The little girl on the plane
Who turned her doll’s head around
To look at me.
Untitled Haiku by J.D. Salinger --- Analysis
J.D. Salinger is not generally thought of as a poet. His only attempts at publishing poetry, 15 poems he submitted to the New Yorker, were rejected and never saw the light of day. All the same, this being the one year anniversary of Salinger's death, it feels appropriate to say something about the late, great Salinger.
Like many people, I was introduced to Salinger through The Catcher in the Rye in high school, and only later in life came across his other works. Salinger is one of my all time favorite authors, and his prose knocks me out like none other. In fact, in a certain sense you could say that all of Salinger's writings are but extended works of poetry. In another more accurate sense, however, you could say that original poetry only appears two times in his books.
The first would be the haiku published as part of "Zooey" in 1957, the slim novella about Seymour's younger brother Zooey Glass. Later on in "Seymour - An Introduction" we are told by Seymour's brother that Seymour, “probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English, but sometimes . . . in Japanese, German, or Italian).”
In fact, Buddy claims that the haiku published above is one he found written in Japanese on the desk blotter of the room Seymour occupied in "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" and that it was written in “straight, classical-style haiku”.
Buddy was, he claims in the story, the one who translated the poem from Japanese to English - which raises an unusual issue. One of the essential features of classical haiku is the use of "kigo" or language that denotes the season the poem is taking place. These are often difficult for foreign language speakers to pick up on, since these terms are often only tangentially related to the season itself (for example, "frog" in a haiku connotes Spring, and "moon" connotes autumn). What we can be certain of, is that none of the words Salinger uses in his haiku are "kigo" which implies either that either Buddy isn't very familiar with classical haiku structure, or that Salinger isn't. Reading on through "Seymour - an introduction" raises further issues of Buddy's reliability as a narrator, but that is the topic for another day.
The other short burst of original poetry in Salinger's prose is much more elusive. In 1947 Salinger published a short story called "The Inverted Forest" in Cosmopolitan magazine. Salinger subsequently blocked the story from ever being reprinted and it was only available on microfilm in library archives up through the decades before some enterprising soul uploaded it to the Internet. The story regards the life of a brilliant young poet named Ray Ford. Although Ford's poetry is lauded as incredible throughout the story, we never get to see any - except for one couplet.
“Not a wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all the foliage underground.”
Like many people, I was introduced to Salinger through The Catcher in the Rye in high school, and only later in life came across his other works. Salinger is one of my all time favorite authors, and his prose knocks me out like none other. In fact, in a certain sense you could say that all of Salinger's writings are but extended works of poetry. In another more accurate sense, however, you could say that original poetry only appears two times in his books.
The first would be the haiku published as part of "Zooey" in 1957, the slim novella about Seymour's younger brother Zooey Glass. Later on in "Seymour - An Introduction" we are told by Seymour's brother that Seymour, “probably loved the classical Japanese three-line, seventeen syllable haiku as he loved no other form of poetry, and that he himself wrote—bled—haiku (almost always in English, but sometimes . . . in Japanese, German, or Italian).”
In fact, Buddy claims that the haiku published above is one he found written in Japanese on the desk blotter of the room Seymour occupied in "A Perfect Day for Banana Fish" and that it was written in “straight, classical-style haiku”.
Buddy was, he claims in the story, the one who translated the poem from Japanese to English - which raises an unusual issue. One of the essential features of classical haiku is the use of "kigo" or language that denotes the season the poem is taking place. These are often difficult for foreign language speakers to pick up on, since these terms are often only tangentially related to the season itself (for example, "frog" in a haiku connotes Spring, and "moon" connotes autumn). What we can be certain of, is that none of the words Salinger uses in his haiku are "kigo" which implies either that either Buddy isn't very familiar with classical haiku structure, or that Salinger isn't. Reading on through "Seymour - an introduction" raises further issues of Buddy's reliability as a narrator, but that is the topic for another day.
