Well I actually almost cried at this. I've said this for every piece I've read, but this one is more sad than the others. Sophie, the protagonist, recounts her brother's disappearance from the family and how a week before he died, he came to visit her. A lot of things hit hard in this piece, mostly the switch from third person to second. Benford separates the piece into sections, and some of them are addressed to her brother. The use of past and present sections in this story are effective and make the story more poignant because we get to see the brother's personality before he died. There was nothing I disliked about the piece. I loved everything about it. The style, the diction, the plot, the characters. I loved all the small details the writer included like how Sophie's cousin, Eli, cut his hair like Chris and how her uncle said because of that Chris was a bad influence but he was now sitting silent across from her, mourning. Benford does the same thing with Sophie's parents. She writes how they threw Chris out one night saying he shouldn't come home like 'this' and then the next paragraph is them saying they just want him to come home.
I see the separation in her story that I see in my poetry, but other than that there are no similarities between us. There is a lot that I want to steal from her. The flawless transitions from past to present really goes with the theme of my show and I would love to effectively borrow the way she deals with time. Benford, Sarah. "The Only Way to Reach You." Glyph 22 (2010): 63-68. Print.
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I love everything about this poem. The emotion carried in the form and the controlling metaphor feel like a punch to the throat. My immediate reaction was to show this poem to someone else so they can feel the same way that I did. The story is really what got to me the most. It's about the speaker falling for a girl, but the girl doesn't really feel the same way about her. The author using italics for the girl's speech. The speech of the speaker and the speaker meld together using semicolons, but the speaker is trying to say that what they are saying do not connect. They can't use a semicolon to fit together, and since the title is about semicolons being kisses, the author is saying that they are incapable of being together. At the end the girl even kisses her just shy of the mouth, like the misplaced semicolon on the page.
I do not see any similarities between our writing which is a bad thing. I want to take a controlling metaphor like this one and use it in my poem. This poem must've been really thought out and planned because everything fits together so perfectly. There's nothing about this poem that I don't want to try. I want to use a controlling metaphor and wrap up the poem as tightly as Bishop does. This poem could be something you analyze in English class with the way the end connects to the images in the beginning. The last line is: "She kept on kissing girls who didn't fit her./I went back to stop-end line breaks." Everything about the last couplet is perfect. Bishop has already established that these girls don't fit together, and that because of this the speaker can't use semicolons and continue an idea, she has to end things. Bishop, Leah. "My teacher said a semicolon is like a kiss." Aonian 58 (2016): 47. Print. What first struck me was how weird this poem was. The images described are not commonplace, but that's what I loved about it. The poem is the speaker looking through the trash for a to-go box they accidentally threw away. The speaker lists things like porn magazines, a dead hamster, pants that were pissed in. I think it's so interesting because the images start out normal. The first image is as ticket stub, then a chicken bone, then beer bottles. Then Gates hits us with an unexpected one: the body of a hamster he squeezed to death. That was the first moment that I just said 'whoa'. He alternates between hard hitting images and normal ones, like orange peels. That's what I love so much about it. It manages to be a list poem without being obvious. The list carries heavy emotions. You learn so much about the speaker through what he has in his trashcan.
That's the main thing I would like to try in my writing. I want to take his form and have the same outcome. A list poem that isn't a list; a poem that has so few words but gives out so much information. I tend to draw everything out and list images, but not in the way he does. Mine are somewhat abstract while his are tangible. I want to try his method of communication in this poem to see if I can accomplish what he can. Honestly, I can't see many similarities between our writing. I wish I could because I absolutely love his writing. What probably won't make it into my writing are his line breaks. In the first and last stanza, the lines break off at a normal sentence. There's always a period or a dash to signify that the thought will be finished on the next line. In the main stanza, the list, the line breaks are also always at the end of a thought. But in the last line of that stanza, he breaks form. I can't see myself doing this. I use line breaks like he does; I break when I've finished a sentence. I know in English class we talk about how when the artist breaks a form they've established it means that line is important, but it doesn't feel important. I just don't think I would mess around with line breaks. To me it feels more natural and powerful if I keep the poem flowing with my own thoughts. The reader will read it the way I wrote it. Gates, Colby. "Tomorrow's Lunch." Glyph 24 (2012): 147. Print. The first thing I responded to was the format, which heightens the emotion. This piece just made me sad. Not like crying sad or aching sad, but melancholy sad. I feel like I need to watch some dog videos to be happy after this. It's about a woman who connects with another woman in a waiting room. The woman she meets happens to be a ghost; they both discuss their dead husbands. The ghost's husband has been dead for seventy years, while the woman's loss was more recent. Her husband has been haunting her-through text messages and gchat. The ghost tells her the internet is slower in heaven. The theme seems to be that it's harder to mourn someone when you're constantly reminded that the exist due to technology.
The only similarity I can see between us are the last two lines of her poem. She repeats the beginning of the sentence, "it's hard, being". I do that often; I'll repeat the beginning of lines to give off a poignant effect, because when you think about it, repeating a line is a way of hitting your reader with emotions until they feel something. What I would like to borrow from her is her form. It's so weird and ghost-like. It really makes the poem eerie. I don't think I would borrow her language because it's really not much different from the language I already use. I think this piece was so strong, mostly because of the form. I want to steal the form and make it the skeleton of a poem. Ashgar, Fatimah. "Waiting Room." Gulf Coast 28:1 (2016): 79. Print. |
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