Poetry of Witness

As I was reading the “Poetry of Witness” tab all the poems appealed to me.  One of my favorite poems I read was “Charlie Howard’s Descent” by Mark Doty.   The fear and pain that Howard was feeling I was feeling with him.  Charlie Howard was a hate crime victim.  Howard was a homosexual man, killed by three teenagers who taunted him for being gay and then decided to throw him over the State Street Bridge.  The teenage boys did not know Howard could not swim and ultimately drowned.  Doty envisioned Howard’s thoughts and feelings of fear remarkably.  I felt the fear and sadness Howard must have been feeling at that very moment.  “Up the ladder of his fall, out of the river into the arms of the three teenage boys, who hurled him from the edge-really boys now, afraid, their fathers’ cars shivering behind them….they didn’t believe he couldn’t swim” (Doty lines 42-51).  The Charlie Howard’s story inspires me in many ways.  At the end of Mark Doty’s poem he says Charlie “blesses his killers in the way that only the dead can afford to forgive” (Doty lines 52-54).  We can all learn for the poem and the true story of Charlie Howard, and become a more excepting society.

                     Here is a link about Mark Doty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Doty

                The second poem that moved me was “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window” by Joy Harjo.  The poem is set in East Chicago and it tells the story of a single mother who sees suicide as the only way out her “dreadful” life. “She thinks she will be set free” as she hangs from the thirteenth floor window (Harjo).  In the poem the woman hanging is seeking comfort from her own childhood memories “when she was young she ate wild rice on scraped down plates in warm wood rooms” (Harjo).  As you keep reading you start feeling the same sadness and loneliness she has been experiencing for years now.  She knows she is not alone as “she thinks of Carlos, of Margret, of Jimmy” (Harjo).  She is the mother of three, but she still feels alone and hopeless.  She tries to talk and explain her emotions but “her teeth break off at the edges” and she cannot express her feelings, instead she feels she can only express her feelings through her suicide (Harjo).  Harjo tries to show us that we ultimately make our own decision on how we want to live our life.  The woman knows “she is hanging by her own fingers, her own skin, her own thread of indecision” and she must make a major decision in her life by the power of her own fingertips.  Everyone must make major decisions in life that will ultimately change lives drastically.  At the end of the poem Harjo writes that the woman “thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13^th floor window…or as she climbs back up to claim herself again” (Harjo).  The ending seems to give us the idea that she never chose to go through with the suicide and instead decided to find her identity again and the person she once was. 

                      Here is a link about Joy Harjo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Harjo 

            

The Necessity to Speak

                                creativethinkersintl.ning.com

As I was reading the essay, "The Necessity to Speak" by Sam Hammil, I had many mixed emotions.  Hammil explains, “we can’t hear very much reality” (Hammil 546).  Many of us are scared to express how we feel. Our emotions stay quiet or bottled up inside.  Hammil goes on explaining how “the writer” is the battered woman in her growing pain, or a good man with a belt wrapped around his fist.  Poetry makes you feel the same pain, or happiness the writer has felt.  We each have not been taught how to express our feelings. 

Hammil writes, “We think poetry is about emotions. We are dead wrong.  Poetry is not about.  The poet identifies a circumstance in which the poetry reveals itself.  We say the poem touches us, sometimes even deeply. We often say the poet is a bit touched” (Hammil 549-550).  When a poet writes poetry, it means they are ultimately giving you, the reader, a part of themselves.  The poet never asks for anything in return, but just enjoys knowing we are there sharing their experiences.  I agree with Hammil as he says “the poet invents a being, and that being, man or woman, stands before the world, naked a feeling” (Hammil 551).  Poets inspire me. They see things in the world we might look past. They all write the truth and even in a world of pain, they find love and hope to keep aspiring themselves to write. 

Here's a site where I enjoy reading poems from famous poets such as Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, or my new favorite E. E. Cummings.

Good Reader

Nabokov believes a good reader should have imagination, memory, a dictionary and somewhat of an artistic sense. A good reader should read more than once to become a major reader. He explains that we all must take the time to read. The books we read will begin to appeal to our minds. I agree with Nabokov for the most part. We all have the opportunity to become good readers. Reading a book twice might change the way you felt or the way you pictured an image in your mind. I think reading a book that makes you happy and excited to read more and more is what makes a good reader. A book does not have to be some kind of work of art, but it can make you imagine a world beyond us. If you enjoy reading and get what you wanted out of the book, than I believe that makes a good reader.

         I would say I am somewhat a good reader. I enjoy reading books that interest me. When I am forced to read some kind of boring book, I start to change my mind about reading all together. It has never been hard for me to find a book that I truly love or enjoy. The stories that make me cry, smile, laugh, or maybe even angry really catch my attention. Once I am emotionally involved in reading something, I can’t stop.