The other short burst of original poetry in Salinger's prose is much more elusive. In 1947 Salinger published a short story called "The Inverted Forest" in Cosmopolitan magazine. Salinger subsequently blocked the story from ever being reprinted and it was only available on microfilm in library archives up through the decades before some enterprising soul uploaded it to the Internet. The story regards the life of a brilliant young poet named Ray Ford. Although Ford's poetry is lauded as incredible throughout the story, we never get to see any - except for one couplet.
“Not a wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all the foliage underground.”
It's a beautiful line, made all the more beautiful by the context - the wasteland, or forest rather, is the main character of the piece, a young woman named Corinne.
Even though both these poems are very short, they convey in their brief lines the depth, melancholy and approachability of Salinger's prose. They are also both tantalizing parts of a suggested greater whole - the copious haiku's of Seymour Glass and Ray Ford's body of work - which the reader will never be privy to. In that way perhaps they represent J.D. Salinger's works most of all - works which, even before his death, were barred from readers by all means save through the tantalizing power of imagination.
A Dream Deferred --- by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Democracy --- by Langston Hughes
Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.
Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.
I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.
Analysis --- Democracy by Langston Hughes
This poem is another great example of Langston Hughes' deep reading of America, and another cry for it's enfranchised citizens to not simply sweep the disenfranchised into the gutter. This was a particularly bold stand to take in 1949, when Hughes released the poem, but remains relevant today in its cry for freedom.
I chose this poem because it continues on the theme of yesterday's poem, not to mention that it fits nicely with framing of the president's State of the Union address last night.
Let's look again at the universality of Hughes declaration. We know that he was a black man, born into unjust times, but though that is the source of his poem's emotion it is not bound by it. This poem's narrator stays clear of identifying himself explicitly as black, or any other minority group, and in doing so the poem becomes a rallying cry for freedom that echoes through the ages.
His language, again, is as strikingly strong and direct - so much so that there is little need for analysis. The simple lines "I do not need my freedom when I'm dead. / I cannot live on tomorrow's bread," is so simply put, and with such spare beauty, that it is surprising it has not been co-opted by hawks at large as a stirring justification for, say, military intervention in Iraq.
Just as with yesterday's poem, there is little to be said about the scansion. Hughes is primarily a writer of the vulgar, in subject matter as well as form. For meter he favors the uneven vocal patterns of everyday speech and for his verses blank rhyme interspersed with simple rhymes that lend strength to the key lines. This was a particularly unusual style to have during the time that Hughes first began to be published - in the 1920's when many modernist poets and authors were writing from the extreme opposite pole of esoteric obtuseness and high pretension (a la Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot).
We'll look at another Hughes poem tomorrow as we continue to explore his bold take on America and his position as a poet vulgarian, writing for all, that served to displease so many.
Theme for English B --- by Langston Hughes
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you—
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it’s that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem,
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It’s not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I’m what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you.
hear you, hear me—we two—you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York, too.) Me—who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records—Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn’t make me not like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white—
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That’s American.
Sometimes perhaps you don’t want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that’s true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me—
although you’re older—and white—
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.
Analysis - Theme for English B
Today's posting is meant as a lead-in to the State of the Union address tonight. Langston Hughes is, not unlike President Obama, an eloquent speaker on the deep theme of what it means to be American as well as, incidentally, the son of an interracial marriage.
Born in 1902 and coming into his authorship in the 1920's, Hughes' black father meant that he was seen in no uncertain terms as "a Negro author", and this social position informed everything he wrote. Hughes is viewed nowadays as one of the predominant voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and arguably has the greatest worldwide reputation of any black writer.
Now, at the risk of revealing too much about myself, I am white man - a white dude. I hail from a world removed from the life and times of Langston Hughes. I was born in a suburb of Denver, Colorado to parents who - several generations back, came from Ireland and Poland. I like hockey. The list goes on. If ever there was a culturally/politically/socio-economically typical white dude, it is I.
And yet, the words of Mr. Hughes effect me very deeply. This goes to show that, one, Langston Hughes is a truly excellent poet - the hallmark of such being the transcendent quality of his language. But more precisely, I think we can say that Langston Hughes wasn't "a Negro author", not in the sense that he was writing as "a black to blacks about blackness". In fact, Hughes was lambasted and vilified in his day for being a black author who didn't fit into the expected role of a black author.
