New Mother EMS

Sharon Olds' "New Mother" is about a woman who has just given birth, and who is describing a sexual encounter with her husband. The woman is clearly not in a position of power. She describes the experience with lines like "you cornered me in the spare room", and "my milk undid its / burning slip-knot through my nipples". She seems to be at the mercy of her man. At his mercy, she describes how her vagina "had been torn easily as cloth by the / crown of her head", and other ways that her vagina has been hurt through the childbirth. This makes her "lay in fear and blood and milk", a state of hopelessness. While she does this, the man is kissing her, and "you hung over me, / over the nest of the stitches, over the / splitting and tearing." This is a really touching part, because it is describing how the man, who is in a position of power, is simply hanging over her, not trying for sex. His penis is "dry and big", meaning it is erect but has not been inside of her. This is touching. She describes it as "someone who / finds a wounded animal in the woods / and stays with it, not leaving its side / until it is whol, until it can run again."

Colossus EMS

"The Colossus", by Sylvia Plath, is a poem that I am not sure if I understand. The poem, in the literal sense, is about her building a colossus of some sorts, which seems like a large statue of greek epic proportions. She starts the poem off by saying "I shall never get you put together entirely" which makes the reader immediately aware of the enormity of the task. This colossus, the narrator believes, is self righteous in its enormity, shown by the lines "Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, / Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other." The narrator has spent much time with the colossus, staying at nights to count the stars, and seeing the sun rise from it. From the lines "My hours are married to shadow", we see that the narrator starts to resent the colossus. My guess for what this poem is comes from when she writes "O father". This makes it so the poem is about her father, and I would guess that the poem is talking about how she built the impact her father's death had on her into such a huge thing, she was always tending to it, and always having it affect her life. I really can't think of more with it, this poem is tricky.

An interesting thing i found from the poem was the flower references. You have "the weedy acres of your brow", "a hill of black cypress", "acanthine hair", and "scrape of a keel" (which can mean a pair of united petals in a flower). These aren't the happy 'roses are red, violets are blue' flower references. It seems that Plath is trying to imply organic growth rather than pretty flowers. This organic life is also shown in the first stanza from the lines "Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles / Proceed from your great lips. / It's worse than a barnyard." Again, these aren't pleasant noises, and this time she seems to be making a direct attack at her father.

Lady Lazarus EMS

Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath, is a poem about the female narrator coming back from the dead, like Lazarus in the bible. Unlinke Lazarus, however, the narrator's deaths, except for the first, seem to be coming from suicides. She says "I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to die. / This is Number Three." This makes it sound as if she will continue to attempt suicide until she finally succeeds.

It seems obvious that these suicide attempts are referring to Plath's actual suicide attempts. She tried to kill herself at 20, and killed herself at 30. The accidental death referred to in the poem could be a near-death experience for her when she was younger, or possibly a reference to her father's death at 8.

While the poem centers on the return from death, it also includes a few references to her being the center of attention to her critics. These critics, "The peanut-crunching crowd / Shove in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot--- / The big strip tease." This seems to be a reference to how Plath puts so much of her personal pain into her work, and can be see in the words "Dying / Is an art". She seems to resent her apparent selling-out of her pain, throuigh the lines "There is a charge / For the eyeing of my scars" and "And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood". She seems to be selling her pain, something that she really seems to detest.

Like some of Plath's other poetry, she seems to villify her father as a nazi. She says "So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy." She describes the way the nazis sifted through the ashes of their victims to find gold, and makes the imagery of a phoenix with "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And i eat men like air." This imagery seems to suggest Plath believes that through her misery brought on by her father

The Japanese Wife EMS

The Japanese Wife, by Charles Bukowski, is an ode to Japanese women, and the narrator's Japanese wife. He describes these Japenese women as "real women" who are "closing the wounds men have made". He soon after describes American women in a very negative manner, saying they "care less than a dime" and "always scowling, belly-aching", among other things. It is interesting that he includes "but American women will kill you like they / tear a lampshade". Right after saying that Japense women will close wounds, he immediately says how American women would easily kill you. These lines become even more interesting during another section of the poem, when the narrator describes how his wife "broke out the bread knife / and chased me under the bed". The difference between the American women's violence and the Japanese wife's violence is how the American women are described as killing without caring too much, while the wife was provoked. The narrator broke down the locked door, and he seems to aknowledge that he did wrong. After the ordeal with the wife, "she didn't mention attorneys, / just said, you will never wrong me again". This seems very reasonable, and a very calm thing to do, something that the "derailed" American women would likely not do. The poem takes a more tragic turn when it is revealed that the wife died. This is when the poem seems to turn into a nostalgiac piece. We are told how the narrator had to hide all of his Japanese prints covering his walls, and hid them in his shirt drawer. When he hid these, "It was the first time i realizes / that she was dead, even though i buried her".

