Week 12 Discussion

William Carlos Williams believes that “the reader must complete what the poet has begun” since the poet often times depends on readers to put effort into it. I find so much beauty in the idea that poetry is somewhat subjective since William Carlos shares that the “act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem”. I understood that poetry can be what readers want it to be by sharing ideas and experiences that might not have been the first impression. In the poem “The Lake of Isle of Innisfree” by W.B Yeats, he writes “Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow”, I immediately imagined a man running away from the busy city life, tired and exhausted and finally being able to embrace his new calm life with nature surrounding him. He started really taking in the beehive, the structure of his new home, the lake. I picture myself there, and seeing and feeling what he feels, everlasting peace.  

In the article, “how to read a poem”,  from the poets.org, by Edward Hirsch, The author helps me read poetry by showing us some points and how they are important, He also states some mistakes that readers do when reading a poem. Some mistakes that he pointed out was that, when reading, is that they should understand what they encounter on the first reading. The second thing is that the poem is some kind of code, and that each code has a specific idea and they need to crack this code. One last thing is that the poem can mean anything readers want it to mean. Now the ways he help us to read the poems are by saying that how by reading the title of a poem can give you a hint and idea or imagination of what the poem can be about sometimes. He says this in the paragraph titled, reading a poem aloud. Another thing is he also says  his lines are often difficult . but states, This act of competition begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem. brining t it your experience and the point of view. Another thing is in that paragraph he states that reading poetry progresses overtime and that it takes time and skills. In the paragraph getting started, the author says, reading poetry is a challenge, but like so many other things, it takes practices and your skills and insight. improves as you progress. These are some ways that author teaches us and help us to read poetry.

In “How to Read a Poem” William Carlos Williams writes that a reader must “complete” what the poet has begun, in the Italian sonnet, “What My Lips Have Kissed and Why and When”, Edna Saint Vincent Millay uses her sonnet to make provoke thought in the reader. Poems tell stories and in order to understand the story, the reader must read between the lines to fully understand. The sonnet is at a surface level about love and loneliness. The deeper meaning to gain from the poem is the narrator reflecting on past loves and regrets she has had and the heartache she feels. In lines 6 through 8, the text states, “And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.”. The narrator is guilty that she has forgotten these past lovers who were once important in her life. As time moves on, she knows they will never rekindle what they had or will speak again in the same way. Lines 12 to 14 state, “I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.” Though the narrator knows she enjoyed being in love with her past lovers, though short-lived she feels empty and in grief. She now wonders if the relationships she’s experienced were even worth experiencing. Usually, we’re used to seeing stories about love where the person is longing for past loved ones but the narrator doesn’t remember much about them. The sonnet started off with her longing for these past relationships she only faintly remembers and ends open-ended left for the reader to come to their own conclusion of how their outlook on the topic.

In “How to Read a Poem” by Edward Hirsch teaches me how to carefully read a poem. He states that “the goal of careful reading is often to take up a question of meaning, an interpretive question that has more than one answer”. That means you have to have a good listening ear for how sound a rhythm is related to meaning. William Carlos wrote a poem addressed to his wife and he admits in this poem, the lines was difficult. He said that a reader must complete what the poet has written. In order for a reader to complete a poem, he or she have to have an imagination. Society has a sharing experience in literature. whether its understanding about living, loving, or dying. The Lineation is the relationship between meaning, sound, and movement intended by the poet is sometimes hard to recognize. The best way to retain the grammatical sense of a poem is to read to the end of the phrase.

After reading “How to Read a Poem” by Edward Hirsch I have more knowledge on how to understand reading poems, in the past I have always like I understood how to read poems, but the article helped me understand it a lot more. it helped me to understand what it means to complete a poem. I have chosen “White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey. in “White Lies” I thought it was funny because throughout the poem she explaining she only lying to feel good about herself by saying things like “I could easily tell the white folks that we lived uptown, not in that pink and green shanty-fled shotgun section along the tracks. I could act like my homemade dresses came straight out the window of Maison Blanche.” was able to enter imagine the play of the poem due to it being something like movies I’ve watched and it being like what people do daily.  

