ICRN: Poetry

TORDA'S FALL 2025 TEACHING SITE

ICRN: Poetry

11/5/2025

Take the poem you are assigned in class. Do a close reading of the poem that is informed by the exercise we did in class with "Why Write Love Poetry. . . ". Then read your classmates ideas about what the other poems we read meant to them. Comment on at least two but feel free to comment on all of them agreeing, disagreeing, going in a different direction, marveling at something your classmate thought or noticed that you didn't--because those things are possible in thinking about a poem.

After that, think about what the poems we've read--contemporary poems--say about the state of poetry today. What function does it play in our world? Why write it? Publish it? This is what will make up our class discussion tonight.

28 Comments

Nina

11/5/2025 03:19:36 pm

I actually really like this poem. It's about finding a reason to make meaning and enjoyment in a world that lacks these concepts explicitly. It reminds me of that corny saying everyone's parents tell them before moving to college: "You have to make the most of it." I mean, what is the point of life if you do not find what you love? That sounds a bit intense, but there is truth to it. Like, We live in this world with so much conflict, death, war, destruction, hatred, etc, yet somehow we find ways to make our lives worth living in this world. It seems like the poet has an optimism towards this concept, despite the poem having a pretty dark tone at the beginning. She establishes that she stands in the way of life being completely hell, and that is because of her willingness to block out anything that takes away the opportunity of finding good and love in life.

Nina

11/5/2025 03:22:32 pm

Just to add on, I think a lot of poems, such as this one and the ones that we read for class, serve as social commentaries for different ideas. This one is a bit more broad, but it can be interpreted differently regarding as to what makes the world hell. That in itself makes this poem pretty interesting.

Paul Sweeney

11/5/2025 03:45:45 pm

I always appreciate art where there's a lot of darkness balanced out by a lot of hope. I think a lot of the time when it comes to art like this, it's the darkness that gives the hope its sense of purpose. The bad makes the good feel all the more special, and I like how you highlight that aspect here.

Paul Sweeney

11/5/2025 03:44:17 pm

I'm doing "Naturalized" by Hala Alyan. What immediately jumps out to me about this poem is a lot of the bitterness in it. Bitterness that isn't unjustified, I should clarify. I believe the poem is about a Palestinian living away from Palestine at the moment, and kind of the dissonance between mundane life somewhere safe and having to see their home being absolutely destroyed every single day. They have to bare so much, like the body count, reconciling the privilege of their own position compared to those who are still suffering who are less fortunate than them, and how others perceive them as someone from Palestine, treating them almost like a novelty rather than a person going through a lot of suffering and confused, uncomfortable feelings.

I also think it's highly critical of the privileged position others talk about the genocide from, especially when discussing the various op-eds and other pieces of journalism written about it, and how none of them could possibly reconcile with the unfathomable horror of what's happening.

I.S.

11/5/2025 03:52:46 pm

This is a great reading of the poem and I interpreted it similarly. To add onto your point, I also think it's exploring the person's identity and how they don't feel as connected to their culture as they want to, which further complicates their feelings. For example, they state that they pray in broken Arabic.

Ashley Luise

11/5/2025 03:54:20 pm

I wholeheartedly agree with this analysis. Even in the opening line, “Can I pull the land from me like a cork?” (1), we get a sense that the narrator is incapable of separating herself from her homeland. As we move through the piece, we get to see how this intrinsic connection impacts her specifically as a Palestinian living in America, a nation inflicting so much harm on the speaker's native country. The speaker is unable to detach herself from her homeland even in the most mundane moments of American life, like a leaky faucet. Simply put, everything she has access to is something Palestinians do not currently because of the genocide, and while popular news outlets brush their situation off just as numbers, the speaker carries the burden of knowing the genocide's significance to countless real people.

Anna

11/5/2025 03:54:26 pm

Hi Paul,
I agree with the idea of dissonance in this poem, some of my favorite lines from the poem are "Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I’ve already said too much." The speaker is pulling out this part of their identity and watching it leak into somewhere they don't think it belongs (brunch). I think this creates such a strong dissonance between wanting to align with your identity but also fit into positions of privilege. Brunch itself I think was chosen carefully, to show the luxury of eating an "extra" meal while Palestinians starve. I also felt the sentiment of the difference between digesting content about Palestine through journalism rather than living it, and how this is framed as a privilege in its own way. Thank you for sharing!