First Kiss EMS

First Kiss, by Kim Addonizio, is a poem about a woman kissing an individual for the first time. It isn't the first time the woman has kissed anyone, just the first time she has kissed this one male. The woman is, in fact, already a mother. This is an interesting twist, and also leads to the woman comparing the look of the man to the look of her mother after drinking milk. The woman describes the breastmilk almost the same as a drug, and makes a clear point that the baby was not drinking the milk for substanance, but for please. The baby drinking is described as an act "of satiety, which was nothing like the needing / to be fed". She describes the baby by saying "She could show me how helpless / she was", and then describing the man looking the exact same way. She makes the comparison of the baby sucking on her teet, and the man sucking on her face (although she doesn't use that wording). She uses the comparison lines "when she had let go / of my nipple" for the baby, and "when you / pulled your mouth from mine" for the man.





There seems to be something tragic about the woman in this poem. She seems to be reminiscing about her daughter's infancy, making it sound like she was a while away from that point. It then seems from when the man "leaned back against a chain-link fence, / in front of a burned-out church" Those lines make it seem as though the woman is the burned-out church. She seems to also be at a loss of power, first being helpless to her daughter, and then to this man, and in both scenario's it is because she is stronger than the other and has something they want.

river merchant's wife EMS

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter, by Ezra Pound, is a story about a growing relationship between the female narrator and her eventual husband, the river-merchant. The first stanza starts off while the two were still young. At this time, the narrator "played about the front gate, pulling flowers." The future husband "came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse". These activities show the youthfulness of the pair at this point. They don't seem to be romantically involved at this point, as they are "Two small people, without dislike or suspicion".

The second stanza begins with the narrator being 14, and marrying the river-merchant. At this point, the wife "never laughed, being bashful." We still see the youth in her, still making the transition to being a wife. The next stanza, when she turns 15, she starts to mature, when she "stopped scowling". She starts at this point to love her husband, saying she "desired my dust to be mingled with yours / Forever and forever and forever." This is certainly a shift from before.

During the fourth stanza, the wife turns 16, and the river-merchant leaves. The line "The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead" shows the manifestation of the wife's sorrow. The last stanza shows even more of this manifestation, with a different moss growing where the old moss was that the river-merchant walked. The wife is getting older, and yearns for her husband. She asks that if he is "coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang", if he would let her know, so she can come to meet him.

The most significant part of this poem for me is the transition of the romance. The relationship goes from indifference, to just a marriage without significant love, to love, then despair and longing. Something beautiful to it.

The Flea EMS

The Flea, by John Donne, tells of a husband trying to have sexual relations with his wife. To make his point as to why they should have these sexual relations, he uses the example of a flea who has sucked the blood out of the pair, and "in this flea our two blood mingled be". The husband tells how the mixing of these bodily fluids is not a big deal through lines such as "Thou know'st that this cannot be said / A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead". We then have a turn, when the wife kills this flea, in the line "Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?" The husband then flips this situation on her, asking her what the flea did wrong, "Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?" And even though the wife has had her blood mingled, the husband argues that the wife is not weaker at all from the experience, and then says "then learn how false fears be". He ends by saying that when having sex, the wife will lose as much honor as how much life she lost from the flea dying.

The original question I had after reading this poem was whether the husband and wife had sex already. It seems from looking at the poem, though, that they had already. The line "nor loss of maidenhead" seems to suggest the wife is not a virgin already. When you add that with the line "Though parents grudge, and you, we're met", it suggests through "we're met" that they have had sex, and it can possibly be read that it was a forced marriage due to premarital sex. And could this premarital sex have led to a baby? There is certainly baby imagery through the flea, a third party, containing the mixed blood of the two parents. I don't feel like this is the case, although an argument could certainly be said that abortion is included in the poem, as the wife seems to have killed the flea, potentially meaning that she killed the child.

Mock orange VH

In Mock Orange there are five stanzas. She talks about how she hates flowers and compare them to sex. She then talks about the acts that are done during sex and how it is humiliating and says she doesn’t like it. She also compares the scent of the flowers to the scent of sex in lines 21 to 26. Throughout these poems she detests sex with a comparison to mock orange.

For my daughter VH

This poem is 12 lines long with a rhyming scheme of ababccdedeffgg. The poem is speaking of the death of his daughter. She has died and he is mourning for her throughout the poem. It seems as if he is bitter that his daughter has not made it. The whole poem is description of how he feels about losing the daughter. In the end he says “I desire none” but that is false obviously because he is bitter that he lost his daughter.

