2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: The serpent: the father’s penis in this case.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: wrangle: argument; pottage: stew.
1 Form: Iambic trimeter, irregular but frequent end rhymes—Notes: Notice the double meaning of the title, meaning both “life yet remains” and a “still life” as in a painting, which has the appearance of life but no actual life.
2 Form: Iambic trimeter, two end rhymes per stanza in irregular positions.
1 Form: Prose poem.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Sarajevo: capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Kai: narrator’s son.
1 Form: Free verse—Notes: This list of things needed to be a poet includes all forms of fundamental human experience, both the positive and the negative.
1 Form: Free verse—Note: The poem addresses redeveloping a relationship with yourself after breaking up as a couple.
2 Form: Loose iambic pentameter, unrhymed.
1 Form: Prose poem.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Orpheus: Thracian poet and musician who’s music had the power to move inanimate objects.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: versification: writing poetry.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Esso: brand of gasoline station; PATRIA O MUERTE: Fatherland or death.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: jute: a rough fiber.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: desiccated: foods preserved by drying; lacunae: missing parts; coquettish: teasing with sexual or romantic overtones; apparition: ghostly figure; circuitous: roundabout; brocade: heavy fabric with rich, raised design—Notes: The village in the story is a symbol representing any situation that is tolerable but not pleasant (for example, purgatory, a job, a location) and the bus represents the potential for escape from that place or thing. Notice how the earlier dream-like observations are pulled together in the end, with the bus including the mysterious letter writer as the Virgin Mary, the woman from the postoffice as the passenger, the color scheme of the tiles within the bus, and the two boys from the bus stop as the drivers.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: gadfly: nuisance; arroyo: dry gulch—Notes: The central metaphor is children’s desire to leave their parents and seek adventure.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Natzweiler: concentration camp in France—Notes: The contrast between the pastoral scene and the horror of the concentration camp make the camp even more horrible, and the last line offers a pessimistic view of what the world has learned from those horrors.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: In art, we talk about negative space, which is the part of the canvas not covered with images. It is always important, and sometimes more important than the images. This is about negative space in the world.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: flicker: woodpecker—Notes: Vivid imagery creates alternate realities, one inside the other similar to those Russian dolls. There is also an implied comment on the characters and stories as having a life of their own, but a life that only exists when someone is reading them.
1 Form: Iambic tetrameter.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: parse: Break down and understand; felicity: great happiness; ardent: warmth of feeling.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: ardor: fiery intensity; athwart: from side to side—Notes: Compare the view of inner beauty in this poem with that expressed in “Nightclub” by Billy Collins.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: disconsolate: beyond consolation; anthropomorphize: give human traits to animals or objects; aviary: large bird enclosure; ersatz: imitation—Notes: The poem begins by observing the way December in Houston did not really feel like December to someone used to the snow. Then, the way various animals reminded the narrator of her separation, her isolation, and finally her feeling like the sloth, ill-equipped to go on with her writing, but forced to by ambition, observed metaphorically as the small, nagging monkey.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: ossified: change into bone—Notes: This story of child abuse told through parable can apply to a variety of physical and verbal abuses as well.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Notes: A strength of this poem is the ambiguity as to what the narrator thinks was the real show, the dog or the audience.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Saracen: Arab.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: pencil skirt: skirt that is narrow at the bottom; bum: rear end; arpeggios: chords played as individual notes.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: mauve: reddish purple.
1 Form: Sonnet.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: nape: back of the neck; rods: stems of wood; boughs: tree limbs; firkin: a small wooden barrel; cauled: wrapped like an amniotic sac; connive: plot—Notes: This is one of several poems by Seamus describing “bog people”, bodies from early man preserved in bogs and now exhumed. This one describes a woman who was found murdered in apparent ritual punishment.
1 Form: Sonnet—Vocabulary: Croppies: Irish nationalists who revolted against England in 1798. The name refers to the fact that they wore their hair shortly cropped; pike: spear; conclave: secret meeting; terraced thousands: people on the terraces of the hillside; shroud: burial cloth.
