Growing up with an alcoholic father and suffering through death after death of loved
ones, including the loss of her brother to AIDS and her husband’s suicide, Cathy Smith Bowers turns to poetry in order to numb the excruciating pain in her life. Although victims of painful, life altering events tend to turn towards alcohol, drugs, or other substances in order to numb their psychologic pain, Bowers embraces her writing talents to make sense of her chaotic life in a healthy way. Bowers states, “I write to bring order out of chaos. I feel the subject I write about are very painful when I’m working on a poem” (Cathy Smith Bowers). Alongside serving as a medication for her pain, the majority of Bowers poems tell her life story by reminiscing
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on the painful stories of her childhood or elegies honoring many of her loved ones that have past. Cathy Smith Bowers’ poems serve as an autobiographical timeline of her life as well as an outlet for Bowers to express her emotions in order to move forward from her troubling past. Written mainly in free verse, Bowers currently has four published books of poetry. Three of the four books, The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, Traveling in Time of Danger, and The Candle I Hold Up to See You, all depict Bowers most commonly used style of written and portray multitudes of painful memories. However, Bowers breaks her preferred free verse style and subject matter in her third book published in 2004, A Book of Minutes. Just as the title describes, every poem found in A Book of Minutes is written in the poetic form called a minute. “Minute” poems consist of sixty syllables typically with three stanzas containing a line count (Hansel). It is inferred that Bowers chose to write in this style due to the fact that she herself counts the minutes of her life. By “ counting the minutes”, Bowers mentally places her life in slow motion as she continues to endure hardship after hardship as a coping mechanism for fully processing the traumatic information placed in front of her. Although he was rarely present in her childhood life, the main influence on Bowers’ life was her alcoholic father. A multitude of her poems incorporate her father’s abusive influence on her. As a child, Bowers vividly remembers the instance that her father left for work and her mother hurriedly packed and moved her and her siblings out of the house (Cathy Smith Bowers). Although she got away from her father, the short time period she was with him made a huge emotional impact on her. For example, Bowers recollects a frightening encounter with her father in her poem “When My Father Asked Me to Wash His Back” from her book A Book of Minutes. As her, once again, drunken father was hung over the kitchen sink, he asked her to wash off his back. She hurriedly cleaned his back with one stroke of her hand and quickly fled away from him. Although this story may not seem that all gruesome at first glance to the readers, it is implied as so however due to the last four lines that state, “Nights, still, I lie in fear there really is a hell” (Bowers). A second example of her father’s negative impact on her life is from her book The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas and is entitled “Fire”. Her father, Edward, selfishly looking past the safety of his children, set fire to some old clothing inside her and her sister’s closet in order to receive money from the insurance company. While the main point of “Fire” is to use imagery in order to recreate the writer’s negative childhood experience, it also strengthened a positive view towards her mother. “Fire” describes the instance in which her mother smelled the smoke as, “like a woman flaming, mad through the burning doors of an asylum some psycho set fire to” (Bowers). The figurative language infers that Bowers as a child, she felt trapped in “asylum” due to her “psycho” father. It is later stated that her mother “wanted to kill him” for the sake of carelessness towards her children's safety. However, although she did forgive her husband, the idea of the mother’s anger fully enforces the protective side she has towards her children. As depicted in “Fire”, Bowers’ mother served as a major comforter throughout her childhood.
