Vertical View of a City by Nikki Wallschlaeger
Robert Frost Discovers Another Road Not Taken by X.J. Kennedy
Interpretation of a Poem by Robert Frost by Thylias Moss
What a Cyborg Wants
Why Regret? by Galway Kinnell - 1927-2014
For Pittsford: Bernie's poems:
Togo
Growing Older, Outside Togo
Everyone liked Bernie's poems!
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The first poem is brilliant -- a vertical stack of stanzas and the idea of someone looking down -- maybe a bombardier, but it is hard not to think of God, who also sees opportunity for joy in the sky, we sometimes call heaven.
The 5th stanza only has 4 lines, whereas the others have 5. Is there hope that maybe there will be a change
to the rebuilding of those glass houses which house those who throw stones at the less fortunate who according to their privileged point of view, deserve to die?
Nikki cleverly incorporates the universal desire of wanting to feel important into the second stanza, dismissing
the feeling of "overlooked" as "overbooked".
We noted that guns were referred to with syntax for humans : "weapons who kill"-- without belaboring the fact that funs don't kill... people do.
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XJ's poem (the X adopted by Joe Kennedy so he would not be confused as poet, with the Senator) does a splendid undercutting of the whole misconceived idea of Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken".
What makes all the difference of course, is the fact of choice, not whether the path followed was well-trodden or not...Implied is a tongue in cheek question about how in the end we pave our roads -- will it be towards heaven or hell?
One person made the comment that it felt like a jazz improv on the Frost!
Another re-take of Frost: One imagines perhaps what it's like to be black and running away from a slave master in the woods. but then... see the problem of white vs. black neighborhoods.
"Of course she delighted in the filling up
of his woods, she so accustomed to emptiness,
to being taken at face value.
This face, her face eternally the brown
of declining autumn, watches snow inter the grass,
snow, here is not complimentary... and the sun is blond and nordic... and Jim, as in Jim Crow, and twice repeated promise not to bear him bastards...Although Frost wrote this during the Jim Crow era,
it would be just as disingenuous to think he was thinking of this as to trivializing his poem as a tribute to American individualism.
Social Activist Fanny Choi gives us yet another alternative point of view of who women are in our society-- why not a cyborg who works perfectly, is clean, includes everyone (reply-all) and believes...
that when someone says, "I love you" they mean it, and tests them by tearing off the skin.
It called to mind
I know we discussed the Kinnel before, but I just love how he writes... he knows how to write so irresistibly, you too want this power, bringing all parts of the world together.
The backstory of writing this poem for a student contemplating suicide only augments the irrefutable proof that regret, or complaint, or wishing to die already, has little to support it when there are so many miraculous things happening all around us.
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