Struggles

The poem I chose is “To Abuelita Neli.” This poem shows the difficulties immigrants have to deal with. We can see how much trouble Zamora went through crossing the borders and surviving. He explains the struggles he is having from being in the US to his Abuelita who is in Mexico. 

We know this poem is from around 2009 since he mentions in the poem that “today, this country chose its first black president,” who was Barack Obama. He starts off the poem by saying how many times he had to make fake passports to keep moving around the US and lying about his birthplace in order to hide. He does apologize for lying about his birthplace because it would seem disrespectful. In line 5, he italicized “choose” to emphasize that he doesn’t want to have a choice in marrying. I took that in two different ways: (1) he wasn’t given many opportunities so he doesn’t want to have this choice as well or (2) in the US, it is normal for people to choose who they marry and not do an arranged marriage, so he is following that tradition. He explains to his Abuelita that he can’t go back home because he can’t cross the border. He has already made so many fake passports that he won’t have the opportunity to get papers. He compares himself to a parakeet which are considered small and vulnerable birds. Zamora sees himself vulnerable in a world with so many opportunities that he isn’t allowed to have. Line 8 would be a metaphor since he is comparing himself to a parakeet but he isn’t using any similes. 

Not only does he explain his struggles, we also know that his parents were already across the border before he turned one. In line 11-12, he states how Abuelita and him both celebrated his birthday without his parents. He states that he can’t be a citizen because he can’t get papers which he stated in lines 6-7. He also states how he won’t have to be working anymore since he is hidden in the US away from border control. He ends the poem telling Abuelita that his friends don’t know the real truth about him being in the US. They see him as a traitor and he compares himself to a coconut, which is a metaphor. A coconut has two sides, brown on the outside and white inside. White would be considered as Americans and brown would be referring to the immigrants. His friends claim that he is lying about considering himself still benign one of his family, but since he left and won’t come back, they see him as an American.

Javier Zamora pointed out a lot of the struggles he went through by explaining the issues in hiding and being stuck in the US. He states that he feels vulnerable and small in a big world. He apologizes for not being able to come back and that he isn’t a traitor to his family. For the question directed to the poet: I noticed that in most of your poems, you always add spanish words/phrases in them. Why do you like to mix up the languages in your poem?

Gurranvir Kaur

The art of Nature

When considering rhythms in poems and understanding the different variations, I believe that “Still of be Neat “ by Jonson, best represents the nature of art. When scanning this poem, I mainly got a dominant prosody of iambic tetrameter. Which I believe best fits this poems, meaning that appearances can be deceiving. Therefore, when reading this poem, I feel as if it is portrayed as a scene of a man talking to a woman who is dressed up neatly. Then, as I continued the poem, I also got some anapest meter inline six, which gave the poem a different feeling to the scene as if, it was a monolog, and the man was speaking in his mind. Therefore, we were all listening to how he truly felt towards the women that are neatly dressed. Line six best shows this by saying, “All is not SWEET, all is not SOUND”. This line explains how even though the woman is dressed up neatly and has a graceful face, he still sees her adultery actions. Therefore, lines eleven and twelve can capture his distaste and distrust of overly neat women. This makes me wonder if his preference for women would be for a more natural look. Therefore, that could signify that he believes that women who dress up more naturally and modestly have a more kind and true nature. Overall all these different variations in meters make a sound of patterns that create a visual for us readers to visualize in our minds.  

As for the poem “Delight in Disorder” by Herrick, I feel does represent the nature of art, yet it never created a visual in my head with the rhythm of the poem. The poem seemed so full of metaphors, that it took the visual it could’ve created. The dominant prosody was also an iambic tetrameter, therefore this visual for me was more of us readers listening to a man’s monolog. He suggested with all the metaphors that beauty and attractiveness are not perfections but rather imperfections. This statement can be seen in line twelve when he says, “I see WILD civiliTY”, therefore explaining that all sexy dressed women have the same wild informal behavior and speech. Also, like Jonson, through his use of diction, we readers get a sense that he prefers the way people look naturally when they enjoy their lives, not when they are putting up an act or façade. Through this whole poem full of metaphors, imagery, and personification, I was too caught up in trying to understand the meaning of each line that the visual was never created in my mind. This poem is more a hyperbole that only has an audiovisual of just a man talking, making no suspense to capture our attention.  

-Jeshua Rocha

I am a rose not a poppy.

Review:

In my creative project, I decided to re-create the poem “The Rose & The Poppy” by Adrianna. First, I want to say that this poem had me in circles. It was a poem I had to re-read several times in order to understand it. I didn’t change the poem completely, but I transformed a poppy into a Rose. Just like shown below, I’ve transformed lines like “I am not a ravishing ruby red” to “I am a ruby red rose”. Another example of re-creating the poem would be changing line 17 “Most times I am forgotten” to “I am never forgotten.”

