Seeing is Not Believing

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

In a Station of the Metro° 1913

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 

Petals on a wet, black bough.

. . .

Sarah Rix (2003-present)

In a Crowd of No One° 2024

Faceless individuals, they’re watching.

Hot rain falls on my bark, strip the leaves. 

Leaves in a tree of my own.

It is only me.

For this project, an imitation and interpretation of Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” was parodied to mirror the social anxieties of adolescents as demonstrated in the Japanese animation “A Silent Voice”. In the original poem, the reader is able to interpret dark and mysterious apparitions (ghost-like, possibly faceless) making up a crowd within a metro station. Describing these apparitions as petals on a wet, black bough. The imagery within this poem is dark and ghostly. Similar to this, in the movie “A Silent Voice” a young teenage boy, Shoya Ishida, is seen battling his anxieties throughout the movie, constantly seeing the faces of other individuals crossed out and metaphorically blocked out by his own mind, but is physically blocked out to the viewer. The faceless individuals represent the anxiety of Shoya taking over and keeping him inside his own bubble. 

In the imitation of Pound’s poem, it is written with an emphasis on social anxiety. It is written to emphasize the effects of anxiety on adolescents and the isolating effect it has from others around them. While the people around them are there, they are only the “leaves” surrounding one in their own little world, symbolized by the tree. They struggle to get out of their bubble and they feel alone, as if they are the only one who feels this way. “Hot rain” represents sweat dropping on the anxious individual as they desire for the people, or “leaves”, surrounding them to get stripped away. The line “it is only me” represents the isolation those with anxiety feel when they are anxious, as if no one understands them. 

Between the two poems, both the original and the parody kept the theme of using nature to describe the setting. In Pound’s poem, petals and boughs are used to symbolize the people, while in the parody, trees, rain, and leaves are used to symbolize the people, the main subject, and their anxiety sweats. The reader is able to quickly visualize the faces described as “petals” and “leaves” in both poems. Additionally, the structures of the poems, while different in length, stay the same. They are both written in free-verse and hold no rhyming scheme or specific meter. Both poems offer a dark and ghostly visual of people in a crowd, leaving the impression that the subject, or speaker, are rejecting the individuals and are almost afraid. 

Sarah Rix

We’re all Whitman, enumeration: Edmund Feng

Looking closely at the poem, we can tell right away that there isn’t exactly any sort of pattern to follow, which means there’s no specific rhythmic pattern, nor is there some sort of enumeration in it. As such, we can consider this sort of poetry to be free verse poetry. From a basic overview, this poem essentially speaks about the themes of identity and diversity. The dashes in the poem title further serve to show us the purpose behind that, segregating them almost like the races in real life are. It speaks about the people in the world, although different in many ways, like wealth, identity, spirit, and so on, all belong in the same existence and should be united. When we move to the actual wording system in each though, here’s what I’ve gleaned. walt Whitman has some enumeration on the body, for example, “Head/neck/hair/ears/Drop”. In Luis Alberto’s poem though, he elaborates more on the identities of people, as opposed to the beauty of the body, such as “Romans/Celtics/Hebrews/Moors,” or “Hispanics/Aborigines/”.

Then, moving back to Walt Whitman’s poem, we can look into the actions and descriptions of individuals, such as “Swim with the Swimmers. wrestle with wrestlers, marching in line with the firemen” before comparing it to Luis Alberto’s poem on struggles, like “Boss and day laborer, still the job’s slave, painter of trenches, resourceful creator.” Once more, each poem has an enumeration on its OWN set topic, with Luis Alberto more focused on the workings of identity, race, and diversity, and Walt Whitman on the beauty of the human body. Although both are free verse, both share similar rhyming tendencies and enumerations.

All Too Well (Julia Alvarez Version)

Hey Swiftie! You’re probably reading this because you just can’t get enough of Taylor Swift and you absolutely need more fandom (my friends blog via that link)! Look at my instagram post so you can see my imitation of All Too Well (Ten Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) [From the Vault] written as Julia Alvarez’s sonnet Sometimes the Words Are So Close.

Since you’re obviously a swiftie who’s visited my Taylor Swift blog before, you know everything there is to know about why All Too Well is the best Taylor Swift song ever written and why it’s so important that the song has the words: (Taylor’s Version) next to it!

