Poetry Struggles

Once again, I found myself not being able to understand some of the poems that we had to read for class. Frank O’Hara’s poems were unusually written, with unexpected stops and short sentences that seemed to come out of nowhere. Even though I understood the basic context of his poems, like him describing what he sees during his lunch break in A Step Away From Them, I had a hard time imagining the picture that he was trying to show or the message that he was trying to send. His poem The Day Lady Died and James Schuyler’s poem Dining Out With Doug and Frank both seemed to make a lot of references to places and people that I don’t know. However, I did enjoy James Schuyler’s poem February where he describes what seems to me as a morning of a day in February and the beauty that he observes as he looks around. My favorite poem was Mugging by Allen Ginsberg because it described a common event that occurred in New York in the 1970’s and occurs nowadays too from time to time. Ginsberg describes with great detail his walk leading up to the mugging, the actual process of the mugging, and his frustration in the end as the cops were no help and no one would testify for him out of fear of the gangs. My favorite part from the New York School packet were the imaginary still lifes of Joe Brainard. After reading his autobiography and seeing that he’s a poet and an artist, you can understand that he tries to show his artistic process through his work Ten Imaginary Still Lifes. It’s interesting to see how an artist closes his eyes and imagines his works of art and the stories behind them. Also, his autobiography was unique because he decided to skip all the boring and long stories of his life and honestly described himself in a few sentences that defined his identity, instead of going in a chronological order of everything that happened in his life.