In the Article “How to Read a Poem” by Edward Hirsch, he explains all the ways how to correctly complete a poem. He writes how to “put yourself” into the poem, the reader has to put in the effort to truly understand what the “poet has begun”. Hirsch also explains how it takes time and effort to truly do this, but after a lot of time in doing this, understanding poems is easy. In the poem, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B Yeats, the poet, is fantasizing about a lake island where it is very peaceful, and it seems he wants to go there. It states “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings”. He utilizes imagery in this poem, showing how his image of this place is running wild and how he is eager to go there. According to this text, I think something might be going on with the poet’s life at this time: “While I stand on this roadway, or the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core”. It shows that he isn’t in this place, by saying “while I stand on this roadway”. It is in his heart where he wants to go, whether this may be going to heaven where he may be at peace, or he actually might want to go on a vacation somewhere nice. In the article that Edward Hirsch wrote, I used one of his ways to read a poem, which is by reading the poem aloud. It sort of helped me understand it a bit more. In the article, Hirsch said that everyone sees a different meaning in any poem. That was in the back of my head while reading […]

Throughout my years of reading literature and specifically poetry has been a struggle to understand fully. In the article “How to Read a Poem” written by William Carlos Williams, He tells us about how difficult poetry often is to read and that to fully understand a poem we have to “complete” what the poet began. He tells us “This act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing to it your experience and point of view.” The poem that I have chosen to “complete” this week is “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. On the surface, it seems like a really simple and to-the-point poem with it being so short but it tells a deeper story. I completed this poem by putting myself into the shoes of one of the seven boys in the poem. The lines “We Left school. We Lurk late.” and “We Die soon.” stuck out to me the most because it does not say explicitly in the poem that they were kids rebelling against what they should do and that it could come with serious consequences such as death. But when I put myself into the position they were in it seems much clearer that Brooks was trying to portray this message.

In “How to read a poem” it says that you need to complete what the poet has started and one way to help was to read aloud. The poem I chose was “The mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks and at first I read it silently. What I got was a poem about a mother who had to abort a baby and is haunted with regret for her actions but in the end loved her children. On my second read I read it out loud and I got a different experience as I noticed how some words at the end of the lines had rhymed and how the commas had helped set a slightly different tone. I still felt a tone of regret but throughout the poem I felt the mothers love for her children all throughout. In the lines,” If I stole your births and names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,” When read silently I had the tone of a mother who knew that she stole the future of her children and was regretful with what she did. After reading it out loud I had seen a mother who knew what she did and was instead sad and apologetic to them that they never had the chance to live their own life.

In my opinion, poems speak to us in many ways. Though their forms may not always be direct or narrative. Sometimes the job of the poem is to come closer to saying what cannot be said in other forms of writing, to suggest an experience, idea, or feeling that you can know but not entirely express in any direct or literal way.  Williams admits that poetry is often difficult. the poem “January Morning,”: All this— was for you, old woman. I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can’t understand it? But you got to try hard— He also suggests that a poet depends on the effort of a reader, somehow, a reader must “complete” what the poet has begun. This act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing to it your experience and point of view. If a poem is “play” in the sense of a game or a sport, then you enjoy that it makes you work a little, that it makes you sweat a bit. Reading poetry is a challenge, but like so many other things, it takes practice, and your skills and insight improve as you progress.

In the article “How to Read a Poem” written by William Carlos Williams, he acknowledges the challenges of reading poetry. The readers must “complete” what the poet has begun. This week the poem that I am choosing to speak about is “White Lies” by Natasha Trethewey. This poem is about all the “white lies” the speaker told during her childhood, as the poem progresses the story becomes less innocent. The speaker uses spondee in the third line of the poem “light-bright, near-white” which first introduces us to the racial theme of the poem. The speaker goes on to talk about her “white lies” as she is identified as white by one of her classmates “‘…the time a white girl said (squeezing my hand), Now we have three of us in this class. But I paid for it every time Mama found out.” The speaker was happy to be seen as white but in doing that she was denying her black mother. Her “white lies” symbolize the innocence of the lies she told but also symbolize the thing she is literally lying about which is that she is not 100% white. I did some research on the poet and she was half black and half white and this gives a little insight to the identity issues she faced growing up being mixed. I feel that the poet did a great job at displaying those emotions in the poem.

The poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” describes Innisfree as a peaceful and tranquil place the poet wants to go to. It’s a very quiet place and that is the main reason the poet wants to go there. “Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade” the poet is explaining the landscape and knows for sure he will be at peace living there. In the second stanza “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings” describes the peace and positivity that would come as if the dawn is coming out of the veil. When the morning comes, it carries calmness into the place where the crickets were singing which is why the poet wants to be there. The poet wants to be around nature and doesn’t want to hear unnecessary noises. I completed what the poet set in motion after reading “How to Read a Poem” is how it can sound very lonely and miserable way the poet wants to live but I see it as being at peace with himself. The poet pointing out nature and the environment shows he doesn’t want to hear unnecessary noises but wants to hear nature, something that gives him peace. 

William Carlos Williams states that in order to understand a poem, a reader must “complete what a poet has begun”. The article from Poets.org states that in order to do so you must use your imagination to connect it to your experience to see it from your point of view. For this discussion I’ve selected “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. After reading the poem a few times I really examined it and broke it down.  Gwendolyn Brooks states that the poem was inspired when she passed a pool hall one day and noticed some teenagers inside cutting school. Using “imaginative play” I interpreted the poem as a summary of the life trajectory of the 7 teenagers (as established in the subtitle). The first stanza “we real cool, we left school” establishes the rebelliousness of the group foregoing their education, viewing this act of defiance as cool. Stanza 2 the author uses the word lurk. To lurk means: “To lie in wait in a place of concealment especially for an evil purpose.” Which is followed by the line ‘We strike straight.” To strike is to hit with force. I interpreted this stanza as a representation of the dark path the kids are travelling down, staying out late being menacing. This Stanza is followed by “We sing sin, We thin gin.”  I don’t interpret this as singing of sin but enjoying sinful acts or showing unruly behavior like drinking alcohol (the act of thinning gin). The 4th stanza brings the poem to an end “We jazz june, We die soon”. Gwendolyn Brooks states that “June” represents the establishment (Authority). “Jazz” was once considered rebellious music. So I interpret the line representing the teens rebelling against authority. The outcome of their behavior culminates into their early demise or the behavior ending sooner […]

In “How to Read a Poem” it is said that the act of “completion” begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing it to your experience and point of view. The poem i chose is “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem is about a group of kids forming a identity that they themselves accept and not what society accepts. What completed the poem for me was the line “We jazz June. We Die Soon.” It made me understand the reason for their Defiance, rebellion, the reason they wanted to form a identity true to themselves even if it meant going against societal rules was because they were going to die soon and they rather die with a identity they accept rather than one society accepts.

I chose The Lake Isle Of Innisfree this Poem is very sad yet beautiful because it highlights certain factors about what the author is going through and what he thinks of himself for example he states “ Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade.“ In this line he is higlighting loneliness that he feels but at the same time he thinks that this life will be peaceful where he says And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;“ here the author is saying that even though it can be lonely here that he is content with it because he can have some form of peace that he never had before and by the end of the poem he comes to grip with the reality of the situation and accepts it by saying “I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.” This is the author realizing that he has to accept what is happening, after reading the article how to read a poem it helped me to complete it because in it it states that everyone can see a different meaning in the poem so while others may find this poem depressing I find it beautiful that he’s able to get past the loneliness and to be at peace with the life he is living now.