Glen Beaulieu

11/5/2025 03:57:10 pm

I definitely read this poem the same way, Paul. What stood out to me as well was "I've ruined the dinner party. I was given a life. Is it frivolous?" To me, I think this poem is not only talking about mundane life in somewhere safe compared to somewhere experiencing daily abject terror, but it's also this sort of apathy surrounding these events. "How dare you talk about something so depressing? You're ruining the dinner party!"

Alexandra O'Brien

11/5/2025 03:57:57 pm

Hi Paul, this was a poem deeply rooted in past. You can get this incredible sense of heaviness and also light when the speaker is talking about their family and where they call home or grew up. There's this pull between feelings of beauty, longing, and also guilt that came through for me. Maybe even a fractured sense of self as well. Feeling like your past and your now are clashing in a way. This was such a haunting and casual poem as well, and that contrast was nice.

Anna Dykhoff

11/5/2025 03:46:12 pm

The first thing I noticed about this poem is the prevalence of water. To begin with the actual words used, we have "cupped" and "steamy" in the beginning, this hot, comforting sensory feeling. Next we move into the metaphor of a helpless fish in a breaking wave and the foggy harbor, creating a sense of being lost or displaced, a disruptive and violet water. Finally we have the soothing water that the speaker uses to grieve, to believe that all will return to this calmer water. The speaker's brother has died young, as the speaker mentions the space between the years, wondering who their brother may have become, and the life that was left so early. Much of the poem seems to be trying to make sense of such a loss, imagining their brother not as someone that was almost living but an abstract being now in death. I don't know what to make of the structure of the stanzas, but the lack of punctuation makes this poem flow as one consistent stream of consciousness, one complete homage to a lost sibling and a letting go into the water.

Paul Sweeney

11/5/2025 03:52:58 pm

I think the use of water is interesting in that it reminds me of the idea of time as a flowing river, or water as something you need to "go with the flow" of. When it comes to something like death, once the person is gone, there isn't anything you can really do about it. You can only go with the flow or let it consume you, so the repeated use of water throughout the poem makes me think a lot of that concept, or water as kind of a form of burial, like when people drown and are lost beneath the water.

Nina (The actual response I need to have here)

11/5/2025 03:48:42 pm

"Fairy Bells" By Aaron El Sabrout definitely serves as a commentary on the environmental disruption of a dam in Mississippi as the speaker walks by a stream imagining a "what if" if it hadn't been altered. The speaker of the poem is describing how they do actions that fish can no longer do in the stream, such as running upstream for the fish who can no longer do it. There is also a pull of religion into this, as the speaker refers to the experience of walking this path to that of paths referred to in the Quran and Muslim religion. Towards the end, the speaker imagines another world, one where the dam doesn't exist and the aquatic life, domesticated animals in the area, and usage of the water by people goes back to a normal state. Of course, this is only imagination for the state of the Mississippi water form that is being discussed.

Anna

11/5/2025 03:59:48 pm

Hi Nina,
I think that this poem was a great example of contemporary poetry and how the focus on nature from the romantic era has evolved into environmental activism through poetry. I love that you mentioned the people running upstream as the fish can no longer do it - perhaps implying that we make the world harder for ourselves to inhabit as well the more we destroy it. I think mentions of religion are important to this poem as well, as the speaker mentions nature as the "other side" and the "other world," or what heaven may have been if humans did not destroy it.

I.S.

11/5/2025 04:04:41 pm

I struggled with understanding this poem the most so your explanation was very helpful to read! One thing I noticed in it was the line "the first world a kind of cage" with parallels drawn between the first world and the author's world back home. It makes me wonder if the author was critiquing the first world which claims superiority over others but destroys its land and wildlife, making it no better than any place else.