First I believe that it is important to explain why All Too Well is poetry. According to the Oxford Dictionary, poetry is writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm. The overall feeling from All Too Well is a feeling of loss and remembrance in order to begin a life without this person that your heart is breaking over. Alvarez’s final version of her sonnet Sometimes the Words Are So Close, we see a similar idea to feeling of displacement when in line 9 states, “Why do I get confused living through it all?” Both this poem and this song focus on the idea of moving on, whether that is to make a new life in America as Alvarez shows, or whether it’s to finally get your red scarf back or closure from another person so that you can live another day. Simply, you sense the same drive from these poems, you want to be that woman because you are that woman and you want to remember it all so that one day you can forget. In some way, shape or interpretation, every single person who is alive today can tell you it feels like to have to keep going, and Swift and Alvarez cut to the bone with the words they use to remind us of this. Julia Alvarez uses the sonnet from in the final version of Sometimes the Words Are So Close, but in the sidewalk plaque version in New York City, she uses what can be considered as free verse to bring the reader closer to her poetry- quite literally when you think about how you can stand right on top of it! This is a stylistic choice I decided to use when imitating All Too Well to resemble both forms and the journey that Alvarez uses in her sonnet and free verse versions of Sometimes the Words Are So Close. My favorite part about paying homage to Alvarez using Swifts’ song is the similarity of the paper that they both speak of: Swift line 50- “I’m a crumpled-up piece of paper lyin’ here” and Alvarez “I am more myself when I am down on paper than anywhere else.” I just love the correlation of the sad tone you can hear through both speakers. This is also a good place to make you notice how Alvarez quite literally put her free verse version of her sonnet on paper, then on the ground, like a “crumpled-up piece of paper lyin’ here.” Mind blowing??? Yeah I thought so too! Have you noticed that Alvarez’s sonnet is neither typical sonnet form? It’s like a Shakespearean sonnet but without the rhyming couplets, a piece of work that is a truly stand alone sonnet. I mean just look at the stylistic choice of Alvarez deciding whether or not to use an eclipses. She decides that the eclipse makes the poem too pretentious, yet Taylor creates with her line, “Time won’t fly it’s like I’m paralyzed by it ” almost an invisible eclipse, either way you can feel the time moving- the irony kills me, so I couldn’t get myself to add an eclipses in line 4 of my free verse version of All Too Well. I know this was a lot of info for the day, but I hope you remember it just like Taylor and Jake Gyllenhaal: All Too Well.

Goodbye for now because Taylor is forever,

Anne K. Anderson

(A.K.A Taylor Swift’s Biggest Fan)

My Luve Has Thorns

A Melancholic, Black Rose

O my luve is like a melancholic, black rose 

That’s newly died in December;

O my luve is like the moans 

That ring at night time.

So despicable art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve, am I;

And will luve thee still, my dear,

Til the seas flood us all.

Til the seas flood us all, my dear,

And the rocks crumble wi’ your gaze

I will love thee still, my dear

While the quicksands sink.

And fare thee well, my only luve!

And fare thee well awhile!

And I will come again, my luve,

Though it were no smile.

Traditionally love poems have idealized the woman of desire for the male speaker. She’s described to be beautiful and often inflicts no harm. Her raw beauty in these poems is eternalized forever. This is admittedly why I chose to focus on Robert Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”. Instead of merely focusing on all of the positive elements of this heroine in the original poem, I chose to bring out the sinister side of her existence. I wanted to portray this supposedly perfect woman the speaker is in love with, as a dark mystifying temptress who causes pain and suffering everywhere she goes, not something to be obsessed with.

I feel as though within “A Red, Red Rose” the overwhelming love for this woman is obsessive. The kind of love for this “rose” is blind to her faults and true character. She is not depicted for her personality or charm, but her outward appearance. Roses often are a symbol of love, romance, or something that you’d give as a romantic gesture. And a black rose, for example, would be given somewhere like a funeral, where it’d represent loss or death. Burns predominantly focuses on the deep red color, of the rose, often associated with love and overwhelming passion, whereas I focused on the rose being black. It has a negative connotation. 

