"Foolproof Loofah" Review

"Foolproof Loofah" Review 

"Foolproof Loofah" by Lee Ann Brown

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Brown University, where she earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. 

Foolproof Loofah

"Lo! I fill prol pills
Poof! I rail pro lolls
Fool! I ill for lips
O Pale! I foil frail profs
Fop! I frill pale roils-
So! I proof oil spills

April Fool's!"

Although there are definitely rhymes found in Lee Ann Brown's poem "Foolproof Loofah" there does not seem to be any consistent rhyme scheme. This poem goes in any direction that it wants. There is no consistent plot, story, or tale being told, nor is the poem describing something or someone. The only form of structure the poem has is the fact that is in iambic pentameter. The only sense of order the audience is given within the poem is the April Fool's Day greeting in the last line. This greeting is the only sense of order the audience receives, and so it seems to explain the spastic vocabulary, lack or rhyme scheme, and strange sentences. Since no coherent words, sentences, or ideas are being conveyed, one explanation is that Brown is playing an April Fool's Day joke by using repetition of the letters from the phrase "April Fools Day" to form a bumbling of words, or perhaps a sort of word scramble. The title is also very complex as it includes those same letters, transitioning from "Foolproof" to "April Fool's" However, there is little to no correlation between the title and the last line. The only purpose the body of the paragraph has is to fuel the fire of the insanity. The poem seems quite intricate and fascinating to viewers at first, but as they read and realize the author's clever trick, the readers realize that they have fallen into the April Fool's Day trap set for them by the author. 

"Marks" Review

"Marks" Review 

"Marks" by Linda Pastan

Born on May 27, 1932, Linda Pastan is a Jewish-American Poet from New York. Now 82 years old, Pastan served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991-1995. 

Marks 

My husband gives me an A
for last night's supper, 
an incomplete for my ironing, 
a B plus in bed.
My son says I am average, 
an average mother, but if
I put my mind to it
I could improve.
My daughter believes 
in Pass/Fail and tells me
I pass. Wait 'til they learnI'm dropping out.  


It is clear that poet Linda Pastan has adopted the metaphor of a grading scale and it's variations. The narrator of the poem makes it clear that she is annoyed with constantly being reviewed and graded by people, especially her own family. The narrator starts with explaining her best grades, given to her by her husband. She states "My husband gives me an A for last night's supper" followed by " a B plus in bed". She is then graded by her son who claims that she is an "average mother". Lastly, her daughter, "who believes in Pass/Fail", gives the mother a passing grade. This constant grading of a mother's everyday actions shows the audience that the metaphor itself is humorous. It has taken a the situation of a family lacking respect and appreciation and turned it into something somewhat witty.   

However, the poem has somewhat of a dark side. We see that the mother figure is frustrated. From her "incomplete" in ironing, her sense that she could improve for her son, and finally her "dropping out". Her final words, "Wait 'til they learn I'm dropping out", has an incredibly dark connotation. The narrator could be suggesting suicide, however it appears as if she only craves independence from her family's judgement. Therefore it must be assumed that her "dropping out" is a form of escape that lacks physical harm. The most probable thing that this metaphor could represent is the divorce of the family. Tired of her family's lack of value for her, her retaliation is leaving them to fend for themselves in the the land of the housewife. 

"Slim Cunning Hands" Review

"Slim Cunning Hands" Review

"Slim Cunning Hands" by Walter de la Mare 

Born April 25, 1873, English poet and novelist Walter de la Mare is best remembered for his children's stories. de la Mare was a recipient of the Carnegie Medal, and died in 1956. 

Slim Cunning Hands

Slim cunning hands at rest, and cozening eyes-
Under this stone one loved too wildly lies;
How false she was, no granite could declare;
Nor all earth's flowers, how fair.

Walter de la Mare's poem "Slim Cunning Hands is a testament to how strange people can act. All in all, the poem relates to death and deception. de la Mare uses diction to speak of a now buried lover, who consisted of false and unfaithful actions; hence, she is characterized by the "Slim Cunning Hands". The words "cunning" and "cozening" are used to describe someone who is good at deceiving others. Later, the phrase "under the stone" leads the audience to believe that this deceiving person has passed away. The stone that de la Mare speaks about is the granite that is later mentioned. The granite represents the coldness of the lover's betrayal and ultimately the finality of her death. The images of stone, granite, and flowers help the audience see that the woman is actually dead and also give them a sense that although the man's love for her was deep, it was not wise. The word “wildly” shows the audience that the man cared a great deal for her, and that he believed the love they shared was wild. The word “Fair” indicates the warmth of the relationship, and also presents the idea that she made the man feel loved in return. However,the negative words such as“cunning”, “cozening”, and “false”, suggest that she was not truly trustworthy and that perhaps she only gave the illusion of loving the man, rather than truly being in love with the speaker of the poem. Despite the the wrongdoings of the passed woman towards the man, the speaker of the poem has an overall tone that is mournful. Not only is the speaker mournful for the woman's actual death, but he is mournful for the tainting of her soul by her lies and deceptions.    

