Seems like a long time
Since the waiter took my order.
Grimy little luncheonette,
The snow falling outside.
Seems like it has grown darker
Since I last heard the kitchen door
Behind my back
Since I last noticed
Anyone pass on the street.
A glass of ice-water
Keeps me company
At this table I chose myself
Upon entering.
And a longing,
Incredible longing
To eavesdrop
On the conversation
Of cooks.
I really don't know if my interpretation of this is what the poet really wanted it to be like, because all I can understand here is that the poet has been waiting for a long time for his food to come. Is there any deeper meaning? Because I can't really think of any haha.
So this restaurant the poet is in seems a bit run down and the service seems bad.
'Grimy little luncheonette'
'Grimy' makes me think of dirt and darkness- Probably what the restaurant was like, dark.
'A glass of ice- water/ Keeps me company'
Who serves ice cold water during winter (the writer says snow is falling outside)?
Apparently the cooks are talking ('the conversation/ Of cooks') and the poet has an 'Incredible longing/ To eavesdrop' on it. Probably he wants to know what they are doing taking so long to get his food done.
There is quite a lot of repetition in the poem: 'Seems', 'Since', 'longing'. The first line on stanza starts with a conjunction ('And'). I guess they all just kind of make it seem like the poet has been waiting for so long.
This poem is really different from some of the other poems that I've read before. It's more narrative, factual and straightforward and not many poetic/ literary techniques are used.
And I really can't think of anything more to say about the poem right now. Maybe I'll come up with something later and I'll update the post.
Thursday, February 20, 2014
Trying
Currently trying to understand 'The Partial Explanation' by Charles Simic.
I guess it'll take a while though (no surprise- me and poetry don't mix) so might be updating later.
It's funny how I wanted to analyse a poem a day, but now it's more like a poem a month.
Oh well.
I guess it'll take a while though (no surprise- me and poetry don't mix) so might be updating later.
It's funny how I wanted to analyse a poem a day, but now it's more like a poem a month.
Oh well.
The Poet by Tom Wayman
Loses his position on worksheet or page in textbook
May speak much but makes little sense
Cannot give clear verbal instructions
Does not understand what he reads
Does not understand what he hears
Cannot handle “yes-no” questions
Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs
Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc.
Cannot tell a story from a picture
Cannot recognize visual absurdities
Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the next
OK, so this poem is basically about what poets are like, I think. To be honest, I don't know, haha. This poem is kind of hard for me to understand, even though the content seems to be relatively straightforward...
OK, so the title 'The Poet' suggests that the poem is about what a typical poet is like.
There is no rhyme in the poem, maybe trying to show how spontaneous and random a poet is?
Quite a lot of repetition in the poem- 2 lines start with 'Does' in the first stanza, for instance, but it's not regular throughout the poem: Perhaps wanting to show how spontaneous poets can be again?
Because, throughout the whole poem, the poet seems to be saying that a typical poet just can't settle down, they kind of 'jump around' a lot (if you get what I mean) and they are quite into abstract things? As in, poets are kind of more abstract- minded? So they aren't really into concrete facts and things like that. I'm confusing myself actually haha.
So after a few days thinking about this poem (okay, maybe not a few, more like a week), I guess this poem is also about the feelings of the typical poet as well. 'May speak much but makes little sense'->maybe that's why the poet is into poetry? This poem may be about why poets write in the way they too ('Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs'- some poems use proverbs weirdly). The words 'difficulty' and 'cannot' which have negative connotations to them are repeated quite a lot, so perhaps the poem is explaining to us about the difficulties and challenges that poets encounter which make them write the way they do (eg. many poems are very long, but the message they are trying to convey may just be very short).
To be honest all of these difficulties that the poet in this poem experiences are not difficulties to normal people at all (eg. 'Cannot handle 'yes-no' questions'), so maybe the poet (Wayman) is poking fun and in a way mocking other poets in the fact that they can't really convey the message clearly to the reader and the reader ends up having to think a lot in order to understand the message (or maybe ending up not even knowing what the poem is talking about). Perhaps this poem is ironic in the way that it criticizes other poems for not having their messages conveyed clearly, when this poem itself does not exactly convey its message clearly (to me at least. I don't know about you, but I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what this poem is talking about. Maybe it's just me.)
But then again, in a way this poem is relatively straightforward, as in it doesn't use many literary techniques, because some poems use a bunch of literary techniques and some people like me end up never understanding what they are trying to say. Oh well.
May speak much but makes little sense
Cannot give clear verbal instructions
Does not understand what he reads
Does not understand what he hears
Cannot handle “yes-no” questions
Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs
Has difficulty recalling what he ate for breakfast, etc.
Cannot tell a story from a picture
Cannot recognize visual absurdities
Has difficulty classifying and categorizing objects
Has difficulty retaining such things as
addition and subtraction facts, or multiplication tables
May recognize a word one day and not the next
OK, so this poem is basically about what poets are like, I think. To be honest, I don't know, haha. This poem is kind of hard for me to understand, even though the content seems to be relatively straightforward...
OK, so the title 'The Poet' suggests that the poem is about what a typical poet is like.
There is no rhyme in the poem, maybe trying to show how spontaneous and random a poet is?
Quite a lot of repetition in the poem- 2 lines start with 'Does' in the first stanza, for instance, but it's not regular throughout the poem: Perhaps wanting to show how spontaneous poets can be again?
Because, throughout the whole poem, the poet seems to be saying that a typical poet just can't settle down, they kind of 'jump around' a lot (if you get what I mean) and they are quite into abstract things? As in, poets are kind of more abstract- minded? So they aren't really into concrete facts and things like that. I'm confusing myself actually haha.
So after a few days thinking about this poem (okay, maybe not a few, more like a week), I guess this poem is also about the feelings of the typical poet as well. 'May speak much but makes little sense'->maybe that's why the poet is into poetry? This poem may be about why poets write in the way they too ('Has great difficulty interpreting proverbs'- some poems use proverbs weirdly). The words 'difficulty' and 'cannot' which have negative connotations to them are repeated quite a lot, so perhaps the poem is explaining to us about the difficulties and challenges that poets encounter which make them write the way they do (eg. many poems are very long, but the message they are trying to convey may just be very short).
To be honest all of these difficulties that the poet in this poem experiences are not difficulties to normal people at all (eg. 'Cannot handle 'yes-no' questions'), so maybe the poet (Wayman) is poking fun and in a way mocking other poets in the fact that they can't really convey the message clearly to the reader and the reader ends up having to think a lot in order to understand the message (or maybe ending up not even knowing what the poem is talking about). Perhaps this poem is ironic in the way that it criticizes other poems for not having their messages conveyed clearly, when this poem itself does not exactly convey its message clearly (to me at least. I don't know about you, but I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what this poem is talking about. Maybe it's just me.)
But then again, in a way this poem is relatively straightforward, as in it doesn't use many literary techniques, because some poems use a bunch of literary techniques and some people like me end up never understanding what they are trying to say. Oh well.
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