Learning to Love America

In the lit circle group we did this week I learned something interesting about the poet who wrote "Learning to Love America". She ended up migrating to America and had a child here, which really helped add depth to the story told in the poem. The added perspective made the poem feel more alive and real, like I was peering through a window into her life. It's interesting how rarely we consider the lives of the authors who write the stories and poetry we love.

Harlem (Dream Deferred)

I thought this poem was especially strong just because of how much it said with so few words. There's only 52 words in the entire poem. That's shorter than the majority of my posts here, yet I believe it's far more profound than anything I've written here as well. Hughes wants the reader to think of dreams as real, physical, tangible things: a difficult task at times, but this way they're harder to forget about and harder to just push aside. He knew the value of having dreams.

My thoughts on "I, Too".

I felt that this was a fairly powerful poem as well. While I can't really sympathize with Hughes's position, it was very easy to see the perspective that he was coming from. It's a tale of "revenge" that manages to not be bitter or acerbic at all: it's hopeful, even! The third and fourth stanzas really tie it all together by paralleling the second: the speaker is going to make a peaceful act of defiance by sitting at the table in the dining room. He will be "beautiful" in his act of retaliation, independent like the concept of America itself. It's dramatic and stirring.

In Memoriam John Coltrane

I'm just going to start out by saying I loved this poem. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for jazz and blues music, and a poem addressed to the memory of John Coltrane seemed like it would be right up my alley. Thankfully, it was. I liked how even though the poem was "about" Coltrane it didn't burden itself with overblown praise or flowery description of the man that we already know: instead, the poet paints us a picture of a coal train moving smoothly and slowly, dark against the night, the rattling of the cars beating a rhythm against the tracks. It's still relevant to Coltrane--not only is it a pun involving his name, but it resembles his music in a way: powerful and steady and smooth. It's a clever play on the language and it works very well in this case.

Grass: Deeply Rooted Commentary

I'd also read the poem "Grass" by Carl Sandburg for this week. It's possible that I'm reading a bit far into it, but I thought it was almost nihilistic in its treatment towards the passage of time in marking human events. The wars keep going on, whether they're held in America or Europe, but the grass remains the most constant of the constants: it's always there to cover up our mistakes. The second-to-last and last stanzas really sealed that thought for me: "Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work."

No one will remember in time--and I can't even honestly say that I knew the relevance of most of these locations right off hand, either. It speaks something interesting about the impermanence of even our own inhumanities against each other.

My thoughts on Dulce et Decorum Est.

This poem really did strike me as something unique. I've always been a fan of war fiction, and while war is often held in a bad light in literature (for good reason), I felt that the poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" really took the animosity towards the pointless waste of life in most of our petty international squabbles and ran with it. No delusions of glory or happiness are found here; there's no real "moral" (as Tim O'Brien would say). War is awful. That's it. It's a burden on the working class enlisted to fight on behalf of those more fortunate, and it is neither "fitting" nor "sweet" to suffocate to death on a cloud of poison gas in the bottom of a trench covered in a raggedy uniform.

Greasy Lake

I was part of the group on Greasy Lake. Reading this story, it started out by setting the stage for the story to come. Providing the details around the time period also provided a good point for me to reflect on as I thought about how different the times are today. As discussed in our Lit. Circle, all the different things that were shared to start the story gave each of us some different perspectives but we clearly new that the different points all would come to mean something as the story progressed.

I noted in my write-up about the story how the narrator was a "bad character" but that did not mean he was actually a bad person. This was very important to me as it showed how it was almost as if he was attempting to be something he was not and that showed through with the information he shared about his life; like not being in a fight since the sixth grade.

Overall, I liked the story and the opportunity it gave me to really use my imagination as I went through the story. The symbolism that was used was good and offered to me that these kids had some sort of an idea that they must use certain things to fit in. They seemed as though they were headed in a direction no matter what and as one boy did something, another would do something more.