"Welcome to Hiroshima" Review

"Welcome to Hiroshima" Review

"Welcome to Hiroshima" by Mary Jo Salter 

Born on August 15, 1954 in Grand Rapids, local poet Mary Jo Salter is the co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. She is also a professor in the Writing Seminars program at Johns Hopkins University. 

Welcome to Hiroshima

is what you first see, stepping off the train:
a billboard brought to you in living English
by Toshiba Electric. While a channel
silent in the TV of the brain

projects those flickering re-runs of a cloud
that brims its risen columnful like beer
and, spilling over, hangs its foamy head,
you feel a thirst for history: what year

it started to be safe to breathe the air,
and when to drink the blood and scum afloat
on the Ohta River. But no, the water’s clear,
they pour it for your morning cup of tea

in one of the countless sunny coffee shops
whose plastic dioramas advertise
mutations of cuisine behind the glass:
a pancake sandwich; a pizza someone tops

with a maraschino cherry. Passing by
the Peace Park’s floral hypocenter (where
how bravely, or with what mistaken cheer,
humanity erased its own erasure),

you enter the memorial museum
and through more glass are served, as on a dish
of blistered grass, three mannequins. Like gloves
a mother clips to coatsleeves, strings of flesh

hang from their fingertips; or as if tied
to recall a duty for us, Reverence
the dead whose mourners too shall soon be dead,
but all commemoration’s swallowed up

in questions of bad taste, how re-created
horror mocks the grim original,
and thinking at last They should have left it all
you stop. This is the wristwatch of a child.

Jammed on the moment’s impact, resolute
to communicate some message, although mute,
it gestures with its hands at eight-fifteen
and eight-fifteen and eight-fifteen again

while tables of statistics on the wall
update the news by calling on a roll
of tape, death gummed on death, and in the case
adjacent, an exhibit under glass

is glass itself: a shard the bomb slammed in
a woman’s arm at eight-fifteen, but some
three decades on—as if to make it plain
hope’s only as renewable as pain,

and as if all the unsung
debasements of the past may one day come
rising to the surface once again—
worked its filthy way out like a tongue. 

Published only 39 years after the detonation of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, the ultimate tone of the open-verse poem "Welcome to Hiroshima" is that of gloom, as the poem focuses on human destruction. Salter presents imagery of the lingering effects of war, or rather the lack of them. She presents a verbal "split-screen" and juxtaposes contemporary Hiroshima with it's former 1945 model by comparing the decimation of the city during and shortly after the detonation, and the commercial appeal of the city today. Salter begins the poem through the eyes of a tourist on holiday to a foreign country. Knowledgeable of the city's past, the tourist is not expecting to see what she sees. Her first sight and reaction of the city is similar to that of someone who has just entered Times Square in downtown New York City for the first time. She is consumed by the awesomeness of the city's modernization, such as it's Toshiba billboard, it's coffee shops, and it's variations of fusion cuisines. While seeing this, she projects the visceral images of the city's past into her mind, the suffering that occurred in the city haunts her every sight. Phrases such as "mutations of cuisine" and "blistered grass" allude to the mutations and destruction caused by the bombs radiation. Despite the fact that she as a tourist sees these images, the local population seems oblivious the devastation of the past. She makes the comparison between the city and a flowers reproduction and determines that Hiroshima has experienced a "double erasure". The first one being the bomb itself,the second being the people who have chosen to forget. 

"WE Real Cool" Review

"WE Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks 

Born June 7, 1917, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an African-American poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985. She died January 3 of 2000. 

WE Real Cool

     THE POOL PLAYERS,
     SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool.We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We 
Thin gin. We 

Jazz June.We
Die soon. 


