After reading “ Breathe dust…” of Fred Wah, I was very impressed by the relationship between the form and the contents of this poem. In fact, I found the idea that the form, the structure of a sentence, can support and better explain the content of it very interesting. For example, the title, which refers to the first words of the poem, describes also the situation while we read this text; it gave me the feeling that the poem was one with the reader, as if he was part of the script.
It is not the first time I experience this sensation with a poem: “Breathe dust…” reminds me the calligrams of Apollinaire, poems whose graphic layout on the page forms a drawing, generally in relation to the text object. In both cases, even if in a different way,
Poetry is painting that speaks. It might be defined as the clear expression of cloudy feelings. Composers use poetry to shape their perspective for the responder to interpret. Australia has inspired how poets use skilful language to describe its distinctive beauty. Australian vision is exemplified in Douglas Stewart’s
Images: Did the poet create strong images? What could you see, hear, smell, taste, or feel?
When I read poetry, I often tend to look first at its meaning and second at how it is written, or its form. The mistake I make when I do this is in assuming that the two are separate, when, in fact, often the meaning of poetry is supported or even defined by its form. I will discuss two poems that embody this close connection between meaning and form in their central use of imagery and repetition. One is a tribute to Janis Joplin, written in 1983 by Alice Fulton, entitled “You Can’t Rhumboogie in a Ball and Chain.” The second is a section from Walt Whitman’s 1,336-line masterpiece, “Song of Myself,” first published in 1855. The imagery in each poem differs in purpose and effect, and the rhythms, though created through repetition in both poems, are quite different as well. As I reach the end of each poem, however, I am left with a powerful human presence lingering in the words. In Fulton’s poem, that presence is the live-hard-and-die-young Janis Joplin; in Whitman’s poem, the presence created is an aspect of the poet himself.
Behind this form of allusion there is also examples of vivid image that make the poems come to live. Right away, in the first sentences I can picture the speaker performing
In poetry, it is important to be meticulous of your punctuation. By doing this, the flow of the poem will be clearer and better understood by the reader. Not only is this significant in a writer’s work, but the use of other literary devices, such as description and personification, is also necessary in conveying the thoughts of a poem. There authors, Elise Hempel, Brian Simoneau, and Peter Munro, from the Valparaiso Poetry Review use these literary devices to their advantage to effectively portray the messages of their seasoned poems.
I forge ahead through hundreds of pages of poetry. Images and impressions are beginning to form in my mind. Finally, Hacker, you provide a clue with "Feeling and Form" where you compare your poetry to Cezanne's apples:
This is sheer proof of the potential the written word holds. This genre is vastly successful in creating imagery, exploring ones ideas and expressing emotion in both its raw and refined forms, from Bukowski's unembellished, yet irresistably poignant lexis in the poem "Bluebird" to T.S. Eliot's absurdly enchanting bleakness of "The Waste Land". I enjoy Emily Dickinson's works such as "I felt a funeral, in my brain" as they beautifully capture the depths of human thought and emotion. This has also encouraged me to write my own poetic works, experimenting with the many forms, themes and ideals that a poem can encompass whilst exploring my own creativity and
Imagery is a key part of any poem or literary piece and creates an illustration in the mind of the reader by using descriptive and vivid language. Olds creates a vibrant mental picture of the couple’s surroundings, “the red tiles glinting like bent plates of blood/ the
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
The paper discusses the sound of the poem and how those certain words, said aloud, help to emphasize the meaning. Looking at the form of a poem in this way gave me a new way of looking at the text and finding the meaning. Personally, I have not had much familiarity looking at the sound of a text, but now see how the sound can be valuable when looking for the meaning of a text. I like to look at the imagery that is utilized in a text because I believe it works well in giving the reader a look into the text and bringing the text to life. What I have discovered reading about the formalist approach is to look at the overall form and how the text itself affects the meaning. Looking at the imagery and symbols helps me personally find the meaning in a text, so learning that the form of the text also can contribute to the meaning was
Aesthetic form in modern poetry, then, is based on a space-logic that demands a complete reorientation in the reader's attitude toward language. Since the primary reference of any word-group is to something inside the poem itself, language in modern poetry is really reflexive. The meaning-relationship is completed only by the simultaneous perception in space of word-groups that have no comprehensible relation to each other when read consecutively in time. Instead of the instinctive and immediate reference of words and word-groups to the objects or events they symbolize and the construction of meaning from the sequence of these references, modern poetry asks its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity.
Sense imagery is very important to convey an author’s message. Two poems that are a prime example of how to use sensory imagery are “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen. The use of sensory imagery in literature is a tool for the author to provide the audience a realistic description of his/her work. The reader can not only interpret the words, but can visualize, smell, hear, taste and touch the author’s intent.
There are those who claim with reference to ‘ The Waste Land,’ that ‘its mere fineness of detail constitutes direction,’ or that it’s a ‘filigree without pattern,’ both of which quotations suggest to the reader, what the Formalists claimed, which is that it’s valuable for its form. Eliot himself said eventually that his poem was ‘rhythmic grumbling.’
William Blake is a poet most noted for the engravings that accompany his works of poetry. These engravings included with the poems help to depict the meaning of the poems. However, at times the engravings he includes with his poem can lead to complications for the interpreter of the poem. There are a multitude of variations of the same engraving that accompany a poem, all of them originals; some of these engravings compliment the poem, while others complicate the poem. One example of this occurrence, where one engraving may compliment the poem and the other complicates it, is in William Blake’s work “The Ecchoing Green” which can be found in Blake’s Songs of Innocence. The important thing to recognize is that regardless of whether the poem is further complicated or simplified because of the image, the poem and its accompanying image are still evoking thought, and discussion from the reader.
Through alliteration and imagery, Coleridge turns the words of the poem into a system of symbols that become unfixed to the reader. Coleridge uses alliteration throughout the poem, in which the reader “hovers” between imagination and reality. As the reader moves through the poem, they feel as if they are traveling along a river, “five miles meandering with a mazy motion” (25). The words become a symbol of a slow moving river and as the reader travels along the river, they are also traveling through each stanza. This creates a scene that the viewer can turn words into symbols while in reality they are just reading text. Coleridge is also able to illustrate a suspension of the mind through imagery; done so by producing images that are unfixed to the r...