Ashley Luise

11/5/2025 03:48:58 pm

As I mentioned in our last post, poetry is not a genre that comes easy to me; however, I took “The Beginning According to Mrs. God” as a visceral reimagining that counters the idea of God saying “let there be light.” The title and the first line make a complete sentence: Mrs. God thinks the beginning “was a mess” (line 1). There is a sheer physicality and primitiveness to the “drool and semen and teeth” (2) that were necessary in the creation of all beings. Mrs. God, the speaker of the poem, then addresses the readers as a “you” (7), which drives home the fact that she is retelling this origin story to us directly. Many of these readers are people who are familiar with a biblical origin story that is clean and comfortable, but Mrs. God inherently challenges this understanding. The beginning “was before words” (8) and thus, we cannot rely on our origin story that tries to put words to a phenomenon we were not present for. Her retelling is also feminist, emphasizing her role in creating the light the common narrative credits God for doing. However, her role wasn’t always beautiful either and at one point “in the beginning [she] was a finch/tossing finches out of the nest” (24-25), but at some point, these animals became the sky and stone that exist today. Mrs. God’s retelling of the beginning is not beautiful or clean cut like the story we are used to, but it tells the whole story in a more accurate light that accounts for both women’s role and the loss of life that were essential to creating the world as we know it.

Nina

11/5/2025 03:55:36 pm

Ashley! You definitely interpreted this similar to how I did when I first read it. I don't know much about religion, but I can definitely tell that this piece contradicts ideas that have been normalized about the "beginning." I like that you pointed out details about the language used, it definitely emphasizes the fact that the beginning was rather unpleasant. There was no language, no established understanding of what we know as society. Interesting conversation to be had about this piece for sure!

11/5/2025 03:55:53 pm

It's super interesting to me that you started both this post and the post about Why Write Love Poetry saying that reading poetry doesn't come naturally to you and yet in both instances you offered spot on analysis that is deeply. connected to the text. So perhaps you need to rethink you skill at reading poetry and instead think more that reading poetry requires some exceptional reading skill--which you have in abundance.

It took me a good third read to think about how the poem from Mrs God is directed at Adam and Eve and, by connection, all of their childred (us) and our desire "to get back" to some innocence that mrs god adamantly denies the existance of "

I.S.

11/5/2025 03:49:47 pm

“This Close” by Richard Hoffman explores the complexities of grieving his brother who died young. His brother haunts him, always fleeting from one moment to the next. Hoffman describes him as being in the spaces between his fingers, between the letters of his name, between the numbers of his years, in the curl of a breaking wave, etc. It’s as if the memory of his brother is constantly slipping away from him. However, Hoffman says he never wonders who his brother might’ve become, which makes me think that this is because he’s too busy trying to remember who he was and understand his brother’s absence in his life. He also says “how aging I grew into it / grew onto it like a trellis,” suggesting that this grief has become integral to who he is. In addition to becoming integral to who he is, the last few lines are Hoffman expressing how the grief will persist the whole length of his life, possibly in conjunction with other people and past versions of himself he will be grieving as well. In general, I think the poem is speaking to this common experience of grief where it’s not something that ever truly leaves people. Even after time has passed, small, mundane things continue to remind someone of the person they are grieving. However, similar to the person who has passed, these things are only temporary, but the grief is not.

Ashley Luise

11/5/2025 03:58:20 pm

I read this piece really similarly. To elaborate on your point about the speaker missing his brother in the seemingly small moments like the gaps in his finger, I think the poem's outline does a beautiful job of showing this too. The larger spacings between stanzas allow the speaker's brother to really linger in both the speaker's words of his grief and how he is showing this on the page. I am unsure how to explain this more eloquently, but it makes the speaker's brother's hang everywhere throughout the piece, and I think that is beautifully effective.

Glen Beaulieu

11/5/2025 04:01:38 pm

I think this poem is also talking about survivors guilt as well. To me, I see a lot of anguish over the fact that his grief over his brother has numbed over time and the memories have begun to fade a bit. That kind of grief never really leaves you, but it changes as time goes on. I think that's what the last stanza really highlights.

Alexandra O'Brien

11/5/2025 04:03:33 pm

I loved this poem. He finds all of his "empty" spaces that his brother manages to fill for him. So quietly beautiful this was. This poem felt like the stages of grief, some comfort, acceptance, questioning.... This sense of wandering aimlessly with a ghost of who you have lost beside you. The line "Is it your death or mine or ours?" really encapsulated the whole poem.

