Response to Saalihah Muhammad

This poem is obviously trying to take us somewhere else and let us experience somethign that many people are outside of.  It's an attempt at letting us see a part of the world through someone else's eyes.  I think that it accomplishes this and manages to have some very "poetic" moments in it. 

Your poem is very memorable because of the dialect and slang you chose to use and also for how you incorporated the dialect into your imagery especially "and those apple bums hang loose." I also really like the line about "jump shot fame" because I think it captures the sort of thing that would be imprevious to women who "wanna make a profit."

That being said I think there are a few areas where your poem is a little confusing.  The first line doesn't make sense to me and I'm not sure if it is a gap in my knowledge or if it just doesn't make sense.  The image of "hair mimickin cigarette ashes" also seems strange to me because I can't imagine anyone would have grey and black hair intentionally which is what mimicking implies to me.  The part about the "canyon gaps" is also unclear to me but it sounds like the space between buildings?  The use of "Barbie house" to describe both your old house and the new house that was built took me awhile to wrap my head around. 

I think overall your poem is very well done and accomplishes it's goal but maybe could be reworked to be more immediately understandable. 

Response to Kendall Crowe

I like the theme of your poem a lot - friendship and reminiscing are huge parts of all of our lives and I think you captured it very well.  I also thought the lines you chose to repeat worked very well especially "...a little after twelve/ ...a lot after twelve."  The first two stanzas in general work very well because so much is parallel - every line has a partner with the same structure. 

I think I can also see why you chose to break from the formula for the third stanza.  It seems to emphasize the fact that it's a final stage and is altogether different from the first two.  I think the lines break are done fairly well in the third stanza and punctuation is used extremely well to force emphasis on certain parts. 

I do think the line breaks need some more punctuation at the end and less capitalization in the beginning in order to have them match the third stanza however.  For example "Legs kicking and bouncing/ Against the prickly straw." Since this is one thought I would probably make the first word in that second line lower case and consider adding a comma to the end of the first line.  There is a similar issue in the very first two lines of each of the first two stanzas. 

In the third stanza I would also consider changing the second "sitting and talking" to something different because it seems too repetitious to use the same phrasing one line after another.  And again there are issues of capitalization and punctuation in the third stanza. 

As far as your imagery I think "beady" and "cloudy" are both great words for describing the difference in age and eras of their lives.  "Half wrought smiles" is also very concrete but I think the third stanza could use more imagery in it in order to make it more similar to the rest of the poem. 

Who Who Coud Not... and Homage to My Hips response

The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart is pretty interesting because to me it seems like it tries to mislead the reader.  At the beginning she says that she is not talking about the metaphorical heart but the physical thing.  In actuality she seems to be saying that her heart doesn't fit the stereotype.  The author's use of punctuation is very precise - she is very grammatically correct and uses periods to indicate the completion of thoughts and semicolons to show pieces of each thought.  I also admired a lot of the imagery she chose to use especially the way she describes the valves like fish mouths because that is exactly what they look like.  I also thought it was clever for her to compare a heart to drowning person because it seems to capture the metaphorical and literal idea of a struggling heart.  What I take away from this poem is the linking of the physical world to the metaphorical one - I think it's a great example of that idea. 

Homage to My Hips is probably my least favorite poem we've read so far.  The structure of it is very nonuniform which bothers me: lines are placed seemingly at random.  However I believe that the author chose use to the structure of the poem to reflect the noncomfortity of her hips.  Her hips also seems to be a metaphor for her own personality and it seems that she has embodied herself within them.  The last three lines also seem out-of-place and don't fit in as well with the rest of the poem.  I think they are an attempt to show that even without conventional (for lack of a better term) hips she is still able to do what a woman ought to be able to do.  What I'd take away from this poem is that structure can mirror the intended message and is something that can be used in the same way as imagery.     

"Loading a Boar" by David Lee

It seems that the author was trying to convey a sense of authenticity and a connection to his roots.  He did so through his vocabulary especially with slang and curse words.  He also did so by limiting punctuation and ignoring most grammatical rules.  He also obviously shows his roots through the subject of the poem which is loading the boar into the truck but also that he should write about what he knows.  The poem is essentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.  The structure of the poem is all one very long sentence with a few quotations interspersed.  Interestingly the quotations do employ a small amount of punctuation which could be an attempt to symbolize that the person speaking (and also giving advice to the author) may be smarter than the author.  The poem uses very little symbolism and there is really only one possible interpretation of anything.  The style of this poem is suited to it's purpose and I think that's the lesson to be taken from it.  It blatantly ignores most conventions because it makes the poem a more authentic experience.  It also conveys that people should write about what they know and that not everything that is written must be angsty or have some deeper philosophical meaning.  It also shows how something like grammar or puncuation can be used to show disparity between two parties. 

Abstraction Poem

Hungry is in class

Wearing sperry's and a hat

Writing short poems

[so much depends]

The couplets in this poem are constructed in a very uniform manner that I think lends itself very well to the subject.  It seems to parallel the simplicity of a red wheel barrow and the scenery surrounding it.  Obviously the poem is about how much work a simple tool like a wheel barrow can save someone.  Each couplet is constructed with a total of four words, three in the first line and one in the last.  Additionally each couplet has a partner the first and last each contain four syllables in the first line while the second and third couplet each have three in the first lines.  This uniformity seems borrowed from the idea of a wheel barrow which of course are all essentially uniform.  The couplets themselves each actually look somewhat like a wheel barrow which may or may not be intentional.  The imagery used is also very concrete which fits the simplicistic nature of the poem very well.  There are really only three adjectives used in the entrie poem -red, glazed, and white - and all of these paint a very clear picture of the scene.  Describing the wheel barrow as "glazed" is very easy to visualize, in my mind it makes me think of exactly how a car or anything metal for that matter looks when it rains.  Using "white" to describe the chickens is also very concrete because one can easily manage a pen full of them and how out of the corner of your eye all you would see is whiteness.  I also think the use of punctuation or lack thereof for the most part and lack of capitalization lends itself well to this poem as it makes it seem almost like a passing thought someone might have as they walk past.  The period at the ends signifies the end of the thought and how there really isn't much more to say about it.