Inoculation

The title of this poem is inoculation.  How does this relate to the poem?  well first off to inoculate, according to webster, is to implant (a disease agent or antigen) in a person, animal, or plant to produce a disease for study or to stimulate disease resistance.  So this poem will either be about inoculation or have some strange type of symbolism with it.

The first sentence of this whole thing really baffles me.  It says, “Cotton Mather studied small pox for a while, instead of sin.”  I really try to relate to myself with this line.  I focused on Myspace instead of prayer.  This poem could be  comparing the difference small pox and sin.  One would suggest that studied small pox could only solve small pox, but studying sin could prevent a world of trouble. Or perhaps this single line is saying simply something that had happened… I’m really not sure.

“boston was rife with it”. I don’t know if this means boston was rife with small pox or sin.  the poem does not specify.  This leads me to believe that it is intentionally ambiguous and can mean the Boston at the time was both rife with small pox and sin.  Now it says that the main character is not sick.  And then it says “thank providence”… I dont know what thank providence means.  Providence is capitalized in the sentence. It shows a little bit about the time period, but it is still strange to me.   So, the man Cotton Mather asked his slave (this also says a lot about the time period. Boston still had slaves which is strange for a nothern area, so this must be early early  early in the United States of America) if he had ever had small pox.  In this current view, Cotton Mather is actually studying small pox and he actually wants to know if his slave has them.  Onesimus, the slave, playfully replied to his owner.  He says “Yes and no”.  This is where the poem starts to get tricky and the idea of small pox vs. sin starts to arise and vary.  The slave then playfully said, “Consider how a man can take inside all manner of disease”.  In other words, CONSIDER THIS, men get all kinds of diseases, like small pox.  The slave then said, ” and still survive”….  And men still survive even though they have disease.   So if Onesimus had in the past had small pox, his answer would be yes. If he had not, he would say no. He could say yes, saying that sin is a disease.  Somehow this line ties back into the opening sentence. I don’t understand exactly how…  But then this poem is just very strange.  THe author purposely set this sentence aside. By sentence I mean the sentence which was the slave Onesimus’ response to his owner’s Question.  Perhaps this poem has no real meaning. That is also a large possibility.  How does inoculation tie into this poem?  Sometimes inoculation has to occur in order to study small pox… hm???

Beginning Again

Well..no use of BEATING AROUND THE BUSH (i think it is my goal to use as many cliches as possible haha), Beggining Again is an AWESOME poem. awesome awesome. Let us begin.

First off, I DONT GET IF LI PO is a name.. but im guessing it is a chinese name and it was supposed to make the reader feel as if he or she was in china. but that is just a guess. haha… well i thought that such an obscure name really took away from the meaning of the poem. it stands out too much and makes the rest of the poem diminish (is that a word?).

“‘If I could stop talking, completely

cease talking for a year, I might begin

to get well,’ he muttered”

I really dig this, because what “he” , whoever he may be, is saying that him talking makes him ill. I can relate to this. This makes me think about how I overanalyze everything and it makes things worse than they actually are, and talking about these things sort of petrifies them which results in well.. illness. I know i am correct in this particular analysis, because it says that the man is “performing brain surgery on himself with a badly lit room with no mirror”, this makes it clear that that man is over-analyzing himself. It also shows that he obviously can’t analyze himself very clearly, because he is in a place, room, or STATE OF MIND. The “badly lit room” shows that the man is already in a mentally ill condition. Not having a mirror shows that he doesn’t even have the knowledge to analyze himself. Therefor with him being in a mentally-ill state and no knowledge of how to properly analyze himself, he is sort of stuck. THe poem goes even further to show that he is over-analyzing himself by saying “A room whose floor ceiling and walls are all mirrors, what a mess”. Although the previous line had said there is no mirror, this line seems slightly contradictory, because it now states that the room is nothing but mirrors. This irony makes the poem GREAT. however, there is no real irony, because the poem is simply saying that in a room (his mind) that is badly lit (where he is mentally ill) and no mirror ( and he possesses no education of HOW to analyze himself), he is in a room where everything is a mirror (the only thing he can do is look at himself).

OH OH OH HOW I LOVE THIS POEM. SO GOOD. it is so dark. and provocative. intriguing. and I am totallllly breaking it down WAY to much, but i just.. LOVE it

my favorite part of it is “oh my God-” it is like this person is seriously stuck in their own mind. that is probably the scariest state to be in, and a dangerous one. “oh my God-” completely confirms that this guy is in a fragile state. LOVE LOVE LOVE THIS POEM!!!! not so much the second half, but.. yay.

I think at some point i would like to rewrite this from a more scholarly view. what do you think? ya ya.

