Poetry Response Journal

Poetry is something that has proved to be very difficult for me to read. My complete ignorance towards poems was proven to me as I read the first few pages of Mary Oliver's American Primitive, and was surprised that it didn't rhyme at all. I knew poetry didn't have to rhyme every line, but I thought each paragraph was supposed to have some rhyming theme or something. These two books started off as very slow reads for me, with random pauses as the poems jumped lines for seemingly no reason, but as I progressed through them I suppressed my original negativity for poetry and let the words on the page float deeper into my mind.

I will admit that I haven't yet had time to finish the last 20 or so pages of Billy Collins' Picnic, Lighting, though I plan on reading them tomorrow morning in school. I have read more than enough to notice the similarities, as well as the polar opposites, between these two poet's writings.

Billy Collins' poems are for the most part longer than Mary Oliver's, but they typically have deeper meaning as well. In "Victoria's Secret", for example, Collins goes further than just describing himself paging through a catalog, he vividly describes the unhappiness of the models exposed to any and all curious eyes. Collins' writing had the effects of a deeper understanding in some poems, as well as a deeper confusion in others. I really enjoyed reading "What I learned today", where he describes his thinking process as he reads through a single page of an encyclopedia. "I Go Back to the House for a Book" was another interesting poem of Billy Collins that I personally found both very interesting and very confusing. He explains how by changing what he was doing he has split himself into two; the man who chose to grab his book, and "another me that did not bother to go back to the house for a book" (Collins 39). Throughout this poem Collins details his feelings on this person always being just in front of him, and the paradox of him not existing at all simultaneously.

Mary Oliver's poems were much shorter and quicker to read. While Collins' poems seemed to focus on himself and other people and their interactions and reactions with life, Oliver's writing seemed to wrap itself around the beauty (or ugliness) of nature and the animals living in nature. She has many poems about ponds, or beautiful sunrises in the morning, but she also incorporates grotesque imagery of a crow's "wings crumbling like old bark. Feather's falling from your breast like leaves, and your eyes two bolts of lightning gone to sleep" (Oliver 9). For me personally the contrast she uses between different poems, or even in the same poems, has the effect of making me more connected to the text, and I felt like I had a deeper understanding of them. One poem I enjoyed reading entitled "John Chapman", was about a man whom, "Everywhere he went the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely as young girls" (24). Is this Johnny Appleseed from old legends? Why does she call him John Chapman? Another poem is called Chapp's lake, so I'm wondering if the name Chap has some significance to Oliver unknown to me?

After reading these two poem books, I've realized poetry isn't as bad as I thought. I'm not about to go and buy a bunch of poem books necessarily, but I have a better understanding of them now and can appreciate the complexity of them. Some of the poems were confusing and/or boring for me, but quite a few I found to be shockingly interesting. They had vivid imagery describing nature, as well as deeper meanings that go far beyond what is on the pages. Unfortunately, most of my favorite poems that I wanted to keep reading are the shortest, and end abruptly. Overall though, my poetry reading experience turned out much better than I had first expected.