Her mom was the one person she went to for anything. Just as she does regarding her father, Bowers’ uses her poetry to describe her mothers’ impact on her life. Although her father’s impact was very negative of that compared to the impact from her protective mother, the two parental figures in her life serve as a contrast throughout her poetry. For example, in the “Mother Land”, from her book Traveling in Time of Danger, Bowers compares her mother to the mothers of other children. She reminisces of when she used to hide and rest on her mother’s bosom and how she felt bad for the other children because they were unable to do so because their mothers were so thin. Through Bowers continual use of figurative language, that the weight of the mothers actually symbolize their amount protectiveness and shows how Bowers places her mother above all other mothers. Alongside the protectiveness of her mother, Bowers also appreciates the social influences her mother had on her. In the poem “My Mother’s Lexicon”, from her book A Book of Minutes, Bowers describes her mother as being “the first poet” and that no one, not even her father, could compete with her mother’s beautiful use of language. “My Mother’s Lexicon” not only describes her mother’s creative use of words but also depicts her father's drunkenness again by stating, “Not once did he come home, he straggled in” (Bowers). By including a description of her father’s alcoholism through her mother’s words, Bowers strengthens the contrast between her parents due to the positive descriptors used towards her mother against the drunkenness of her father. Throughout her childhood, Bowers’ mother not only served to protect her against her father but also greatly influenced the poet she is
today. Almost twenty years after her mother finally left her father, Bowers reunited with her father at his death bed due to his excessive use of alcohol. In her poem “My Father’s Last Wish”, Bowers fully takes advantage of the healing qualities of poetry as she opens up to her readers and shares her raw emotions (Bowers: A Book of Minutes). “My Father’s Last Wish” shows Bowers rightful anger towards her father and her wish to hold her suffering father hostage to his life support mechanisms, just as he did to her throughout her childhood with his alcoholism (Chappell). Bowers, overtaken with power, was finally in control of her father after twenty years and had the power to decide how long he will suffer and when he will die. Following her father’s death, rather than feeling remorse for the loss of a loved one Bowers describes the death of her father as freeing in her poem “Bone” (Bowers: The Love That Ended Yesterday In Texas). Before the poem begins, Bowers includes an excerpt from the Adult Children of Alcoholics World Service Organization stating, “We become addicted to chaos after years of living in the midst of trauma” (The Laundry List). She continues on with poem describing the relief his death brought over her yet the silence left her and her siblings waiting for dead father to continue on with the normality of his traumatic treatment towards them. However, through her writings, Bowers is able to fill this silence that she is now left with. Just as it did for her traumatic childhood experiences, poetry allows Bowers to express her raw emotions through her father’s death and many more deaths to come. Just a few years after her father's emotionally torturing death, Bowers’ brother contracts the immunodeficient disease, AIDS. Desperately searching for anything to cure her brother, Bowers, usually an unspiritual being, begins to pray. “Learning How to Pray”, from her book Traveling in Time of Danger, depicts the heartbreaking struggle and helplessness she endured through the death of her youngest brother to AIDS. Through the use of free verse, the exemption of punctuation, and some fragmented sentences, Bowers correlates the rhyme, meter, and grammar of the poem with the inconsistencies of life and her fast and pleading thoughts throughout her brother’s death. It is observed that the dying younger sibling holds a dear place in the hearts of the other children as he is described as “our lovely boy” therefore making his death even more depressing for the author and the readers (Chappell). By the end of lines 4-8, Bowers illustrates her relationship with any god or religion as doubtful or irrelevant and alludes to a childhood memory of her apathetic feelings towards for mother’s pre-meal prayers. However, in lines 9-29, after learning of her brother’s fatal illness, Bowers rigorously turns and begins to pray to every immortal notion, deity, and god that she has ever heard of in order to save her brother’s life. Bowers even prays to the dark, Amazonian soil just as the ancient Indians would by stating “our carbon who art in heaven”. The break between the poem’s lines brings about a tone shift in the poem as the last lines 30-36 depict Bowers helplessness she felt. She describes herself as a prostitute of prayer among the gods she was praying to. Unashamedly, she continues to parallel her willingness to give up anything, even her sexuality, in order to save her brother’s life as prostitute would for any of their takers. Through her poem, Bowers opens up to the readers of her willingness to do anything to save her brother alongside the painstaking realization that there was nothing she could do to help other than pray. Just after her brother’s painful death, her mother fell ill to neurological disorders. In her poem “Aphasia”, found in her book The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, she uses her common topic of childhood to show the juxtaposition of death and childhood as the speaker struggles to keep her mother’s slipping cognition from deteriorating further (Hartnett). The first line of stanza one depicts Bowers' mother as mentally impaired as she repeats herself and refers to the refrigerator as a “clock”. As Bowers continues to characterize the appearance of the refrigerator as old and beaten up, the poem describes a night where it was mistaken as a wild turkey. Since mistaking a refrigerator as a wild feathered creature is psychologically unhealthy, it is understood that Bowers is portraying what her mentally ill mother perceived as she loudly beat the refrigerator causing it to loudly buzz and appear defected. The second stanza uses imagery of salmon swimming upstream to show how the mother’s mental illness is causing her to noticeably digress from her former adult mental state. In addition, Bowers also hints towards the mother’s