For this week’s discussion, I chose “The lake isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats. It’s a beautiful haunting record of what I believe is W.B. Yeats himself reciting the poem adds another mystical layer to the poem and in a way brings the poem more to life. You can close your eyes and listen to W.B Yates himself describe  ” I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” and “And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade.” You can imagine the imagery and scenery for this poem more vividly with W.B. Yeats himself describing it. The poet has set in motion the imagery of this scene of the lake isle of Innisfree and the yearning and longing of the scenery. You can picture everything described in the poem and with the way of W.B Yeats himself reciting the poem it brings the very imagery of the Lake Isle of Innisfree to life. 

In “How To Read A Poem” one of the biggest instructions that helped me read and understand poems clearly are “Talking Back to a Poem” talking back to a poem is something I noticed I did unconsciously, I would faintly question what the author or poet is trying to say and represent. After reading this article, I made sure to be intentional with my questions so that I can understand the poem in its entirety, after asking myself “what does this line mean?” “what is this poet trying to say?” it makes me further read the poem deeply over and over. The poem “My Last Duchess” at first was a very hard poem to understand at first, I had to ask myself over and over what each paragraph was trying to convey, and I had no choice but to understand fully so that I could answer the questions through each paragraph on Commonlit. This poem is about The Duke feeling betrayed and belittled by his first wife, The Duchess. He described her as “trifling” simply because she was pleasant to most that she had laid her eyes upon, and The Duke’s ego was not going for that so he killed The Duchess. Later on in this poem he reveals that he wants to marry a Count’s daughter.

In the article How to Read a Poem by Edward Hirsch in order to “complete” what the poem has started, you must put yourself in the poem. You have to immerse yourself into the poem, and put yourself into the point of view of the narrative. The article brings up the fact that it is something that takes time and effort to get used to. But over time it should make understanding poems easier. The poem I chose was The Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B Yeats. This narrator is fantasizing about going to a remote island off the coast of Ireland. In this poem, the narrator wishes to live a simple life on a remote island. The narrator says that the nature on the island will bring peace and comfort. “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings” (5-8, Hirsch). The narrator speaks about nature on the island like it has a spiritual meaning and as if it is a part of him.     

I chose White Lies by Natasha Trethewey as my reference for this week’s discussion. At first, I had a challenging time understanding the meaning of the poem. However, through several readings and breaking down each line I understood what was laid out by the author. The poem touches on identity as a theme and it’s about a girl who struggles to accept herself for who she is. What brought my understanding to completion is this line “Believing her, I swallowed suds / thinking they’d work / from the inside out.” For a good portion of the poem, it seemed like it is about a girl just telling normal white lies that meant little harm. However, underneath that I understood that her mother was punishing her because she was denying her racial identity, trying to assimilate into a culture that was not her own. To which the line comes into play where she really believed that if she were to be clean from the inside then she can be white and purified on the outside- as in her skin tone. 

According to the article “How To Read A Poem”, the act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing it to your experience and point of view. The poem I choose to illustrate my response to this week discussion is “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. After reading the article, I used the talking back to the poem technique where I asked, what does the title suggest? The Mother, suggest some form of being a parent, as I continued to read, I asked, what circumstances gave rise to the poem? The answer was abortions. The first time I read the poem, I imagined a hurt female, that had regret and disappointment in the act that she committed. The line where she states, “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children”, I felt like she was beating herself up about not giving the children she aborted life. The second time I read the poem, I read it aloud. This time my imagination gave me a woman that feel she did what was best. The line where she states, “believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”, gives a perception of her doing the right thing. My completion became clear in my third reading of the poem when I read the line ” you remember the children you got that you did not get’, with me knowing now what she was talking about, this is a woman thinking about what could’ve been if she kept her children, the love she still has, and the guilt she feels, however there is no regret. I put myself in Gwendolyn position and imagined not having a child by choice. I have a beautiful daughter that I cannot see life without. Pain […]

