Journal #3: “First Death in Nova Scotia”

When I read this poem it took me a few tries to understand what was going on. I think that is because the poem is written with such simplicity in mind, as it’s written from the point of view of a child. It was hard for me to figure out what was going on with the loon too. The poet says that little Arthur looks like a “doll” and describes his coffin as a “little frosted cake,” as the loon watches it from its “white, frozen lake” that is the marble table it stands on. I think that within the poem, Bishop uses colors to indicate life and the lack thereof. For instance, the parlor is cold, and holds two dead things: Arthur and the stuffed loon residing on his frozen lake. The lake is “white” and the words “frosted cake” make me think that Arthur’s small casket is white as well. Jack Frost paints Arthur white, leaving just a “few red strokes” (perhaps representing the few days or months that Arthur lived). The royal families are shown as “warm in red,” indicating life against the stark whiteness that is the parlor.

Journal #2: Concrete Images

A half-full, lime green box of Kleenex tissues

A bright orange pumpkin carved with a smiley face

A white and blue osprey diving into a clear river for a fish

A yellow mountain lion with glowing black eyes in the foliage along the gravel road

A fat grey cat spread across a cream-colored couch

Buttery yellow popcorn in a metal bowl with steam rising

An old maple tree with the remnants of a half-finished children’s treefort

A graveyard bathed in sunlight with yellow warblers flitting around the tombstones

Poetry Exercise #2: Three Haiku

In the endless ocean
I see crawling towards the shore
A piece of driftwood.


A hot day in July
Scorching in daylight;
At night snow falls.


On a wooden boat
I cast my line for hours
For one small fish.

Journal #1: First Loves

In First Loves my favorite two poems were “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke and “The Flea” by John Donne. I have read them both before, and the fact that I remembered them specifically means that they spoke to me then as they do now. I remember reading “My Papa’s Waltz” in high school, in a class full of kids who didn’t want to have anything to do with poetry. The only poetry I had read before was Shakespeare, and so I was struck by the simplicity of Roethke’s words. I could smell the whiskey as I read it, and heard the pans clattering as they fell. It really formed images in my brain that Shakespeare, as much as I tried, could just not conjure until a few years and English classes later. I think in that sense my experience was much like Sherman Alexie’s; “My Papa’s Waltz” was probably the first poem I truly understood, too. Unlike Alexie, however, the violence depicted in the poem is (fortunately) alien to me.

Donne’s poem speaks to me in a much different way. His prose is more complex and inaccessible than Roethke’s poem. Donne is one of my favorite poets, and this is probably my favorite poem of his. When I first read it, it made me feel angry at first. I was mad at Donne’s exorbitant attempts to sway a woman into sleeping with him. When I read it again I began to understand the concept of the flea and I fell in love with Donne’s metaphoric argument. This poem makes me feel passionate in a way no other poem has ever done. Maybe passionate isn’t the right word. Alive. Yes, alive, that’s better. The flea is so unimportant in the first stanza – “And pampered swells with one blood made of two, / and this, alas, is more than we would do” (8-9). What the flea does is much worse than such a little thing as sex, because the flea “swells” with two types of blood and Donne assures her that she will not swell like the flea (become pregnant). Then in the next stanza the flea becomes as important as a marriage bed. As the flea’s importance changes from stanza to stanza it reminds me of someone trying to persuade someone else. If one angle proves useless, the persuader switches to a different argument.

Poetry Exercise #1: Descriptive Sketch

When the silver remote stopped working, the slender buttons on the television’s frame remained: power, volume, and channel. Eventually the television swallowed them into its frame, and after that we used a fork to pierce its mechanical guts and turn the television off at night. When the buttons became so lost inside that even a fork or carefully placed ink pen could not stop its dirge, the mute button became our savior. But while the sound was temporarily stopped, the trance-inducing images on the screen were always present in their IQ-lowering splendor. The glittering commercials were there when we woke up, the cartoon characters joined us for lunch and the generic sitcom laugh tracks followed us to bed seven nights a week. The strategically placed furniture in the living room watched the machine dominate our phone conversations, homework and minds, but remained impartial.