them all the time

Niki Giovanni

• Princess of black poetry

• Deals with racial inequality and feminism

• Racism 101 - Famous work

• Spoke up for women’s rights

Ego Tripping

• Inflated ego

• She’s everything

• The world without a woman is nothing

• Women and people are amazing!

BLK History Month

• Black History Month is important

• Educates about history and reinforces ideas of equality

• Metaphor: people and the message are the seed, blk month is the water, Sun, that helps it grow

Poem for a Lady Whose Voice I Like

• References Simone

• God made black women

• Idea of ego tripping and people working towards being amazing

Nikki Rosa

• Memories of growing up in a suburb in Cincinnati

• Primary black population

• Happy with family

• Strong sense of community

Rainer Maria Rilke

• German poet born in Prague

• Most significant figure in the 20th century

• Divorced

• Secretary to Auguste Rodin

• Wanted to make poetry unique and different

The Cadet Picture of My Father

• Looking at a picture of his father

• Father is dead now

• Did not have a strong relationship with his father

• Slowly, he forgets what his father was like

• After death, our memories of those dead fade away

Song of the Dwarf

• Speaker is aging

• Ready to die

• Hands are so important to him because he is a writer

• Dwarf represents his writing talent, which he is losing

Day in Autumn

• People follow nature

• As the seasons change, humans do too

• Nature is cyclic, and we follow

Theodore Roethke

• Born in Saginaw Michigan

• Father (a drunk) overseer of a greenhouse

• Rough family life

My Papa’s Waltz

• Being beaten by his dad who is drunk

• Mom is upset

• Child does not hate his dad, he loves his dad

• Idea of how children can see abuse as love

• Clings for his father, even after being beat with a belt

Elegy for Jane

• Student named Jane dies - horse riding incident

• Non romantic love

• Jane had curly hair

• Idea death affects everyone, even those not super close to the subject

Root Cellar

• Repulsive cellar

• Boxes, manure, and planks

• About how even if life is awful, nature and life still finds a way

The Waking

• Villanelle

• The value of taking life slowly, trusting one’s intuitions

• He wakes to sleep and takes his waking slow

• Life is mysterious

• Life is full of lessons

Sharon Olds

• Still Alive

• Pulitzer Prize

• Abused by her father

• 25 year marriage, husband left her for his secretary, saw a change in her poetry

• Private individual

I go back to May 1937

• Parents graduating from Harvard

• Somewhat wishes they would not marry, but then she would not exist

• Paper dolls = parents

• Olds is the fire from her parents

• She will tell us what happens so we do not make the same mistakes as her parents

Sex without love

• Bitter

• Writing about how we are selfish

• We are all selfish in life

Size and Sheer Will

• Growth and Change

• Comparing youthful boy (Gabriel) to grass

• We are impatient about becoming old, but then long for youth once we are old

Rite of Passage

• Poem about the root of male violence

• Boys pretend to play war

• Violent culture of men in contrast to youth and innocence

35/10

• 35 is age of mother, child is 10

• Hair is turning gray as her daughter becomes a young woman

• Young replace the old; this is the normal part of life

Elizabeth Bishop

• Lived with grandparents in Nova Scotia

• Lots of Awards

• Wrote Armadillo in reaction to Robert Lowell

• Lived in Brazil for 15 years

• North and South

One Art

• Talking about losing things

• Lost someone

• We try to convince ourselves it is fine to lose someone, that it does not cause us to become insane

• The art of losing is not hard to master

Sestina

• Sestina poem

• Family trauma with dad being dead

• Girl draws houses with father, but as she continues to draw the father will appear less and less

The FIsh

• Extended metaphor about how people fight back in life, life always has its setbacks

• Sea lice, barnacles, and fish looks rough

• Let the fish go

First Death in Nova Scotia

• Wake held for her cousin Arthur

• Fascination with death

• Children are innocently curious about death

• Dead bird in relation to Arthur’s death

Anne Sexton

• Taught creative writing

• Committed suicide by asphyxiation

• Won the pulitizer prize for Live or Die

• Mental illness and Depression

• Taught by Robert Lowell

• Confessional Poetry

The Starry Night

• 11 stars

• The stars and sky is alive

• Sky is a serpent or dragon gobbling the stars

• Sexton wants to die, falling to sleep

Two Hands

• Wonders about the origin of humanity

• Themes of creation by god

• Men and women are interconnected

• Applauding is no sin

• Part of a larger plan

• God created us all and everything we do is holy

Her Kind

• Death and Suicidal thoughts

• Women cannot succeed in society without being seen as something

• Witch - strong, powerful, single, independent woman

• Homemaker - a married woman becomes a wife, a woman with a child becomes a mother

• Driver - she has got a job, so she is no good and selfish for not taking care of her family

Louise Glúck

• Died last year

• Poet Laureate of the US from 2003 to 2004

• Born in NYC

• Taught poetry

• No degree

• Had anorexia

• Divorced then remarried

• House burned down

• Died from cancer

• Famous Work: October about 9/11
  

Mock Orange

• Mock orange is a flower

• Confessional

• She hates the flowers

• Feminist ideas of men being the root of women’s problems

The School Children

• Children going to school

• School is framed pretty harshly

• Distance between children and mothers while at school

• Apple Imagery since Apples represent education/teachers in general