Colossus VH

The poem has six stanzas and doesn’t have a rhyming scheme. It is clear that the poem is speaking about her father but only so if you have a little bit of outside knowledge of her life. If you know about her past you would be able to connect the dots quickly. She is very angry at her father because he passed away and wasn’t there for her. She holds it against him and has not forgiven him for not being there.

The title is very important because throughout the poem she discusses how significant an impact on her life her father’s death has had. She also compares herself to small things when she is speaking of herself and him. She makes him seem so much larger and more important than herself hence Colossus is an appropriate title.

In the first stanza she states that she doesn’t understand “him” also saying that the sound off his lips are those of farm animals. “Mule-Bray, pig grunted and bawdy cackles” She then proceeds to say that he is worse than those animals.

The next thing that jumps out is in the third stanza. She compares herself to an ant in mourning. That image makes you think of all kinds of thing. I imagine an ant in mourning means that because she is even lower and smaller than an ant and very insignificant. She says that’s how she feels in his presence.

“I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress” has a connection to death because it is commonly known as a tree used to decorate cemeteries. So that is another hint that she is talking about her father who died. In the following stanza she begins to speak on the impact of her father’s death saying that when he left is more ruining then a lightning stroke. This is a comparison that is describing the impact her father not being there had on her life.

Shakespeare sonnet 18 MP

Love sonnet 18 follows iambic pentameter and consists of three quatrains and a couplet, much like most of Shakespeare's other sonnets. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg. Shakespeare compares a person to a summer's day, stating that the person is "more lovely and more temperate." Shakespeare then lists some negative aspects of summer saying that it is too short and sometimes gets too hot. "And summer's lease hath all too short a date, sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." However, while summer has to end eventually, the beauty of this person will never fade. The person's beauty is immortalized by the fact he is putting them in a poem. "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Shakespeare is capturing this person's beauty and making it eternal by the fact that this poem continuously lives on.

Anne Sexton Article

The article starts off with having two viewpoints about poetry:
1. The mad writer approach such as Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath that battle with "inner demons" in their poetry, and
2. therapeutic creative writing, where individuals use writing to cope with a difficult situation in their life and it has helped them overcome that problem.
The article states that although these two concepts are complete polar opposites, there seems to be a relationship-those with emotional or mental trouble leaning towards creative writing as an outlet of emotions.
The author first makes an analysis of mental illnesses but, unlike one of the three articles we read a few weeks ago, it uses the references very well and even states that "making distinctions can be particularly prone to error". Without manipulating the data, the author states how there is a high correlation between suicide rates and artists, such as writers or poets. Furthermore, suicidal poets tend to write for the self "revealing inward focus". It shows that they are socially shy as opposed to their non-suicidal mates. Schizophrenia is also mentioned to be another factor.
This article then starts talking about the Sylvia Plath effect as well. Female poets tend to pay attention to their depression, whereas male poets apparently tend to distract themselves, thus they are less likely to be suicidal. 

Dream Songs

John Berryman's poetry is very different to the other poems we have read so far. It is more..abstract and harder to decipher than the others. He uses a character called Henry in his poems, something that other poets have not created. Henry, as discussed in our classes, could be considered his alter-ego.
His style is usually writing in tercepts, quatrains, or a mixture of the two. His diction and grammar is very odd, although they are purposely written that way. Why they are written this way is a bit unclear but to me, it sounds like the poem is more raw, or, more original-giving it a very freestyle writing image, as if it were fresh from his thoughts without careful revision or any revision at all. 

3 Articles on Sylvia Plath (M.A)

I Bask in the Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women


The article talks about how female poets are more affected and prone to mental illnesses than male poets or other kind of artists, such as visual artists or prose writers. It has a very generalized analysis of the data, taking different types of experiments and just fitting them in to the topic of the paper. It is also very repetitive in its data and I find it very generalized. The article does not seem to have substantial data to prove its point. The article's beginning is also very negative, as to me, I did not want to read it anymore because of its pessimistic tone. Furthermore, it states that female poets tend to have the "Sylvia Plath" effect because poets start off as mentally unstable and it worsens when the poetry does not help them resolve their mental or emotional problems. It stated that although writing can be helpful for people to let go of emotions or deal with situations, it is unclear how valuable and helpful poetry is due to the statistics of female poets developing mental issues and their suicide rate.

Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self-Repair
In this article, three dualities were listed by the author:
1. balance between creative individual's use of the audience to serve her own narcissistic interests
2. balance between destructive and constructive activity
3. interplay between pretense and fantasy.