While I was reading Adrianna’s Poem I noticed she used metaphors to compare herself to a poppy creating personification. I wanted to do something else, though. Instead of comparing her to a poppy, I compared her to the perfect Rose “always chosen”. In my eyes, I wanted to show everyone that they’re a rose and not a poppy, a flower that is known as a drug. When doing so, I created a paradox, causing confusion. I re-created the poem in an image of a poppy but describing it as a rose simply because we cannot change the poem completely and a poppy still plays a big factor here.

When reading the re-creation that I did, you’ll most likely be confused, and that is a good thing because I want you to be drugged by the poppy but be reminded that you are beautiful and cherished. Reading my re-creation of the poem will cause you to tilt your head like a druggie, but the words will keep reminding you of how lovely you are as a rose.

Thanks to Adrianna, because of her poem, I could transform a poppy into a rose even while still being imperfect.

– Ana Munos

Drunkenness

In using figurative language in poetry, instead of direct and precise words, an author is able to help the reader in visualizing what they mean as well as understanding the feeling and point they are trying to get across in certain lines of their work. In Hafez’s poem, ‘Ode 487’, the line that stood out to me the most was the line, “If you would reach your daily destination, /The holy city of intoxication.”. This metaphor creates the feeling that the act of getting drunk, resembles a journey. He also adds to the metaphor by stating that intoxication is a ‘holy city’, which to me gives the impression of a glorious and heavenly place, which is what he is insinuating being drunk is. By stating ‘holy city’ he only refers to the positive connotation of being drunk, which allows the reader to see his perspective on intoxication and prevent us from missing his point of the fact that he believes drunkenness is something positive. This start of the poem makes one realize that the whole poem is about Hafez and his drunkenness. Yet the other metaphor that stands out to me is where he states “Well, HAFIZ, Life’s a riddle – give it up: /There is no answer to it but this cup.” He uses a metaphor about life, insinuating life is confusing and hard to comprehend, but at the ends, claims the answer is in ‘this cup’. This poem starts off by insinuating that drinking is this wonderful journey, by using positive connotation, yet ends with a shift to claim that it is the only answer in life. In the end Hafez makes it seem like drinking is something he must do, in order to find the understand his own life.

Emily Mayo

Lust and Love

Reading the first poem Ode 44 by Hafez really surprised me. This poem shows what it is like to be drunk and in love or lust. In the first poem he described the beautiful girl by saying “ her wine-red lips”, “warm as a dewy rose” describing her by using similes. Then the author goes on to explain how they started interacting with alcohol, “wine of the tavern” by using metaphors. Hafez then switched his feelings about the girl and her being there. He uses a metaphor to compare him being a traitor to wine and love. Which is odd because he seemed happy at the beginning of the poem about the girl and the wine. It seems like he loves wine more than he loves the woman.

However, that shows how this love is rejected by Islamic spirituality. Hafez then continued to talk about the wine by saying, “ordained this wine for us, but not for thee;”. In this poem there is a lot of use of metaphors and personification like the example above. He then ended the poem with a simile and used personification, “O knotted locks, filled like a flower with scent”, “how have you ravished this poor penitent”. The uses of the figurative language gave the readers, and myself a real description to what Hafez is telling us. Finishing this poem, I realized that the love/lust is not for the women at all, it is about comparing the woman to wine and how easy it is to fall in love/lust for both of them.

Joseph Jordan

Feelings have different meanings

Jackeline Salazar

The poem that spoke to my heart and choose to discuss in my blog is “Like This” by Rumi. When I started to read this poem there were lots of emotions and feelings in this poem. There was also some figurative language in this poem that represents love or at least how I interpreted it. This poem symbolize love and other feelings that the author is expressing. Also when I started to scan this poem I wasn’t sure what kind of poem it was due to the lines and the way I read this poem, it was confusing to determine whether it was an iambic or a dactylic. It could also be both as well, an example of it being an iambic was due to the first line where you can separate it into three parts like so, “if any, one asks, you” you can tell that from that first line and so on it could be an iambic poem. Bur, then again at some point of this poem it was also becoming too sound like a dactylic poem. For example in lines 42 and 49 it sounds as a dactylic but I could be wrong since I am no expert on scanning poems, “light the candle, in his hand. When Shams comes, back from Tabriz,”. I thought that these lines and a few others were dactylic so I assumed that it was mixture of iambic and dactylic with a trimeter when it came to figuring out the pattern of this poem. 

