The poems that we were assigned to read for class tomorrow were kind of difficult for me to read. I feel that I was able to get the main story/point of the piece but it was hard for me to follow the plot and to pick out the details. The lack of punctuation in Schuyler’s and O’hara’s pieces and that the general organization of the poems made the concepts difficult for me to grasp. I also found the language that the poets used interesting.
O’hara seems to make his pieces friendly with all of the name-dropping that goes on in his poems. He uses interesting phrases that caught my attention like “in a sense we’re all winners/ we’re alive” and “my heart is in my pocket.” I’m not necessarily sure what the second quotes means while I find the first one slightly inspirational. I feel that the last 5 lines of the poem could be a poem on their own and perhaps convey an equally important message.
Schuyler uses a lot of colors in his poems. He also uses a lot of devices such as personification (“a chimney, breathing a little smoke”) and metaphors (“like a few snowflakes out of the blue”). He incorporates small details and descriptions so that the reader is able to picture the scene that he is describing. He also uses very long and run on insertions with parenthesis in the middle of sentences which seem to distract me from the actual meaning of the sentence outside of the interjection.
The Allen Ginsberg pieces were also pretty hard for me to follow. I was able to conclude that it was about the author getting robbed but with the somewhat unique structure of the lines and the insanely detailed descriptions I was lost. The author often times described the same thing over and over again further detailing its aspects.