childhood. As the stanza continues, Bowers describes the salmons’ bodies as “lean and shadowy”. She uses unappetizing descriptions of the salmon's’ outward appearance in order to parallel with the sickly body of her mother. Alongside aphasia, the mother shows symptoms like confusion, a decline in mental state aside from language, and looking unhealthily thin. Through the descriptions of more serious symptoms, the readers can interpret that the mother has Alzheimer’s. As the readers reach the third stanza, the mother’s mental state has continued to get worse as she begins forgetting people's’ names. Bowers uses imagery when describing the her forgetfulness of names as “sloughed-off skin” to show how parts of the mother’s memory are starting to disappear and how they’ll never be remembered by her again, just like dead skin. The childlike interpretation of the mother is used once again as Bowers describes how she communicates with her mother. Just as babies get excited for jangling car keys, her mother gets excited to finally be understood or remember something. Again, in the fourth stanza, Bowers describes her mother as childlike. However, this time, the mother is unable to even reach the mental level of a child as she describes the elementary geometric shapes as completely different objects. The last two lines of stanza four symbolize how the mother will continue to forget words every time she goes to bed as if her brain is closing of the memory of words, just as “a flower that closes in the night”. The last line of stanza four into stanza five marks the tone shift of the poem as the mother’s mental state rapidly declines. Stanza five begins with the unfolding of beautiful flowers. However, as the professor rewinds the tape, the flowers begin to fold back up. The refolding of the flowers symbolizes the increasingly faster reversal of the mother’s beautiful memory as she “relinquishes everything” to her cruel disease. The poem goes on to stanza six to where Bowser is watching her mother’s death. Continuing from stanza five, the mother resembles a beautiful flower being mentally reversed until she is physically and psychologically near the end. Stanza seven marks the death of Bowers' mother as she degraded to virtually nothing and was buried. However, the Bowers ends the poem with a small glimpse of hope as she describes the sun and moon and reminds her readers that no matter what happens, life will go on. Overall, Cathy Smith Bowers' free verse, elegy , “Aphasia” , depicts the timeline of her mother’s mental disease through her own eyes. Following the loss of three loved ones, Bowers endures yet another emotionally traumatising death with the suicide of her second husband. Just as she did following the deaths of her father, mother, and brother, Bowers uses poetry in order to express her emotions during this mentally debilitating time in her life. In her poem “The Napkin” Bowers expresses her guilt that she was to overtaken by her writing and did not pay her husband as much attention as he deserved. As all of the heartbreak in her life became too much for her, Bowers reached a point where poetry could no longer aid her emotional pain. Through her friends company and the use of alcohol, Bowers was finally capable to fully express her guilt. Despite all of the food and phone calls that she was bombarded with, Bowers writes of the only two friends that helped her through this terrible time in her poem “Pear Moonshine”. “We drank and passed the waning jar and drank again until the glacier of my pain began to break, a thousand icy floes drifting down the river of my grief” (Bowers:). Bowers took one moment to drink away her pain and then returned to her normal life of writing through her pain. Suffering traumatic event after traumatic event, Bowers’ life has finally developed a sense of normalcy. Cathy Smith Bowers’ life went from enduring hardship after hardship to her quaint quiet life. Today Bowers is an English professor at Queens University and has published multiple books of poetry (Cathy Smith Bowers). Writing through her pain, Bowers states, “We should be trying to find a way to be ‘semi-whole’ some of the time” (Bagwell). Growing up with an alcoholic father and suffering through the deaths of her father, brother, mother, and husband, Bowers finds her sense of being “semi-whole” through her poetry. For Bowers, poetry serves as a medication to numb her mental and emotional pain from her rough life.
Night Waitress by Lynda Hull is a poem that describes the feelings of a waitress that works the night shift of a diner Reflection of “Night Waitress” “Night Waitress” by Lynda Hull is a poem that describes the feelings of a waitress that works the night shift of a diner. The speaker obviously belongs to a lower social class, in the way of income and her occupation. Much like the character in this poem, the speaker in “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake works long, hard hours as a chimneysweeper. These two characters are both related in their ways of life and their classes in our society.
Poverty is often taxing to one’s life in multiple ways, some of which include mind taxation, stress taxation, emotional taxation and of course money taxation. Mother Theresa once said “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty”. How would you find time to look for the one that would make you feel special and wanted, while having to live in situation which doesn’t forgive free time? “Night Waitress” by Linda Hull is poem that looks at daily life of a waitress who struggles to answer just that question.
In The Awakening, Edna Pontellier is a selfish character. She wishes to live her life the way she wants without anyone interfering. She did not start selfish, but grew selfish as her hidden desires were awakened. Her selfishness comes from her complete disregard for anyone’s happiness besides her own. Edna refuses to attend her sister’s wedding, describing the event as lamentable. Even if Edna did not want to attend, a wedding is for the bride and groom’s happiness. She is unable to compromise any of her own desires for the happiness of others. Edna’s own marriage was an act of rebellion for marrying outside of what was expected, and came with the titles of wife and mother. Edna abandoned her relationship without trying to resolve any difficulties with her husband before satisfying her needs. She does not discuss with him her unhappiness or seek his approval before moving to the pigeon house. She develops her relationship with Arobin only to fulfill her own physical needs.