The woman in the original poem’s genuine character underneath the pretense is not as endearing and charming as presented. In my rendition, the black rose represents a completely different symbolic alternative. It is inspired by the deep love for a woman described to be just as perfect as a rose is. Furthermore, in my first stanza, I use the month of December to depict winter rather than spring as it was in the original poem. This is because I wanted to depict the end of this cycle and call attention to how roses die in the wintertime. In comparison to how they often bloom in springtime around June as represented in the original poem.

Robert Burns in “A Red, Red Rose” crafted the poem with free verse. As it contains an ABAB rhyme scheme with variations in the first 3 stanzas not rhyming the 2nd and 4th lines. This means that it does follow a regular or consistent meter pattern. My piece does not follow this scheme exactly as I wanted to focus more on the imperfection of this love rather than the rhyming pattern too closely. The similarities between my rendition of the poem and “A Red, Red Rose” are that they are different in many ways. My piece is focused on this dark twisted love implementing the symbolism of a black rose, meanwhile, Burns focuses on an obsessive idealistic love with the use of a red rose. I strayed from Burns’ rhyme scheme and pentameter since neither my poem nor his follow a traditional sonnet form. Therefore, I wanted to experiment with this idea.

Both poems focus on the imagery of this rose. With Burns focusing on the characteristics of a bursting love and passion, and mine focusing on how it is a morbid obsession. I found this fixation on the rose very interesting, so I desperately wanted to stay true to that just with the variations in wording. The key differences are that it goes from the pleasant sense of stability the author feels around this rose or woman, to the crumbling and devastating nature of her existence. The relentless dependency on her despite how much damage and hurt she brings. Roses though fragile, possess thorns that make them hard to touch without causing pain to yourself. With the vehicle of the rose to the tenor of the love for this woman, we can see that it is an unreliable tale of this woman. Despite this obsession, I can appreciate the poem’s elements and nevertheless think that inevitably it is well-written and truly a tale of devotion.

The Free verse and the Chaotic

In the poems by Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric, and Luis Alberto’s Ambroggio’s “We Are All Whitman #2: Song/of/to My/Your/Self, ” we don’t see the very structured sides of poets. While last week our class was looking to fin d the very precise and coordinated rhythm and meter of he poem this time around we focus on how the unstructured devices of a poem allow for a better way of a message to get to the reader than the way a message would be conveyed by a very structured poem. Although this is tru and free verse poem can b e refreshing and a great form of writing, it allows for the meaning of the poem to be up to more interpretation that if it was structured like pros, in my opinion. The way that owe discussed Whitman’s poem last week allowed us to see two very different points of view, whether he was being misogynistic or whether he was being progressive for his time. I believe that he was being sexist but because of the intricate free verse someone else m might think of it in a different way, thus creating the chaos of what the poet is actually trying to convey and allowing us top have more discussion about our ideas.

Guadalupe Lemus

Individuality in Free Verse

by Cifriana Mina Dela Cruz

This week, we focused on a poem titled “We are all Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self” by Luis Alberto Ambroggio and were supposed to compare it to “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman. As I was reading them, I frequently got lost in the sounds and the words of the poem (and not just because they were pretty long). A lot of this poem felt like a blur, the tornado of sounds overwhelms the ears when heard out loud. The cacophony it creates emphasizes the numerous distinct experiences and people, how these different voices make up an individual, and this poem celebrates this individuality.

Also like “I Sing the Body Electric”, this poem also has this listing quality, but the listing has a different purpose. Walt Whitman lists the body in such a way as if these parts make up a whole, not really distinct from one another. In a way, emphasizing a collective. By contrast, what Ambroggio does when listing different colors, countries, etc, he makes a clear distinction between each of them, while giving them importance also emphasizes their individuality. This is shown especially at the end when listing the different countries, repetition of the word “From” in the beginning. Now I think this may further have to do with the individual self; listing them this way gives them importance, a difference in each person. It further delivers the message that while we have similarities, we each have our own voice within us, and our unique self is what should be celebrated.

Jarring Recitation

Luis Alberto Ambroggio’s poem “We are All Whitman: #2 Song of/to/My/Your/Self”embodies similarity of the rhythmic enumeration to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Sing the Body Electric” through the aspects of recitation of poem, punctuation and the grammatical structure. Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” has an enumeration of body parts which causes a very cacophonous sound when the reader is reciting the poem. It all involves the emphasis when reading the high use of repetition, punctuation, and the listing of body words that allows the poem to continue with a very harsh flow. 

