By Lauren Hamilton
All The Titles of This Class Point to
The Negro Speaks
To the Mississippi Mother
About the Tired Worker,
An Outcast, Bonny Barbara Allan
Of the uses of Poetry
And on Formal Poetry
With its Rhyme and Meter,
Sometimes the Words are so Close
Like this Song
Where the Abecedarian
Tried the Examination
Of the types of Roses;
One Perfect Rose,
The Sick Rose,
A Sea Rose,
A Red, Red Rose,
The Rose and even the Poppy
But then their Hearts leaped up
With Valediction
Within the Station of the Metro
Because of the Second Attempt Crossing
Of the Legal Alien Begin Jogging
To a Poet in America,
For the Hand That Signed the Paper,
Along with the Author to her Book
All While Other Figures said
To Be an Easter Flower
Women Are Not to
Delight in Disorder
And Still to be Neat
While Signing the Body Electric
In the Attic Which is Desire
For the Waiting Storm
While the Bronzeville Mother Loiters in
The Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation
Where she says she is Like a Rose
Without missing a beat to give
Some Notes on the Imagist Movement
While a Bird Came Down the Walk
That the Night Come in Mississippi
For If We Must Die
Looking at a Coyote,
All while My Brother at 3 AM
Becomes Mortal at the Altar
With Angel Wings of an Anglikan Seraphym
That had Forbidden Mourning,
Requiring Further Poetry to
Be Brought from Africa to America,
For the Liberty of the Mexicans
Being Compared to a Summer’s Day,
Where My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like
The Chaos of these fourteen lines
Of Burnt Bacon making the
Queens of 1963
Write Sometimes…
An Ode with
Metrical Feet of a Song about
of/to/My/Your/Self
Where We Are All Whitman
Within This Poetry Class
Review:
For some strange reason I could not choose just one poem to imitate. The choices were overwhelming with how many fantastic poems we have read this semester. So I decided to list every single poem out and re read them all, but then I got struck with creativity, why not write a free verse poem that encompassed every single poem. But then I wasn’t sure how to do that. So I came up with using every single title in some way or form within a free verse poem.
Something the titles have pointed out to myself, is that we spoke at length about race and various cultures throughout this class by analyzing poetry. It certainly made for some interesting lines within this poem here. But if it was possible to learn that Abecedarian is a noun and it means novice or a person just learning, then it really is possible to become more knowledgeable about other topics through analyzing poems on different topics and looking into the background information of either the author or the time period in which they had written.
I kind of attempted to put a story within the poem itself. So it starts with two individuals talking about Bonny Barbara Allan on how she writes her poems like a novice trying to examine a rose. Then we find that the two are in a station of a metro and that they are watching someone attempt, for a second time, to cross a platform having to jog to get to a female american poet. Where in which we hear all the judgements women who are in the spotlight hear, be good and religious, don’t be disordered, be neat as possible, have no desires but yet be physically desirable to the men in your life and be like a storm that is brewing under the surface with how you think, these are the things the two individuals at the beginning are saying of the female american poet. Then we jump to Bronzeville where a white mother is pushing her way into the subjugation of an Indian reservation in a racist way by claiming that she is beautiful and “smart” with notes on the imagist movement and those on the reservation aren’t because they aren’t her. To distract the others around her, a bird comes walking down a walkway as it becomes night time. While in the area we (the reader) feel like death because of the way a coyote is looking at us while we get news its 3 AM and our brother has passed on but we can’t mourn because of the coyote is watching. So we have to get more poetry from our friends in Africa to here in America to help our other brothers who don’t have liberty because they are Mexican, while being shunned for being feminine or gay, which just causes chaos that burns bacon. Since the bacon is burnt it causes the gay ‘Queens’ write in a fashion that is difficult for others to see (historical fact, gay men and women would in 1963 write in code to each other in magazines and have organizations in secret), sometimes their secret writing were poems or songs that round us up into talking about free verse within this classroom in the present. I think I did a decent job but there is always that nagging feeling of anxiety, so please enjoy the poem.
Introduction to Poetry 