Poems from Around the World

I couldn't decide between poems from India where my ancestors are from or poems from Japan whose language I'm studying. So, I picked one poem by Kamala Das, a famous Indian English poet and one poem by Chika Sagawa translated from Japanese.

I picked "My Grandmother's House" by Kamala Das because it fills you with a huge feeling of nostalgia. It's about the speaker's (probably Das') grandmother's house that used to be a place filled with love and books to old for her. https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/my-grandmother-s-house/

I also picked "Ribbons of May" (五月のリボン）by Chika Sagawa because its really beautiful imagery comes through in both languages. I really like the imagery of the wind as hair, and the sound of the wind as laughing. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270572859_'Ribbons_of_May_Fading_Green_and_Angels_of_the_Sea_by_Sagawa_Chika'  or if you want the Japanese original version: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/4d32/e31a05bd0f45a40676cd2237bafe88726534.pdf (scroll down a bit)

Prose Poetry

I don't think we've covered enough prose poetry. It's a very weird category of poetry, and I think it deserves further exploration because its very existence seems contradictory to the mainstream idea of poetry. How can something be both prose and poetry?

We've covered "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché, but I wanted to share this poem called "Closing Time; Iskandariya" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly because it's beautiful and it's one of my favorite poems every.

https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/opinion/closing-time-iskandariya.html

It's a poem that you can read and reread without really figuring out what you think she's saying. You can read and reread it and come up with your own meaning without deciding that that meaning is the one Kelly was going for. Especially once you start doing your own research into her references.

I have my own interpretations, but I won't say them because I don't think they're any better than what other readers might come up with and I don't want to ruin their interpretations by imposing mine on them. Have fun reading it!

Limericks

Limericks have five lines, with the rhyming pattern AABBA. The first, second and last lines are longer than the B lines (third and fourth). Usually, the rhyming part of the A-lines is two or three syllables, while the last words of the B-lines are typically one syllable.

I think limericks are perfect for comedic poetry because the last line can often act as a twist and has the perfect comedic timing. The rhyme scheme somehow seems inherently comedic. So, I thought I'd include a humorous limerick but also show how the limerick form can be used to be serious, though serious limericks are pretty rare.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49916/to-my-daughter-in-a-red-coat

This poem, "To My Daughter in a Red Coat" by Anne Stevenson isn't necessarily dark, but it feels weird because it's not really humorous and to me feels kind of eerie. I thought I'd include it as an example of a semi-serious limerick that also doesn't follow the form exactly but is definitely a limerick.

https://libquotes.com/ogden-nash/quote/lbk7w6m

This poem, "There was a young belle of old natchez" by Ogden Nash, is one of my favorite comedic limericks specifically because Nash uses the rhymes in a funny way as you can see if you read it.

Blue by Carl Phillips

I wrote about this poem in my essay, but it remains one of my favorite poems ever even though it's kind of confusing. Its enigmatic style makes it really fun to piece apart and figure out. I am usually someone who likes explicating poetry because sometimes concentrating really hard on one or two word-choices or phrases yields a moment of epiphany. This moment gives me a kind of high that I really enjoy. No matter how small the epiphany, I feel as if all of the thinking I have put in culminates into one single realization that belongs to me entirely. 

So, it’s pretty hard to understand the meaning of "Blue," yet every time I read it I get the sense that it's layered with more complexity and emotion than I can consume. “Blue” makes me want to analyze it precisely because its imagery-packed lines provide me with plenty of small epiphanies. Most significantly, the poem’s deliberation over the colors blue, white, and black immediately intrigues me and prove very interesting to unpack. 

I really like the way each stanza juxtaposes beautiful and terrible imagery so closely together. For example, the juxtaposition of the brutal comparison of his mother's white flesh with blue veins to a gutted fish and the line "this is her hair, gone / from white to blue in the air" which is beautiful and actually rhymes highlights this theme of disunity and split ideas. In the second stanza, the color shifts from white and blue to black and blue. The speaker says the “blue, shot with black, of [his] dark / daddy’s knuckles” and “the same two fingers he has always used / to make the rim of every empty blue / glass in the house sing” which convey so many emotions at once. Thinking about his father’s knuckles fills me with fear, while the beautiful imagery of making the glasses sing fills me with nostalgia. His beautiful, lyrical imagery culminates in the third stanza, which is by far the most interesting to me. 

I think the third stanza conveys the meaning behind this juxtaposition. Phillips was biracial, and I definitely interpreted the poem as an exploration of the conflicted feelings Phillips has about his biracial identity. The third stanza in particular, but also the continuous feeling of self-conflict like he doesn't know what to think or how to relate to his memories, resonates a lot with me. This poem really shows how conflicted it can feel inside my own head, going over who my parents are and not feeling seen by either of them (“I am the man neither of you remembers”). It can sometimes feel like there are two sides of me based on race and then a third side of me that is incredibly conscious of the other two sides, one that is just divided and lost all the time. I definitely have felt “somewhere / between” races and longing to be “finally; nothing” and just human.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47852/blue-56d228a03ee82