"We Real Cool" is written from the perspective of seven young men who spend their day at the bar as opposed to attending class. It is meant to symbolize the youth of America in the post-war era of the 1950's. Although the poem is about the youth and is written from their perspective, the audience is not given the idea that the seven young men are actually talking, or that they are eben the speakers. Instead, they are lead to believe that the speaker is an onlooker of the scene, someone who is silently watching and possibly judging the youth. The poem itself is the speaker is trying to imagine the thoughts of the young men. The audience is given the idea that the speaker is another person in the bar, someone who has most likely been in the young men's position before, and knows the outcome of their current activities. The speaker knows the harms that come from these activities and he criticizes the youth for thinking this way. Without having to wait, the speaker already knows the young men's future. They skip school, they engage in fights, they celebrate sinful acts, and they drink alcoholic beverages while they are underage. All of these acts are characteristics of the forming of a street gang, and with gangs, comes gang violence. The boys will "Die soon" because of some gang related crime. The boys lose their lives because they want to seem "real cool".          

"Driving Glove" Review

"Driving Glove" by Claudia Emerson


Claudia Emerson is an American poet born in January of 1957. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for her poetry collection Late Wife.  She has also written several poetry books, Late Wife being the most recognizable. 



Driving Glove

I was unloading groceries from the trunk of what had been her car, when the glove floated up from underneath the shifting junk-a crippled umbrella, the jack, ragged maps.I knew it was not one of yours, this more delicate, soft, made from the hide of a kid or lamb. It still remembered her hand, the creases where her fingers

had bent to hold the wheel, the turn of her palm, smaller than mine. There was nothing else to do but return it-let it drift, sink, slow as a leaf through water to rest on the bottom where I have not forgotten it remains-persistent in it's loss. 



"Driving Glove" is included in a collection of poems entitled Late Wife and is found in the third section,“Late Wife: Letters to Kent.” This collection's focus is on a woman who leaves one marriage, for whatever reason,for another with a man that has lost his wife to lung cancer.“Driving Glove” is an elegy, it's a rather mournful and melancholy poem. The poem is not set up in stanzas, and lacks a rhyme scheme, adding to the mournful and reminiscent effect of the poem. Emerson's description of the glove describes it as being long forgotten, but well worn. The line “It still remembered her hand, the creases where her fingers had bent to hold the wheel, the turn of her palm, smaller than mine” suggests that the owner of the glove was lost in some type of tragedy. The audience can infer that because she died in some type of tragedy, her former husband had neglected to remove her personal belongings from the car, and rather chose to leave her things where she left them. The last line of the poem, “There was nothing else to do but return it – let it drift, sink, slow as a leaf through water to rest on the bottom where I have not forgotten it remains—persistent in its loss.” suggest that the new wife of the woman's former husband is choosing to follow in her lovers footsteps and leave the glove, along with the other personal materials where she had found them, in the trunk of the car. The overall tone of the narrator is one of sadness. As she finds her predecessor's belongings, she is filled with sadness from the findings of her things and imagines what she might have been like.    

The Aim was Song

"The Aim was Song" by Robert Frost 

Robert Lee Frost born March 26, 1874 was an American poet famous for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of the American vernacular. Frosts work used 20th century New England rural life to examine complex social and philosophical themes. Frost died on January 29, 1963.

The Aim was Song 

Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong:
I hadn't found the place to blow;
It blew too hard--the aim was song.
And listen--how it ought to go!

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.

By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be--
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song--the wind could see.

Frost uses this poem to analyze the evolution of poetry.Poetry evolves from an incredibly powerful unstructured being into a tame and measured song. The poem is about the structure, rhyme, and meter in modern poetry, hence it uses a very formal structure to emphasize the taming of poetry. The formal structure is seen in the iambic tetrameter with and the alternating quatrain rhyme scheme.  The way wind is used as a metaphor for poetry suggests that poetry before the modern age was an uncontrollable element, such as that of wind. However as the poem progresses, and new technologies and theories are invented, poetry becomes a tamable element. But, Frost does not want poetry to become too tame. As authors master the art of poetry, they begin to change it into a more “advanced” prose. By changing the way wind blows in the last stanza, Frost suggests that poetry is better left as prose, or at least as literature that should not have so much emphasis on tedious details. In essence, it's Frosts way of saying that he prefers to stick to regular metrical patterns in poetry rather than the more modern and almost anarchic prose, poetry, and free verse.  In addition to the commentary on the actual form of poetry, Frost also comments on issues from his time period.  The line "And held it l ng enough for north to be converted into south" could mean that the ideals of the north are spreading to the south. The wind could be a metaphor for northern ideals taking hold in the south.