Dubbed as “The Greatest Country in the World” by god knows who, America is not as awesome and free as some may see. In doing a close reading of Heather Christle’s “Five Poems for America”, we can see how the author uses metaphors to portray a flawed American, specifically within its political system, religion, obsession with technology and basic human rights. Americans have been living with the oppression of these everyday issues, completely oblivious thus creating the America we infamously know today.
He focuses on that in both poems. Strength is an important aspect in anyone’s life, because without strength one cannot succeed in life. Since the dawn of time African-Americans have been blazing through pain to survive. Strength is extremely noticeable in Mother to Son. The whole poem is based on her strength and courage to endure all her trials and tribulations with grace.
In the world of teenagers everything seems to come and pass by so quickly. For instance the beginning of senior year. In Spite of being happy and excited were also generally nervous and anxious to see what our future holds. As senior year comes to an end, It then becomes as temporary as the summer sun but also the boundary of our life before we enter adulthood. Even then our future is still undefined.
When writing poetry, there are many descriptive methods an author may employ to communicate an idea or concept to their audience. One of the more effective methods that authors often use is linking devices, such as metaphors and similes. Throughout “The Elder Sister,” Olds uses linking devices effectively in many ways. An effective image Olds uses is that of “the pressure of Mother’s muscles on her brain,” (5) providing a link to the mother’s expectations for her children. She also uses images of water and fluidity to demonstrate the natural progression of a child into womanhood. Another image is that of the speaker’s elder sister as a metaphorical shield, the one who protected her from the mental strain inflicted by their mother.
Phillis Wheatley is recognized as the first African American female poet published in America, among many other titles. When she was only seven years old she was brought to America and sold into slavery. Fortunately, her masters did not abuse her; instead they actually cared for her and educated her. Although much of her work is forever lost, some of her published pieces still remain, among them “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and “To the University of Cambridge, in New England”. The former work is a short poem that describes two of her most life-altering experiences: being sold into slavery and becoming redeemed by God. Wheatley, however, views them as one great transformation. The latter work is a poem written to the students of Cambridge University, urging them to learn everything they are capable of. She also cautions them, however, to be wary not to forget their Creator. In these two works, Wheatley portrays three key elements of her identity: her social position, racial identity, and religious affiliation.
The purpose of this essay is to analyze and compare and contrast the two paired poems “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning and “My Ex-Husband” by Gabriel Spera to find the similarities presented within the pairs. Despite the monumental time difference between “My Last Duchess” and “My Ex-Husband”, throughout both poems you will see that somebody is wronged by someone they thought was a respectable person and this all comes about by viewing a painting on the wall or picture on a shelf.
“Silence is a sounding thing, to one who listens hungrily.” Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an author, journalist, educator, and artists. She was a woman of the Harlem Renaissance. But despite all the struggles of being an African American woman, Gwendolyn B. Bennett made herself into the woman she was in the 1900s. Therefore, the strong woman she became is shown through her work.
Connie Fife is a Saskatchewan, Cree poet who writes using her unique perspective, telling of her personal experiences and upbringing. This perspective is revealed to her audience through the poems “This is not a Metaphor”, “I Have Become so Many Mountains”, and “She Who Remembers” all of which present a direct relationship to her traditional background and culture (Rosen-Garten, Goldrick-Jones 1010). To show the relationship of her experiences through her poetry, Fife uses the form of dramatic monologue, as well as modern language and literal writing to display themes about racism presenting her traditional viewpoint to her audience.
When sorting through the Poems of Dorothy Parker you will seldom find a poem tha¬t you could describe as uplifting or cheerful. She speaks with a voice that doesn’t romanticize reality and some may even call her as pessimistic. Though she doesn’t have a buoyant writing style, I can empathize with her views on the challenges of life and love. We have all had experiences where a first bad impression can change how we view an opportunity to do the same thing again. Parker mostly writes in a satirical or sarcastic tone, which can be very entertaining to read and analyze.
Liscio, Lorraine. “Beloved’s Narrative: Writing Mother’s Milk.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol.11, No.1 (Spring, 1992): 31-46. JSTOR. Web. 27. Oct. 2015.
To fulfill ones full capability he or she needs to cross boundaries such as emotional,
Judith Wright is a respected Australian poet is also known as a conservationist and protester. Her poetry has captured the most amazing imagery of Australian Culture. For Australian students to understand their own culture and history it is necessary to study the best poetry and Judith Wright’s poetry is definitely some of the best.