Response to Lee, Olds, Neruda, and Bierds Poems

These poems interconnect in that they all tell some sort of story. At least I'm confident the first three tell stories, as I'm clueless as to what's going on in the last poem.

I really appreciated the way Lee's "Loading a Boar" was written; he captured the essence of the type of person who would be loading a boar. It would be strange if the poem had been written in neat stanzas with formal language. Instead the stream of consciousness, the beer and the profanity make this poem believable. I think John has a great point when he tells the writer "you gotta write poems about what you know." Instead of writing a poem on a subject the poet thinks a poem should be about, he writes about something he understands, even if it isn't a glamorous task, such as loading a boar.

In contrast to "Loading a Boar" Olds' s "I Go Back to May 1937" is structured more like you would expect a poem to be structured. The inner turmoil the person in the poem is facing is fascinating to me: she wants to warn her parents of their future, yet she is selfish enough to still want to be born. I feel that as a college student I can relate to this poem in that, like the man and the woman in the poem, I don't know what the future might hold. Everyone starts out life as innocent, and at some point that innocence is taken. In addition, it is only human nature to make bad choices or mistakes. It appears from what the author says that the marriage between the man and the woman results in a loss of this innocence, and the beginning of a string of bad choices and events. I want to feel sorry for the person writing the poem, but I feel like I need more details other than "you are going to do bad things to children" (which I assume means bad things were done to the author). Bad things like what, exactly?

The title "A Dog Has Died" seems really impersonal to me, yet the poem itself offers insight into a relationship between a dog and his owner. He speaks of the dog as if he was the only dog to have ever not have been "obsessed with sex" or "full of mange." He seems envious of his dogs happiness and recalls fondly the times they have together. This last stanza doesn't seem to go with the rest of the poem. "So now he's gone and I buried him, and that's all there is to it." He sounds indifferent to his dog's death, yet if he was indifferent why would he recall so many good memories about his dog? Heck, why would he even write an entire poem about the death of his dog if "that's all there is to it"? It's almost as if he's trying to appear like he doesn't care, when in reality the event has upset him.

To be honest DNA by Biereds was the most confusing poem I've ever read. I assume during the course of the poem DNA is discovered..? "Star-shot elegance" sounds pretty but I have no idea what it means. The whole poem is just a strange collection of shapes and stars and then something about a lamb. Maybe I'll figure out what's going on in this poem when we discuss it in class, because right now I'm really clueless.