I enjoyed reading the article “How to Read a Poem” because the author uses many references to life that makes it easier to connect to the challenge of reading a poem. For example when he says that reading a poem might make you “sweat” a little, but that it’s like a sport – it takes practice and in the end, you get better.  The poet William Carlos Williams, in acknowledging the challenges of reading poetry, writes that a reader must “complete” what the poet has begun. One example from this week’s readings can be the poem “My Last Duchess” in which you need to “talk back to a poem” as mentioned in the article. The author of the article gives some questions to ask yourself which I think are helpful in order to understand this poem better, such as who is the speaker, and what situation is presented? In this case, the speaker is a Duke, he shows someone the painting of his first wife, the Duchess, and tells him about her and a little about their relationship. The Duke says “She had A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”.  She had a big heart and saw good in everything, she was friendly. He also mentioned that she treated others with gratitude and warmth, as treated him.  

I really enjoyed reading this article as it helped me understand the mind of a poet and how the reader can use what the poet is trying today in his or her poem and be able to feel what is being said. I have always struggled with reading poetry, being more analytical in my reading and writing, and putting myself in a poet’s shoes. The article explains that a reader must “complete” the poem, which is when the audience and reader start to think about how the poem plays a part in their lives and to put themselves in the poem. The poem, “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, is about her seeing seven young pool players and telling them that life is short. She explains this writes “We left school.” in the first stanza to “We die soon.” in the last stanza. She writes the word ‘We’ seven times at the end of the line for each pool player that she saw. I am able to complete what the poem set in motion, by putting myself with the seven pool players, having fun and not thinking about what life is about and how it ends so quickly, and Gwendolyn Brooks giving them advice since she is experienced, wiser and older than them because they are not able to see that there is so much store for the pool players. The article states “This act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing to it your experience and point of view.” I did this by putting my selves with them and always hearing advice from my elders about being careful with the things that I do because life is so short and I should not mess it up doing silly things and hanging out with people […]

In “How to Read a Poem” the biggest idea I took out of it was that there was no one way to interpret a poem. There are countless ways to understand a poem, and each person can understand things differently. That is what we, the readers, complete I think of a poem as a puzzle the writer gives the outer lining of the poem, but each time we interpret the poem differently, we add a different piece to the poem. For example, in the poem.” The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats, my first understanding of the poem was a man escaping from the city or just from his normal life to the wilderness and taking in nature. Then on my second read, I thought of it as him comparing two different life of his in the busy everyday life another where he lives freely in his cabin. These two similar ideas are like 2 pieces of the puzzle that I put together.

In the article, “How to Read a Poem” by Edward Hirsch, he describes the act of completion when reading poetry, is to step into the imaginative play of the poem.  So as I read, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W.B. Yeats, I took part of this imaginative play was by first reciting the poem at different tempos. To see if there was a rhythm I needed to find so I can find the flow of the poem.  I tried different ones, like from how I would read ” Mary had a little lamb”.  I kept trying until there was a flow connecting the words that rhymed, which was every other line.  I also found myself searching for a theme. I noticed there was a lot of mention of things that create sounds from nature. For example, “Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.”  or ” Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; And live alone in the bee-loud glade.”  As I re-read it, I found myself playing the sounds of nature he described, in my head to create the atmosphere. I, without trying, played along with the visuals given to me in the poem. Trying to bring it to life to see what about it felt peaceful. Every sound they found pleasant were low, fluttering and from nature.  It almost felt like a picture puzzle in my head as I tried to envision the meaning. and feeling, through visualizing.

In the poem The Lake Isle Innisfree by W. B. Yeats. The poets fantasize about going to a peaceful life in Innisfree where he would build a small cabin of clay and waffles (line 1). He was providing a great vision of a place where he was going be at peace, he hopes to plant nine rows of beans in a clearing (line 3) which would buzz with sound of honey bees tending to a hive. he believes that this place would bring him peace. Maybe the message he was trying to send was that he wasn’t happy where he were and he needed to escape to an environment where he would be happy. He needed to be around nature and natural beauty, he mentioned “I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore” (line 10)  that gave him  pleasure just to enjoy it which gave him solace and comforts. This also teaches us that when things get overwhelming we should also build a cabin of solitary place.