2 Form: Iambic pentameter, AA end rhyme.
3 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Iambic pentameter—Vocabulary: prie-dieu: prayer kneeling bench; Mater Dolorosa: Mother of Sorrow; bereft: left desolate or alone; gall: bitter poison; Dregs: sediment from the bottom; lees: sediment at the bottom of fermenting wine; transubstantiate: change bread and wine into body and blood of Christ; heresies: belief at odds with the Church; heresiarch: proponent of a heresy; Vicar: higher ranking priest; Shroud of Turin: burial shroud with image of Christ, thought by some to be his burial cloth; basilicas: Christian church with a nave in the center; Ararat: mountain in Turkey, thought by some to be the resting place of Noah’s ark; montane: related to mountains, or in this sense, like bedrock; Carnality: sexual desire; actuarial: death statistics; cotes: animal pen; wops and micks and spics and krauts: Italians, Irish, Puerto Ricans, Germans; WASP: White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; Father Coughlin: depression era priest who was an extremely popular radio personality. His message included anti-Semitic statements; Glemp: current Archbishop of Warsaw; Giacomo: Jack; gainsay: deny; Ptolemys: astronomer who believed everything revolved around the earth; chador: Garment that covers from head-to-toe; Autos-da-fe: public announcements of the inquisition; foetuscide: killing a fetus; casuist: a person whose reasoning is subtle, sounds true, but is false; tares: plant that looks like wheat but, when the ear appears, turns out be poisonous; Passaic: City in New Jersey; Malone: Bishop of Boston accused of covering up sexual misconduct of priests; Muggerone: fictitious name and person; bete noire: detested person; fulminates: loudly attack accusers or deny charges; Ton-ton Macoute: Haitian militia; pusillanimity: cowardly; alb, Dalmatic, chasuble, and pallium: robe, outer garment, vestment, and bishop vestment worn by a priest during Mass; sops: something to placate; crozier: Bishop’s crook; legate: emissary of the Pope; imprimatur: mark of official approval; aria: solo vocal song; dollop: splash; cowl: hood; Lourdes: Town in France where Virgin Mary supposedly appeared, known for miraculous cures; exvotos: church offering; bromides: platitudes; polity: nation or state; Ratzinger: now Pope Benedict; sanguine: optimistic; conundrum: paradox or riddle;
proscribed: prohibited; cellarer: person in a monastery who provides the food and drink; Homeostatic: in equilibrium; Pax vobiscum: peace be with you; consistories: assembly of Cardinals; Italian bank that collapsed in 1982. The Chairman was supposedly involved with the Masonic lodge; See: authority of a Bishop.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: yoke: around the neck and shoulders; yardage: number of yards of cloth; Lapped: overlapped; overseam: Two parallel seams with the thread alternating between them; mangle: machine that presses fabric with heated rollers; treadle: foot pedal for foot powered sewing machines; bobbin: spool of thread; Bedlamite: lunatic; placket: a piece of cloth sewn under an opening; bar-tacked: type of stitch; Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras: patterns; tartans: plaid fabric; Ossian: legendary Gaelic hero of 3rd century A.D.; carders: machine to line up fibers in wool; calico: coarse, bright-patterned cloth; culled: Check for Quality and remove defective parts.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Notes: Lethe is the river of forgetfulness in Greek mythology.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Johnny Hartman: contemporary jazz singer; bebop: form of jazz originating around 1940.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: jubilize: blast trumpets.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: carnal: earthly; flounces: a strip of decoration.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: filial: child to parent.
1 Form: Prose poem.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Notes: Here the parent of a special needs child responds to the child using his word, but unlike the wonder the child means by the word, the parent is just saying the word without the same meaning.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: La Brea Tar Pits: tar pits in Los Angeles where many dinosaur bones have been exhumed—Notes: Notice the repeated references to “waiting their turn.” The son-in-law waits his turn, figuratively to be old and lonely. Later in time (after the tilde (~)) his children wait their turn. They are all trapped in a cycle, much like the animals millions of years ago trapped in the la Brea Tar Pits.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: bennies: a stimulant; spoor: track of an animal—Notes: The two are caught by the police for breaking the window but also caught in a role, a life, from which there may be no escape.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: alkies: alcoholics—Notes: This poem, centered on the color of blood, is all the more powerful because the final conclusion is not explicitly stated.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Quintet: five instruments.
1 Form: Prose poem.
2 Form: Prose poem—Notes: Notice the attention to the sense of smell to make the day real for the reader.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Prose poem.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: nacreous: lustrous; reticent: restrained or reserved; loam: a type of soil.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: ochre: earth-tone colored—Notes: The issues alluded to in this poem form the basis for a significant amount of Sharon’s confessional style poetry.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: nape: back of the neck; shorn lamb: lamb with fleece removed.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: redolent: smelling; edelweiss: small white alpine flower—Notes: A metaphorical look at child abuse, the inner destruction of evil, and the necessity to reach resolution—if not forgiveness. Notice how anger appears to bring her closer to resolution, but it is actually a path into Satan
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: juniper berry: berry used to give gin its distinctive flavor; fume: type of wine (fume blanc).
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: familiar: attendant spirit—The beginning of a bond with the therapist that will help the narrator deal with issues revolving around her father.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: rent: torn.
1 Form: Free verse—Notes: The narrator has unresolved issues with someone who has died, and finds herself waiting expectantly for the opportunity to resolve those issues—but the time will never come.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: supplanted: usurp; vibrato: causing slight frequency variations in the voice.
1 Form: Sonnet with constraints of meter and rhyme order relaxed—Vocabulary: Gent, Nugget, Swank, and Dude: Magazines featuring pictures of nude women.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Bergson: French philosopher; Wladyslaw Gomulka (1905–1982) Polish Communist Leader; atropine: chemical used to dilate eyes—Notes: Notice how how sound of the words fit with the descriptions of what is on the radio. The screams of the comet are whines as a comet flies by, it’s head melting. The radio represents the history of oppression that has gone through it’s speaker, but the narrator ends on a pessimistic note regarding the future.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
2 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: woodbines: a climbing vine.
1 Form: Blank verse.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: heraldic: announcing something to come; Gobi: desert in Mongolia; abed: in bed.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: consecrated: set apart as sacred; garland: wreath; thrashers: type of bird; Limbo: dance involving stepping under a low stick while leaning backward—Notes: The end may be read as a metaphorical statement where it is not just literal blackberries that are too ripe to touch, but the very world of the people in that car with winter crawling out of the windows that is unreachable.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Chimera: in Greek mythology, a fire breathing monster.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: godhead: God; Ontological: metaphysical study of the nature of being; creed: system of belief.
2 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Fano: town in Italy; literati; literary intelligentsia; pensione: inexpensive small hotel.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Dacca: the capital of Bangladesh; sari: a dress worn by women primarily in India and Pakistan; paisleys: swirled pattern of abstract curves; Bengal: part of Bangladesh.
1 Form: Prose poem—Vocabulary: transcendence: surpassing others.
1 Form: Free verse.
1 Form: Free verse—Vocabulary: Bulge, Anzio, or Monte Cassino: WWII battle sites; flak: shrapnel from anti-aircraft guns; fire storms: massive city fires caused by incendiary bombs; philodendrons: type of plant often grown as a house plant.
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 75