Eustace Gay, the Literary critic of the Philadelphia Tribune, wrote this about Hughes' early book of poems Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927:
"It does not matter to me whether every poem in the book is true to life. Why should it be paraded before the American public by a Negro author as being typical or representative of the Negro?"
Mr. Hughes was roundly abused by many other black critics for similar reasons throughout the early part of his career. His poems and writings were seen as reinforcing negative stereotypes of African-Americans already held by "white" America. Come the 1960's, Hughes was abrogated by black critics for an entirely different, but not unrelated, reason.
"Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race," wrote Laurence Lieberman on the 1967 work Panther and the Lash, "A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes' politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically."
From beginning to end, critical naysayers took issue with Hughes. So much so, in fact, that Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hughes was "critically, the most abused poet in America. . . . Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him."
So why has Hughes endured as one of America's most popular poets? That is a question I can only answer in a personal light. Hughes has always been beloved for the ordinary way he speaks of the uniting beauty of humanity. Indeed, during the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read.
Hughes may have been a black author, writing for his times to address the gross injustice in racially divided America, but he did so always by turning to underlying factors that unite all people. He called attention to America's madness of racial segregation and bigotry by remarking in simple terms on our gorgeous humanity, and the humble pride we can find in our shared American identity.
Given the recent happenings in America, and President Obama's recent call for all Americans to look past their ideological differences and unite in that same concept of shared humanity, this poem seems quite apt.
The narrator's voice in the poem is so personal and identifiable that it makes it easy for us all to see ourselves in him, no matter where our differences may lay. Whether we are Black or White or Republican or Democrat or Arabic or whatever - "[you are] a part of me, as I am a part of you. / That's American."
David Crennen
Born in 1902 and coming into his authorship in the 1920's, Hughes' black father meant that he was seen in no uncertain terms as "a Negro author", and this social position informed everything he wrote. Hughes is viewed nowadays as one of the predominant voices of the Harlem Renaissance, and arguably has the greatest worldwide reputation of any black writer.
Now, at the risk of revealing too much about myself, I am white man - a white dude. I hail from a world removed from the life and times of Langston Hughes. I was born in a suburb of Denver, Colorado to parents who - several generations back, came from Ireland and Poland. I like hockey. The list goes on. If ever there was a culturally/politically/socio-economically typical white dude, it is I.
And yet, the words of Mr. Hughes effect me very deeply. This goes to show that, one, Langston Hughes is a truly excellent poet - the hallmark of such being the transcendent quality of his language. But more precisely, I think we can say that Langston Hughes wasn't "a Negro author", not in the sense that he was writing as "a black to blacks about blackness". In fact, Hughes was lambasted and vilified in his day for being a black author who didn't fit into the expected role of a black author.
Eustace Gay, the Literary critic of the Philadelphia Tribune, wrote this about Hughes' early book of poems Fine Clothes to the Jew in 1927:
"It does not matter to me whether every poem in the book is true to life. Why should it be paraded before the American public by a Negro author as being typical or representative of the Negro?"
Mr. Hughes was roundly abused by many other black critics for similar reasons throughout the early part of his career. His poems and writings were seen as reinforcing negative stereotypes of African-Americans already held by "white" America. Come the 1960's, Hughes was abrogated by black critics for an entirely different, but not unrelated, reason.
"Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race," wrote Laurence Lieberman on the 1967 work Panther and the Lash, "A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival—and mutually hostile—views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes' politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically."
From beginning to end, critical naysayers took issue with Hughes. So much so, in fact, that Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hughes was "critically, the most abused poet in America. . . . Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him."
So why has Hughes endured as one of America's most popular poets? That is a question I can only answer in a personal light. Hughes has always been beloved for the ordinary way he speaks of the uniting beauty of humanity. Indeed, during the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read.
