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The clouds began to gather and the rain sprinkled

Down as we pulled into the cemetery. It’s funny,

How burials are always rainy and gloomy, like the

Weather is sad too. While my sister and I walked to

He grave, I told myself to hold it together as long as

I could. The ground began to sink in under my feet

From the rain. I was hoping this would go fast.

My dad was delivering the eulogy as he began to dig. I kept

My head down the whole time, hiding my tears. At the

Crack of his voice I looked up to him cry for the first time.

That was one of the hardest things to see. The tears falling

Off his face faster than the rain. He quickly wipes his face

As we make eye contact. That’s sweet, my dad thinks he

Needs to be strong for me.

Critical:

I plan on working on my paper a half hour a day from now until it’s due. I need to include the last two poems and I plan to expand more on the second poem. I was really glad we did the peer reviews because I wasn’t sure if I should use Auden, Woolf, Frost, or Eliot and Alex suggested Auden’s memorable speech essay so that really helped me out. The editing of my paper also helped because now I can go back and fix what I already had instead of only getting ideas for the second half of my essay.

Dramatic Monologue

Amy Winehouse

They tried to make me go to rehab,

I said ‘No, no, no’.

My most famous song.

Maybe I should’ve gone then I wouldn’t

Be laying here with alcohol poisoning.

Curse my daddy for thinking I’m fine.

I’m now a member of the 27 Club.

I didn’t realize it was such a popular

Club until I joined.

Back to Black became the UK’s best

Selling album of the 21^st century,

I was listed at number 26 on VH1’s

100 Greatest Women in Music.

And another Grammy to add to the list.

All of this after I passed of course.

Damn my love for the bottle.

Along with my list of awards, there’s

My list of arrests, charges, and assaults.

I even spit on Pippa Middleton,

Take that Princess Kate.

I always had Mary Jane and

Aunt Nora at my side.

At least three arrests for possession,

Why do I insist on taking them out.

Sleeping past noon was a normal

Routine until July 23.

My bodyguard tried to save me

But I was already black and this

Time I wasn’t coming back.

Three bottles of vodka, that’ll do it.

More than five times the legal

Drink-drive limit. They tried to make

Me go to rehab, I said ‘No, no, no’.

(Aunt Nora is a slang name for cocaine)

I can't think of a title yet

One of the best moments of my life

Was on the tennis courts in Marietta.

It was my junior year of high school.

I'd been to the courts many times before,

But this time everything was different.

I swore I was on top of the world.

Megan and I had just won the league for the team.

I'll never forget the look on my father's face,

Or the feeling I had watching the ball that I, me, had hit

Bounce right underneath my competitor's racket.

I knew exactly where I had wanted to hit it, 

That was the only thing on my mind.

I get goosebumps every time i think about it.

It was the first moment my coach had ever

Told me she was proud of the game I played.

I'd never felt so connected to the world before.

When I close my eyes I can still hear Megan's

father cheering, I can still smell the park.

It's so real when I go back in my mind.

It's funny when you're in high school and think

You're on top of the world, you don't realize

That we were too young to really be connected

To the world.

Final Paper

For my final paper i'm going to use the topic of chances. I'm using the poems "Hap" by Thomas Hardy, "Casino" by Denise Duhamel, "Reasons for Attendance" by Philip Larkin, and the poem "Dive For Dreams" by E.E. Cummings. I think the topic of chance is really interesting because it's not something you can control, it's completely out of your hands, it's just something that could happen in the blink of an eye and everything is different. Thomas Hardy's poem "Hap" just means shit happens, you don't always see it coming. "Casino" by Denise Duhamel is about the tragic escalator accident her parents were involved in while in Atlantic City. "Reasons for Attendance" by Philip Larkin is about a man deciding whether or not to go into a strip club or not, what would've happened if he'd taken that chance and actually gone in. The last poem "Dive For Dreams" by E.E. Cummings is about taking chances and trusting your heart. All these poems are about taking risks in life or what happens after chance happenings.

In class essay #3

In Denise Duhamel’s Ka-Ching, she uses various forms of poetry throughout the book. She hides codes in some of her poems, she uses the form villanelle, and she uses the form sestina. The villanelle form is has 19 lines, 5 stanzas of three lines and 1 stanza of four lines with two rhymes and two refrains, with the first and third lines alternating until the final stanza where they end as a couplet. The sestina form consists of 39 lines, consisting of six stanzas of six lines each. The words at the end of the first stanza are rotated and used at the end of each stanza. The form I noticed and liked the most was the sestina form. I think this form is noticeable and effective because it catches the readers’ attention. She uses the form in “Delta Flight 656”, “Anagram America”, and “Please Don’t Sit Like a Frog, Sit Like a Queen”.

         In “Delta Flight 656”, Duhamel is riding on a plane and writes a poem dedicated to Sean Penn. In doing so of dedicating the poem to Mr. Penn, she ends each line with a word containing “pen”. The sestina form is very noticeable in this poem (also because she points it out) and it amazes me how creative she is just sitting on this plane coming up with all these words containing “pen”. However, in this poem the flow of “pen” words started to have more of an unnatural flow towards the end, like the line “..poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula of glamour like so many menacing penguins”. It’s creative she included penguins but the reference is random. She’s speaking to Sean Penn in the poem, she tells him how she wanted to be his pen pal and how she loved the poem he had written in 1987. The tone of this poem is somewhat silly, at times it seems serious but I think because of the sestina form it comes off as silly when she has to use unusual words to include her “pen”.

              When I first read “Anagram America”, I could not for the life of me figure out what the bold words at the end of each line meant. This is such a creative way to write a sestina, she uses only one word and mixes the letters up. At first this poem seemed a bit unnatural to me, but after reading it a few times I think it becomes not as unnatural seeming. When she cuts off words such as ‘Madonna’, ‘Ramadan’, and ‘about’ that’s where it becomes unnatural because those aren’t words that tend to be split up but because of her sestina she had to. The tone of this poem compared to “Photo Op” is very different. “Photo Op” has a very serious tone and she goes into too much detail describing her mother’s wound, it’s disturbing, while “America Anagram” is not as sad or depressing, but she still throws in some sarcastic seriousness.

         “Please Don’t Sit Like a Frog, Sit Like a Queen” was something Duhamel saw graffitied in a ladies’ bathroom. The tone of this poem is not really serious nor humorous, it’s advice; the poem is about how to be lady. When I read this poem, I can hear as if the speaker is saying it but I picture it being said by an English woman at a Cotillion rather than graffiti being read off of a bathroom wall. Unlike the other two poems, “Anagram America” and “Delta Flight 656”, the poem does not come off as unnatural sounding though. I actually really enjoy this poem the more I read it.

Butterflies and Floodwalls

Butterflies and Floodwalls
Looking back on the memories of butterflies and floodwalls,
A weird combination I know.
The mem not so pleasant as I recall.
It all began one sunny day,
Riding bicycles with my mother.
A white flutter caught my eye.
I followed it down the path,
Away from my mother.
It cast me under its spell and
Down I went. Tumbling down
The hill, still bike in tact.
When I landed at the bottom,
My little white friend disappeared,
Flying away with a smirk on its face.
I've always hated them since.
I've forgiven the wall, but the insect, my foe.