On the other hand the main reason why I also like this poem was because this poem symbolize a meaning of love. When I read this poem it had some sort of figurative language to represent a meaning on this poem. For example in lines 25-26, “When someone asks what it means to ‘die for love’, point here.” I thought that it was a metaphor due to the fact that you can’t really die because of love or just assume that this one thing dies for love. It was basically just an expression saying that you would give up anything for love or to love someone specifically. In this case the author would give up anything for love and since they said “point here” I assume that he would die for love for someone specifically or maybe just themselves too because I am curious as to say what Rumi meant by “point here”. Also Rumi uses personification to express the love he has for this person, like an example in lines 21-23 “If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead. don’t try to explain the miracle. Kiss me on the lips.” He is using personification to let us imagine or think if Jesus raises the dead or if there are actual miracles out there, because in reality we really don’t know if Jesus exists or if miracles do, so Rumi gives us this idea of Jesus and miracles but at the same time he uses his feelings towards the end because he will say that there is no need to explain this and to just “kiss me on the lips.” This line says it all that he doesn’t really need to know all about it. Rumi just uses this line to express the emotions he has for this special person and he just wants to feel them. Rumi also uses imagery by letting us picture clouds uncovering the moon and loosening a string knot from a robe in lines 17-18. Overall he uses these images to let us picture what he means to be in love and seeing the moon while he is trying to loosen a knot from his lover’s robe before they make love. Overall, there are many more figurative language that Rumi uses to express his love and feelings for this person. He has many feelings with different meanings and they were mostly about love but it was how powerful his love was.

Overall, if this poem was interpreted by someone else other than a Muslim or an Iranian poet, my interpretations would have been the same. I don’t think it should have been different just because of what they are. Even if they are not Muslim or an Iranian poet I would have not have different interpretations because in my opinion I think they we are all humans, so what we say or write or speak all has its own meaning  and everyone who would have read this  would have their own interpretations about the poem whether it was a non-Muslim or non-Iranian. Overall, I would have had the same interpretations that I wrote for this blog post no matter what because I think its just all about how you feel or what is your way of meaning for this poem.

London Calling

Wordsworth’s poem, “London 1802” does not provide a more effective, thorough, and powerful critique of 19th Century London’s social and political corruption, however, Blake’s poem, “London”, does. Blake’s poem, “London”, does provide a more effective and powerful critique of 19th Century London’s social and political corruption through his use of imagery and figurative language. Through the use of synecdoches, metonymies, metaphors, similes, and imagery Blake paints a very critical perspective of 19th Century London.

In “London” Blake uses metaphors to describe how pitiful London was at the turn of the 19th Century. In line 8 Blake writes “Mind-forg’d manacles” which is a metaphor for all the different ways the political and intellectual climate of 1970s London “enslaves” people. In lines 11 and 12 Blake describes London when he writes, “the hapless Soldiers sigh, Runs in blood down Palace walls” which is his way of metaphorically accusing the palace, which is a symbol of a corrupt government, for forcing innocent men to murder and plunder in wars. Along with figurative language, Blake also uses strong imagery to provide a powerful critique of 19th Century London’s social and political corruption. For example in lines 9 and 10 he provides a powerful image of children chimney sweepers “appall” every “blackening church” symbolizing his distaste for the common exploitation of children and the Church’s acceptance of it in the early 19th Century. Also in lines 13-16 he writes that instead of hearing the sweet Thames he hears a prostitute curse out her infant for crying. This for me really paints a realistic, thorough, and powerful critique of 19th Century London’s social and political corruption compared to Wordsworth’s poem.

Wordsworth’s poem, “London 1802”, offers a more natural, romanticized critique of 19th Century London which I do not think offers as effective a critique on London’s social and political corruption as Blake did. Wordsworth never writes about images of corruption, instead, he calls for England’s poetic hero, John Milton, to magically fix this “swamp” that has become London. Along with requesting the help from a dead poet, Wordsworth uses figurative language to tell the reader London needs help and not offering images of what corruption there looked like. For example Wordsworth uses a simile in line 9 when he writes, “Thy soul was like a Star” calling upon Milton’s god-like abilities to shine brighter than the average person. Maybe Wordsworth thought that Milton would be able to offer guidance on bringing London back to its glory but it certainly does not offer a powerful critique of in the way Blake achieves. In lines 3 and 4 he uses two synecdoches, “altar” and “Fireside” to represent the English Church and the security and safety the people in London get from being at home and proceeds to write how these virtues were taken away by corruption. This does aid a good image of London people suffering but not necessarily an image of corruption. Wordsworth also uses a metaphor in lines 2 and 3 when he writes, “she is a fen of Stagnant waters” which hints at Wordsworth’s opinion of London in 1802 as a dirty, full of disease, and unpleasant place. He believes London is just like the stagnant waters of a swamp yet that image does not provide the more effective and powerful picture of London’s economic and social climate of the early 19th Century as well as Blake’s “London” does.