Poems- Piercy's "The Secretary Chant", Bishop's "The Fish", Morgan's "Mountain Graveyard", Cofer's "Common Ground", Slavitt's "Titanic"

Week 7 Poetry

The Secretary Chant by Marge Piercy is a secretary saying what she feels like. It seems she feels under appreciated and her worth as a person is no more than the work she produces. This poem is filled with metaphors, as she compares certain parts of her body to items a secretary uses. I believe the audience of this poem is anyone that will listen; she just wants someone to hear how she feels. At the end of the poem she says “I wonce was a woman” this is the whole theme of this poem. In this poem Piercy also uses onomatopoeia, (“Buzz. Click”). The setting is left out; I believe this was done so the audience could not be defined.

John Updike’s poem Dog’s Death is one I like least. Not because I didn’t understand it, but because of what it was about. A family’s dog had died and some parts are a little gruesome. At the end the last words are “Good Dog”, which are to imply that even though this dog had become sick and left a streak of feces across the floor he had tried to make it to the newspapers he was trained to use.  There is rhyme though out this poem but there isn’t a particular form to it.

The poem Mountain Graveyard by Robert Morgan is just twelve words long. It is written in two columns. When I first looked at this poem I didn’t even recognize it as the poem. I thought it was part of something else. The poem is titled as Mountain Graveyard, which makes me automatically think of death or dying. The words in the poem all tie into death. If the title had been anything else this poem would not make sense, and leave the reader puzzled. As the book pointed out all the words that are used are a series of anagrams.

Just by reading the title Common Ground by Judith Ortiz Cofer, I thought of two people meeting in the middle on something. Similar to what I thought, this poem is about a woman who is starting to find certain aspects of her appearance similar to her parents. The first stanza is about ageing; the second is more personal and describes what the speaker feels she has in common with each parent. It was hard for me to distinguish a setting, or audience in this poem. I believe they have been left out, because they are not need to make this poem work.

I found Titanic by David R. Slavitt to be amusing, especially compared to Hardy’s poem about the Titanic. Instead of being sad about dying the speaker is almost comforted, because most everyone else is also going to die and he will not have to go alone, and their death will be fairly quick. The speaker is certainly a person that dies on the titanic, and from the line “We all go: only a few, first class” I believe he is probably from 2^nd or 3^rd class.