The article talks about how Plath realized that poetry was self-destructing for her, yet she still kept writing poems. Some themes that were major themes of Plath's poems were her father's sudden death, and about suicide and pain as well.

Sylvia Plath: Fusion of the victim and suicide
According to the author, Sylvia Plath was able to use poetry to resolve some of her emotional and mental issues but it states that the poems would backfire and haunt her again, which it did. It also stated that if the poems are read in order (i.e. chronologically), it shows how Plath is forcing against death but towards the end of her life, the poems forces against death and suicide weaken, which shows her weakened stability of mind and her attraction towards suicide.

Sexton - BK

You can't help but draw parallels between Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, however there are differences between the two female poets as well. While the article explains the whole "female poet being more likely to have psychiatric problems" argument, it is also stated that Sexton was instructed to write to help her depression (known as the writing cure). I don't think it worked, but you can see in Plath's works such as "Wanting to Die" and "Suicide Note", that she put all of her feelings on to paper, openly expressing that suicide in on her mind. The way she describes it made me think of Plath discussing how it is an art form, although Sexton doesn't use the same metaphor, she talks about how a carpenter doesn't ask why build, just what tools. This is a comparison between suicide being a profession and that people who are suicidal aren't questions if they will do it, just how.

A lot of the info in the article by Kaufman we have seen before because it was referenced a lot in the articles on Plath.

I think that Sexton's style is more interesting than Plath's, she uses more of a narrative style that allows the reader in to her life, and get a new view point whereas Plath is more figurative. Also I think the rhythm in Sexton's poems are more enticing,

"Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees / it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying / through the mist." (Funnel)

"Tonight all the red dogs lie down in fear / and the wide and daughter knit into each other / until they are killed" (The Wifebeater)

With Sexton, I need to be in a certain mood to read her poetry. Most that I have read are very depressing and not usually the type of poetry I gravitate towards reading, although I think her poems are of merit.

Anne Sexton - Poetry/Articles - Jeet

The essence of the first article lies in two theories - 1) The Writing Cure 2) The Sylvia Plath Effect.
According the "writing cure", expressive and narrative writing about personal and emotional experiences ought to have therapeutic benefits for the mentally ill/depressed. According to the Sylvia Plath effect, women tend to ruminate more than men and are more affected by external constraints. These and other factors, combined with a non-narrative style of composing poetry may prove to be deleterious to the mental health of female poets. Anne Sexton was recommended to write for therapeutic reasons. Unlike Sylvia Plath however, her work is decidedly non-narrative in nature. Sexton carefully crafts her poems to elicit certain emotions and sympathies without explicitly narrating the underlying story.

"Even then I have nothing against life.

I know well the grass blades you mention,

the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build."

In these lines, Sexton uses grass blades and furniture to signify the emotions she identifies
with feeling positively about life. Yet, it is unclear exactly what she is talking about. Perhaps, grass blades signify fertility and furniture hints at domesticity. Going back to her justification for suicides, she employs the somewhat distant analogy of carpenters. A clear storyline rarely emerges in Sexton's work. According to the writing cure, it is the narrative aspect that is most beneficial since it allows the writer to make meaning out of events and move on. In Anne Sexton's case, perhaps the lack of narrative meant she was constantly drudging up the traumatic experiences in her life and dwelling on their detrimental emotional effects through her poetry.

The second article looks at contemporary views on suicide and offers brief explications of Sexton’s poems – “Wanting to Die” and “Suicide Note”. A major distinction is made between euthanasia and other suicides. In our society, some sympathy is conferred upon the former; the latter always invites some repugnance and fear. In “Wanting to Die”, Sexton tries to persuade the reader of a rationality that might underlie a suicide that arises simply out of mental agony. She tries to establish suicide as natural and innocent when she speaks of children pondering upon the “sweet drug”. She hints that people might be born with a detached mental state that they cannot continue living with. Since they weren’t still born, it is rational that they wish to return to their state in the womb, where the first boundary between life and death exists.

The third article goes in depth into some linguistic research that was also cited in the first article. Suicidal poets tend to be more inward focused and a linguistic analysis of their writing confirms this. For instance, they use the first person singular noticeably more than the non-suicidal poets.

Anne Sexton Poems and Article- VB

The article was talking about a study done on the language of poems and how that correlated with suicide in any way. It used poems of poets who had committed suicide and was also testing two suicide models by analyzing text. This also pointed out that suicide rates are higher among poets than authors in other literary fields and the general population. Their are certain words that seem to be a trend in the writing of poets who commit suicide such as I, me, and my being used heavily. Also, there was a trend of suicide among poets who wrote more about death and lust as well.