Ambroggio’s poem follows this Whitman style of poetry as it also involves similar aspects that could be pinned back to Whitman’s poem. Whitman uses the the long list of body parts to signify the founding over the human body through, “O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul, / O I say now these are the soul” (267), as he concluded to list off the the different parts of the body. While in Ambroggio’s poem, he explains the nature of an individual by looking back towards their roots from their skin color, religion, etc as they all come from somewhere. 

While closely looking Ambroggio’s poem, the sound the poem flows through while even having the listing of features. Whitman gave this very cacophonous sound as it involved harsh wording that Whitman purposely placed to be properly pronounced and articulated to support this main idea. However, Ambroggio’s poem had more of a graceful euphonious sound while also incorporating the enumeration. When both poems involve listing off words, the poem designs it to be recited in a particular way such as in Whitman’s case, the reader is needed to rapid fire the list of body parts that as the reader is reading the poem it intensifies them without much of caesura or end stop punctuation. Ambroggio follows the similar structure when further describing the individual’s identity through a list as without much a stop for a breather makes the reader recite the poem quickly. With both similar parts of the enumeration, they change the rhythm of the poem while having the reader recite it quickly as they do not have an intended meter, rhyme scheme, and punctuation that makes the reader pause and reflect on the text.

Naraint Catalan Rios

Free Verse

Poetry is a delicate art; every poet has his own unique way in expressing his emotions. Each poet uses a different style of rhythm to help make his poem easier to understand. The poem at hand, “I Sing the Body Electric,” is written by Walt Whitman, where Whitman enrolls the use of free verse poetry to help deliver the message of the power of the body to the reader. The poet empowers a parabolic sense of rhythm that can be described as sound like.  Also, the detailed descriptive language used by the poet is a part of the rhythm as it contains some irony. To exemplify this, in line 14 the words, “inwards and outwards,” emphasize on the idea of the parabolic sense of rhythm. The use of a parabolic sense of rhythm used by Whitman helped deliver Whitman’s message to the reader.

On the other hand, the poet, Emily Dickinson, empowers the concept of rhythm to describe the beauty of the nature through her poem “A Bird came down the Walk.” Similar to Whitman, Dickinson uses a very detailed language that creates a parabolic sense of rhythm. However, the sense of the rhythm created is not as powerful as the other poem, but the rhyme in this poem is more ambient. For instance, rhyme is seen in line 4 and 2 through the words “saw and raw.” All in all, Dickinson uses an easier sense of rhyme to help deliver her message to the reader.

Ramsey Mogannam

The Order in Chaos

In “I Sing the Body Electric”, Walt Whitman uses the elements of cacophony, sound emphasis, and juxtaposition to get across his message. He includes cadenced verse by not rhyming lines or allowing scansion to be possible in the poem. He spends his poem describing the body and its importance but yet at the end believes it to be less than the soul. And as though the body is APART of the soul, thus making it less significant. Although Whitman juxtaposes both the elements of feminine and masculine body parts in the poem, he shows later that while he sees that while there are similarities between them he sees them to be completely different. He describes women by saying, “This is the female form, A divine nimbus… It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction” and separates them to be seen as a gorgeous object to be worshipped. He also believes that “Womanhood, and all that is a woman, and the man that comes from woman, The womb, the teats, nipples, breast-milk,…” Whitman additionally places a hyperfocus on womanhood being about bearing children purely by mentioning the elements normally associated with nursing and birth. Whitman by placing emphasis on the sound of these labels in womanhood and manhood aims to show that he sees the two of them being nothing without their parts of the body. Like how he sees a woman to be nothing without bearing children. He finds them to be the most important. But by doing this, he objectifies more specifically that women seem to be nothing without what they have to offer physically or their assets. Whitman talks highly of men by using free verse to be much more than women. He uses cacophony making the lines hard to read thus creating chaos within his poem to create these feelings of liberation through expressing this passion. Yet at the same time, while creating this chaos, he has an order to how he approaches it. The order within the poem IS the chaos.