Hughes may have been a black author, writing for his times to address the gross injustice in racially divided America, but he did so always by turning to underlying factors that unite all people. He called attention to America's madness of racial segregation and bigotry by remarking in simple terms on our gorgeous humanity, and the humble pride we can find in our shared American identity.
Given the recent happenings in America, and President Obama's recent call for all Americans to look past their ideological differences and unite in that same concept of shared humanity, this poem seems quite apt.
The narrator's voice in the poem is so personal and identifiable that it makes it easy for us all to see ourselves in him, no matter where our differences may lay. Whether we are Black or White or Republican or Democrat or Arabic or whatever - "[you are] a part of me, as I am a part of you. / That's American."
David Crennen
"The mother" -- analysis
This poem deals with challenging subject matter, to say the least, but I decided to post it today for a couple reasons.
First, dealing directly with subjects we can't speak about freely is one of most important roles poetry can play in our lives.
The caliber of the poet was also an important consideration. This isn't screed, or a rant taking one side or another of a very contentious issue, this is an eloquent outpouring of emotion from a deeply conflicted woman. The poem never tries to "score points" for a particular point of view. Instead, it struggles to work out on paper (or in voice) just what the speaker feels.
It begins conflicted and ends more conflicted after engaging in tortured bouts of self-contradiction and self-condemnation. Brooks makes the words feel like they are being thought out even as they are written down - her style bordering on stream-of-consciousness.
But what are we left with? Why did our poor, tormented narrator write this poem if she doesn't even know how she herself feels? The answer is that she does in fact know how she feels, she makes it clear in her final, sweet stanza. She is filled with love. She is conflicted, confused and regretful, but most of all she is filled with love, and so she wrote this - a love letter to her children that she no longer has.
This poem has been used by both sides of the abortion argument, and understandable so. No matter what camp you consider yourself a member of, the deep love Brooks writes of speaks to us all.
Incidentally, Gwendolyn Brooks herself never underwent abortion. Her writing on this topic shows the deep pathos that she brings to all her poetry.
Although this poem is about abortion it doesn't take sides. Instead it expresses in great eloquence the author's deep uncertainty.
First, dealing directly with subjects we can't speak about freely is one of most important roles poetry can play in our lives.
The caliber of the poet was also an important consideration. This isn't screed, or a rant taking one side or another of a very contentious issue, this is an eloquent outpouring of emotion from a deeply conflicted woman. The poem never tries to "score points" for a particular point of view. Instead, it struggles to work out on paper (or in voice) just what the speaker feels.
It begins conflicted and ends more conflicted after engaging in tortured bouts of self-contradiction and self-condemnation. Brooks makes the words feel like they are being thought out even as they are written down - her style bordering on stream-of-consciousness.
But what are we left with? Why did our poor, tormented narrator write this poem if she doesn't even know how she herself feels? The answer is that she does in fact know how she feels, she makes it clear in her final, sweet stanza. She is filled with love. She is conflicted, confused and regretful, but most of all she is filled with love, and so she wrote this - a love letter to her children that she no longer has.
This poem has been used by both sides of the abortion argument, and understandable so. No matter what camp you consider yourself a member of, the deep love Brooks writes of speaks to us all.
Incidentally, Gwendolyn Brooks herself never underwent abortion. Her writing on this topic shows the deep pathos that she brings to all her poetry.
Although this poem is about abortion it doesn't take sides. Instead it expresses in great eloquence the author's deep uncertainty.
the mother
Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
Gwendolyn Brooks
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.
I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Welcome to the Great Poems Blog!
Welcome to the Great Poems blog - your bedrock-solid website to the fleet breeze of the Twitter feed. Updated daily!
Here you will find all the poems I post on the Twitter feed in their entirety (along with all the formatting that Twitter can't provide, oh joy!). We'll also feature some pithy analysis to help make heads or tails of our ever-confounding friend, the poet.
Poetry is not meant for dry academia but needs to run and beat in the breasts of the lively and agitated - so please comment on the poems as often as the fancy strikes you. You have my promise that I, at least, am listening. (Promise not extended to spam bots.)
Enjoy your stay,
-David Crennen
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