Poetry Packet

Heather McHugh's "And What Do You Get," really made me think about the origin of words and their meanings. As she picked apart words and took letters out it showed a hidden connection that words have with other words; such as exercise to excise, and example to ample. I found it particularly clever and ironic that the word therapist can be changed to rapist, and mind can be converted to M.D.

In Langston Hughes' poems, I liked the use of slang words which made them very easy to read, understand, and make a connection to. Langston's poems seem to mostly be about living as a (suppressed) black in a dominantly white world. An example of this is in his poem "Children's Rhymes" where he writes:

"Lies written down 

for white folks 
ain't for us a-tall: 
Liberty And Justice-- 
Huh!--For All?"

Shakespeare's poems are mostly sonnets with fourteen lines which end in a couplet, with a large amount of them talking about love. His poems used conflicting ideas and personification of inanimate objects. In sonnet 116, Shakespeare writes, "love is not love" (conflicting idea) and "Love's not Time's fool" (personification).