My Fear

This poem is about … fear. who would have guessed?!  So right off of the bat, I assumed that this poem would suck. it seems so cliche. But, I’m learning to not judge a book by its cover.(AHAHA I LOVE OVERUSED PHRASES)  What is neat about this author is that he personified death as a person. FOr example he says stuff like ” He follows us” “Maybe he smiles when he finds the right one”.Well.. death has been personified for hundreds of years aka the grim reaper..     even in the allegorical story Everyman, death was personified.
So what I am trying to establish more or less (mostly less, but i need a direction to go) is that The Author fears death. I understand. It is very easy to be afraid of Death. I know i am.. not really , but it is a lame subject.    THIS IS WHAT I THINK THAT THE AUTHOR, Lawrence Raab, is saying:

“Make it small please”.  Make what small? “What must I carry away from your dream”.  What can I learn about my fear of death perhaps?  What do i NEED to take away from the dream caused by death?  Hopefully nothing bad..like death so “Make it small please”. Maybe my a plan of mine will die or something, maybe even my dog. but not me. :let me have a small brown bat and a purse of crickets”  Let me have something to protect myself in such a wicked dream.

SO… in short, this poem is OKAY. it didn’t move me to change the world. I wasn’t impressed by the idea… I was affected by the composition of words… what makes this a good poem? To each his own perhaps?

However..I did like the lines:

“Let it fit in my pocket,

let it fall through

the hole in my pocket.”

I felt that these lines were AWESOME, but they took a very abstract thing, an idea inside of a dream, and treated it as if it were a concrete object.. one that could fit in a pocket. what also makes this interesting is that the “let it fall through the hole in my pocket” thing REALLY is cool, because it is sort of unexpected.

umm

ya… i don’t have a creative way to end this.  lo siento. =[

To Myself

Well, this poem is titled “To Myself”, so I think that I will analyze this poem and sort of use my poem analysis to analyze myself. I think this will happen in a reverse “metafictional technique” sort of way. I actually don’t think that makes sense, but here we go.

SInce the poem is titled, “To myself”, I am guessing that the Author wrote it to himself. So I will be reading this as if i am the author.

“Even when I forget you”- In short, this poem is saying that a person could forget themself? Even when I forget myself..

“I go on looking for you”. Okay I understand this. I am ALWAYS looking for myself. Even when I am found, I feel lost and am on a mission to find out who I am. And sometimes I realize that I have abandoned my old ideals on a mission to find myself… so in short on the journey to find myself, i lose myself, and eventually find myself again. Forgetting myself would sort of be like slowly slipping away from who I am…. I think.

“”I believe I would know you I keep remembering you sometimes long ago”. Um, the phrase “I believe I would know you” I think once again is the author saying “I think I know who I am”, and then the author says

“but then other times I am sure you were here a moment before and the air is still alive around where you were and I think then I can recognize you” I think of terms of finding oneself, the way I view and relate to this is, sometimes I feel like my old self again, because once in a while I will find that I still have some of my older traits however faint they may be.

“who are always the same who pretend to be time but you are not time and who speak in the words but you are not what they say you who are not lost when I do not find you” THIS i do not understand. I think it would be interesting to read what others have written in order to grasp a better understanding of this. BUT.. if i were to try and interpret it into my own words, it would be something like, “I’m the same person I have always been, but I think that time has changed me. But in reality when I think I have lost myself, I’ve had myself this whole time.”

I REALLY LIKE THIS =]

Blackberries for Amelia

Although I am sure that the poem “Blackberries for Amelia”, written by Richard Wilbur, could be considered a very good poem…. I can’t help but feel that it is TERRIBLE.

The line “thickets everywhere have come alive” absolutely makes me want to hurl. Have come alive? WOW. that sounds like a line that a third grade child would write. That is like saying, “in the spring everything comes to life“. or “too bad you couldn’t make that poem come to life, because it was so unoriginal that it made me want to take my life.”

As far as originality goes, this poem is a complete failure.

Luckily for the author, originality does not exactly make up a poem. I am guilty of pretending to hate this poem, because setting that one line aside, these words are in a beautiful composition. I think that what makes this poem successful is the use of words. Everything flows SO nicely together and I would love to figure out exactly why. As far as I can tell, what makes this poem really work is the rhyming…. HOnestly i don’t understand enough about poetry to say that he used a certain type of word that was soft and not harsh… perhaps the combination of smooth words and harsh words.. sort of how a lot of contrast is what makes a painting look great.

I think that the strong point in this poem is in the composition of the second stanza

“As the far stars, of which we are now told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold. “

I feel that this stanza is saying that someday the world will end, because it speaks of the stars and how someday they won’t shine and we will only have darkness… it is a sobering thought, and perhaps that is why the next few lines really make this poem feel complete, because they highlight the beauty of life, such as the beauty of talking to a grandchild ( which could represent life going on) and doing something so simple and human such as picking blue berries.

I dont know for sure, but it is almost like what makes this poem work is the contrast of life with death (maybe im completely off with that) coinciding with the contrast of harsh and.. pleasant sounding words.

okay any opinions? PLEASE =] thank youuuuuu