In contrast, within a similar poem in terms of methodology, “We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self” by Luis Alberto Ambroggio, Ambroggio highlights chaos as well, but in a different light. He instead focuses more on the chaos within diversity and how within this chaos of being exposed to different people and ideologies, we are actually brought together. Through the highlighted differences between us, we become more than just ourselves. Ambroggio writes, “It is expressed and is not expressed by welcomes,/ the yowls of rejection and the sunless silence/ of indifference, every day, gray hands.” He wishes to remind us in the cacophony of these sentences being hard to pronounce that while everyday existence is hard, we go through the same struggles. We struggle through it and live on. Through both of these poems, we are exposed to varied points of view in life and two different viewpoints on humans. But it is important to remember that it is only through the meticulous work of each poem using rhyme and rhythm, experimenting with sound that we are able to stumble upon these messages.

Proposition 64

Illegal money that pays legal taxes,

Funding the schools, fixing the roads, 

Providing healthcare. 

They relished in the benefits, but hated 

How it was made. 

They put up a front, lying to the country about 

the dangers of our livelihood;

It was similar, yet more dangerous, to the way 

families in my county put up

storefronts to hide their farms.

This had harmful consequences. 

Fall was the busy season; fourteen hour days

and fourteen hour nights.

It is long, but it must be done. 

And illegal draws in illegal. 

But how can a person be illegal?

And how can working for your

Family be 

Illegal?

My biggest secret was my entire life; 

Everything I new must be hidden

Even if it was not my secret to hide. 

Where I come from, being honest could a character 

Flaw;

Dangerous to those you loved. 

It meant that there was a possibility 

You would say the right thing to the wrong person 

And suddenly, 

As if in the blink of an eye,

Someone you knew could be 

Gone. 

It was for this same reason I 

Was scared of Helicopters. 

I told people it was because I was scared of heights 

(this was both a truth and a lie)

But really, it was because helicopters meant 

They were 

Searching

Searching for what?

For family, my family. 

To take them 

away 

But now things have changed. 

The sounds of helicopters no longer scared me;

I knew that all the necessary ducks were in a row 

The necessary paperwork filled and signed. 

For most everyone else, the fear was gone, too.

Now, when the cops come looking for someone, you are complicit

“They are on that side of the fork”, you say. 

It sucks, but you have kids to feed, payments to make. 

But what about those who are still being punished for 

Doing something to feed their kids. 

That thought is always in the back of your mind. 

You can’t help but think of those you know who 

Have been to prison before, but are now 

being featured on national television

For the same reason as their incarceration. 

You tell yourself there’s nothing you can do, but again,

You are being complicit.

You’re accepted by the Man, but at what cost?

Your privilege is heavy, almost like the soil 

You carry daily, but you tell yourself it’s the cost of the job. 

Yet, you ask again, is the cost worth it?

Review: 

Dear Julia Alvarez,

Like you, identity is important to me, but it can also be easily changed by an outside power. My community’s acceptance in the eyes of different individuals has shifted my identity and made me more aware of my privilege. I know that because I am white, and I grew up is predominantly white community, the legalization of the marajauna based economy that I grew up in had more of a positive impact on my life than it would have if we were not white. This is a reflection of my privilege. This is similar to the privilege that I think you hinted at feeling as a young girl in Queens. The privilege of being accepted when you weren’t previously, while witnessing those in the position you were in not long ago still being viewed in a negative light. Your poem inspired me to write about my own experience with gaining a certain privilege that I had not previously had, or at least not been aware of, and how that affected me.  

In your poem “Queens, 1963”, you briefly talked about the “before” side of acceptance. I found this to be something I could resonate with. Because of this, I focused my poem on the “before” and only briefly touching on the “after”. Most of what I know, or rather knew, falls in the “before”, which is why I made this choice, as well. In a way, it contrasts your poem.  

I know that our poems are not obviously similar. They talk of different experiences. But that is okay. When I read your poem, it was not the words you wrote, but rather the feeling you created that stuck out to me. I think you were recreating the emotions you had during this time in your life, which you did with your words, and I think also with the use of free verse and the creation of similar line lengths. This is why I chose free verse as well, but also made it so the lines went from varying in size to being more uniform. It was meant to show the anxiety I felt growing up in the “before” and the sense of security I felt in the “after”. I wanted to try to replicate the feeling you created, despite having a different story to tell, with the use of free verse and line arrangement. I can only hope I was successful.

Sophia Wallace-Boyd