I AM
AMYEM
English Major, lifelong learner, impractical perfectionist.
Painting: Iris Fields - Paul Chester
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Painting: Iris Fields - Paul Chester
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Poems have never been easy for me to read. It often takes about twenty read-throughs in order to really grasp the idea of what the poet is trying to convey, and hey – why can’t they just use normal words? You can guess I was a little off-put when my class started out with analyzing poetry. But thank goodness for Modernist poetry. In reading Writing the Nation, I was so happy to see that, in the biographies of the poets, all their rejections of old poetry. Marianne Moore even said it herself: “I too, dislike it: there are things important beyond all this fiddle.” Modernists care so much more about delivering a message or an image with just the right amount of words. Some are concise in their imagery, such as William Carlos Williams in his poem The Red Wheelbarrow. One of the things I find so remarkable, especially about modernist poetry, is the universality of something so concise. The poem is specific not only in terms of what it is describing, but to who it is being written for or about. It would have more meaning to someone on a farm, as an interpretation you could get upon reading this poem is the requirements to care for a farm – providing for the animals and having enough water, given that without water crops will die. There is a heavier weight upon those who live on a farm and have to experience the weight of helplessness as they are, essentially, required to rely on things out of their control than there is on someone living in a suburban neighborhood where the closest farm is forty minutes away. There is a different kind of specific meaning dependent on where you are at – living on a farm or living two minutes away from the nearest Kroger. But even in my experience of the latter, I still get meaning. I see the meaning of the vague “so much” in “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow”, because it is begging the reader to fill in what is unknown without any explicit or even implicit “this is what depends.” Vague wording in plain speech is more personal to the reader because it makes them attach their own meaning, and thus strengthens the relationship of the text to the reader, and I think that’s just pretty neat, and beautifully artistic. There is even imagery in things without intense or long descriptors. Putting a word like “depends” in a stanza and following it up with an animal and a thing the animal is reliant on, your mind is full of images. At least, mine is. I see clear, hot skies and dried grass because the meaning I derive from the poem is helplessness of depending on something out of your control, such as weather. But others may see it as clear skies, cool weather, and waking up early in the morning and being able to care for your chickens because of the grace of rain – a red wheel barrow, glazed with rain water. And that’s what I think poetry should be – individual, and special.
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Meet Amy -This blog is to share insights into things I'm reading or studying. Feel free to share your input! Archives
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