Alexandra O'Brien

11/5/2025 03:51:53 pm

- The End of Wildness by Gail Griffin
- This poem felt like it was speaking to me, possibly about generations and family. Of growing up and childhood as well.
- The "we" that the speaker refers to makes me think of community, a collection of people once gathered together through simple and grounded things like nature and daddy long-legs. There is this childlike feel to this. This unawareness of what the world is feeling. Kept neatly in this little place of wonder.
- This description of a certain place is so vivid. We know the speaker probably calls this place home and frequents it, or at least spent some time there in their life. "We knew the mean dogs to avoid and we believed in horses", showing beliefs and mindsets connected to this place that is possibly home. But they are again simple and childlike thoughts
- The "we" that is the now generation feels as if they have been taught a different way of doing things, that they have been separated from their roots in a way, "domesticated", taught to leave behind their wild ways. The modern and mature way of things is taking over—and they cannot truly live in the vast, wild, and open world of nature they once were so rooted in.

Nina

11/5/2025 04:00:28 pm

Hi Alexandra! I enjoyed your analysis of this poem. An idea that I had while reading is that I could see the wilderness being a symbol, or meaning to reflect the city, and learning how to leave that life when they move away from it. It is definitely a different way of life, comparing urban lifestyles to rural, and I think the poet could maybe be doing that here. Maybe though, it's just what I thought when reading haha!

11/5/2025 04:01:37 pm

I thought about wilderness--the edge of wilderness--as a mulatifaceted metaphor. On the one hand, I thought about the suburbs. The opening talk about how the land is claimed by sod and trees that weren't just growing their naturally, but then the "we" that the narrator is describing move into wildnerness with the possibilities of mild catastrophes. bee stings and garter snakes, etc. And I thought of the edge of wilderness as a the edge of childhood. The untamed land they play in is childhood and our narrator and the rest of "we" are at the edge of that, The poem ends with a return to civilzation and. civilizing forces to strip malls and paved roads. To adulthood.

Glen Beaulieu

11/5/2025 03:52:01 pm

"Self-Portrait as Coriander Seed" was one of the poems we read for this week that really jumped out at me. While its message on gun violence against children is overt, what stuck with me was how the Abby Murray framed it around seeds and gardening. Children are the "seeds" that we grow "for the future," and gardening, like children, is this innocent thing that relies on the care of others in order to survive. Children have no say in gun laws just in the same way that a plant doesn't have any say in whether or not it gets watered. The use of the word "bloom" really stood out for me as well, as the author uses it as a kind of inverse to how we picture something blooming. When a plant blooms, it changes and grows, becoming something new and beautiful. The bloom from a "round of an assault rifle" also changes somebody when it is "planted" into their bodies, but it doesn't cause them to grow or become something beautiful---it destroys them. It removes everything but a torn apart body. It "only grows an irreversible, merciless absence." Even hope in this poem is "crouched within us, waiting to germinate." Even that part of ourselves, which should be allowed to bloom, is sheltering in-place, waiting for something to happen.

I'm struggling with the last few lines of the poem. Does the author mean that she wants to be able to protect her daughter so she can chase her "independent dreams"? By "mowing around that place forever," does the author mean that she will never stop fighting for change?

I.S.

11/5/2025 03:58:01 pm

I really like the way you explained the meaning of this poem. I was also unsure of the last few lines. I think it might be about the author never stopping her fight for change. I also think it could be about her desire to protect her daughter so she doesn't become hardened and can continue to have hope, unlike the author and everyone else in the world who has had to witness all these shootings.

11/5/2025 04:04:26 pm

I landed somewhere around the idea that our narrator intends to try to keep her child seeing the world as a child--full of possibility and potential--for as long as it is possible for her child to do so. The improbable planting can't last there forever. It doesn't really belong there. Childhood is an improbable state. It's full of whimsy and potential and few rules. To live in that space feels less and less possible for childrend now--there are actual studies of the traumatizing effects of lock down drills--the author is desperate to keep her child young as long as is possible in this disasterous world.

Ashley Luise

11/5/2025 04:05:14 pm

I was also unsure about the last few lines of this poem, but I read them pretty similarly. I almost wonder if this is a way to separate her daughter from the seed. As much as the speaker wants to protect her daughter from the dangers of gun violence, she also must send her to school---one of the most prevalent sites of gun violence. However though, she can choose to protect her daughter's seed and "mow[] around that place/forever" (29-30), which allows it to “Unfurl[]/as slow and beloved as they like” (30-31). While I do believe this means the speaker will spend her years fighting against gun violence, I think protecting the seed also signifies a protection that cannot be granted to the innumerable amount of children murdered by guns each year.

ICRN: Poetry

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