Anne Sexton's poetry did have many hintings towards suicide but I feel she used her writing as a coping mechanism just like her close friend Sylvia Plath. However, just like Plath eventually neither of them were able to handle living in this world and took their own lives. Poetry was a release for them because they clearly had something unstable or wrong either in their minds or in their lives and poetry allowed them to express themselves in ways they could not in person. I believe that poetry also contributed to their suicides because it allowed them to get through situations without getting real help. They could only express their anger they could never confront the problems head on in their lives and caused the eventual breakdown of their mental health to the point where they took their own lives.

I feel that when reading poems written by Anne Sexton it is easy to make the connection that she is suicidal. However, I am not sure that I could have concluded that she committed suicide just by reading her poetry. She is very talented but it seems that her mental instability which was apparent in her poetry eventually wore her down. It would be interesting to see how different her life would have been without poetry.

Anne Sexton Articles/Poetry - R. Abbott

One theme mentioned in the articles was the purpose for many writers' work - are they writing because they are 'mad' or are they writing as a form of therapy. For Sexton, I believe it was a bit of a combination. Again, the articles reinforced the research which supported the fact that of all writers, poets (more specifically female poets) had the highest rate of psychiatric abnormalities. Sexton certainly supported this assertion. She clearly ran a very high risk of depression which ultimately resulted in her suicide. As the articles concluded, depressed/suicidal poets (or artists in general i.e. Kurt Cobain) started using the first person singular in their work. This is evident in many of Sexton's poems from a later portion in her life such as: in 'Sylvia's Death' - "...the death I wanted so badly and for so long," along with many other uses of I in the poem; in 'Wanting to Die' - "...even then I have nothing against life," along with other uses; and in 'Suicide Note' - "...I will have to sink with hundreds of others...I will be a light thing. I will enter death." Sexton clearly used first person singular a great deal in her writing, but not just in her works closest to death. Another interesting point brought up in one of these articles (along with the Plath one from a few weeks ago) was the fact that female writers are more affected by extrinsic constrainst. I particularly believe Plath's suicide added to the mental stress of Sexton. Overall, from the select writing we have read of Sexton, I believe it has a similarity to that of Plath in reference to what the articles explained of female poets/their writing styles.

Dream Song - AS

After reading the set of Dream Song Poems by John Berryman, there is a clear sense of pain in all of his writings. When you first read these poems, there is no real order to them. Also, it makes it kind of confusing all the different names he uses. The most noticeable name is Henry, which appears over and over again. Most likely, Henry is a name that he uses for himself in his writings. If not a direct correlation to himself, than maybe it is someone who feels similar emotions throughout life. The emotions that come through in his poetry are obscure and painful. In the poem dream song #5, he uses the line "Mr Heartbreak, the New Man/come to farm a crazy land;/an image of the dead on the fingernail/of a newborn child." This line stuck with me as I continued to read his poems. I believe that Berryman sees the world as though it is broken. I think that through his poetry, he is trying to show people that there is good in the world, but he can't find it. In his poems he continues to talk about death, and heartbreak, and even starvation, which makes me believe that he only capable of seeing the bad, and looking at the world as if its in pieces.

Mr. Bones and Me, EMS

The biggest question I have from reading the poems by John Berryman is who is Henry? My guess would probably be that he is the depressed alter-ego of John Berryman. It starts in the first poem, where he describes Henry as someone who has lost something, possibly a first wife. He then becomes reclusive and sad, and is angered at how public his sadness is. Henry also seems to be someone who hates what he has become, as seen in "The Prisoner of Shark Island" with Paul Muni. He describes the "Big Ones" who laughed at Henry being unable to understand The Man from Blankley's. And then, "Now Henry is unmistakenly a Big One". Something he seems to regret. During the later poems, it seems that Henry is in the hospital, from what I assume is a suicide attempt. In 74 it says "Henry stabbed his arm and wrote a letter/ explaining how bad it had been/ in this world." Berryman uses language in a way where he seems to mess around with proper grammar, and it seems like he is trying to give an uneducated dialect. An example from "The Prisoner of Shark Island" with Paul Muni is "Funnee; he don't feel so." There are supposed to be some of his oddly placed accents over funnee and feel, but I don't know how to type those in. It seems that he doesn't want the characters of Henry or Mr. Bones to seem particularly intelligent. About Mr. Bones. I assume he means death, possibly someone who has already killed himself (maybe it is the future dead Henry, but I'm probably just putting my own imagination into that idea), and he seems to be something out of Henry's imagination. He says "I have sent my grief away" in 36. Does this mean he has already died?