A Story about the Body

I choose a story about the body because it shows the shallowness of the man. At first he admires the women for her looks regardless of her age, he is still attracted to the way she looks. He also loves her work, for she is a painter, and admires her paintings and other works of art she has created. He watched her for a week and loves her. But when he finds out she has "missing parts" his attraction is gone as fast as they came

Reading Response 5: Poetry, Kooser and Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s “My Mistress’ Eyes…” sonnet is one of his most well know and beloved sonnets. Not only is this because Shakespeare is, in the words of one of my former professors “a god-like genius”, but also because Sonnet 130 is, at its heart, a good poem. I believe this is what Ted Kooser was trying to convey in Chapter Four (‘Don’t Worry about the Rules’) of The Poetry Home Repair Manual.

Kooser makes the case that poetry should be first and foremost about substance (i.e. the point/plot/meaning) with style growing out of that substance. He gives the example of the haiku, traditionally 17 syllables, and yet that restriction does not always have to be enforced, if the resulting balance is a much stronger and more meaningful poem. He even goes so far to state that he believes along with the critic John Berger that: “Every successful sonnet is a good poem first and a good sonnet second” (Kooser 28). And this is what makes Shakespeare’s poems so enduring: people react to them first on an emotional/intuitive level before they look into the effort Shakespeare must have put in to craft the sonnet form.

Poetry Reading Response

As poetry and I have always had a rocky relationship, I approached this week’s reading from a skeptical standpoint. That being I said, I took a lot from Burroway’s technical outlook of the writing of poetry. There was a point when I figured that prose, broken into many lines, would magically become free verse poetry. Perhaps a part of me still does, to a degree, but I found Burroway’s lessons on sound helpful helpful.
Specifically, I found the use of alliteration and connotation to be helpful reminders on what can be done with the form of the English language. There is subtlety in message, and then subtlety in form, and even though I’ve been aware of such technical knowledge before, it’s faded over time. So, the idea of using sounds throughout a line to tie the line together internally and with surrounding other lines was a fresh reminder of what can be done with the work. As I’ve attempted to write free form poetry in the past, these are probably lessons I’ll use most.
Additionally, I wish they had used Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors” instead of “Stillborn”. While it has more form than “Stillborn”, “Metaphors” shows the power of the density mentioned by Burroway, as well as keeping to symbolic nine syllables for each of the nine lines.