Mrs. Ho's AP Lit 2022-2023

                                                                          "The Mango"  - Mary Oliver           When I went through the list of all the poems Mary Oliver wrote I was drawn to this title for some odd reason. I guess I just really like mangoes and I couldn’t help but want to read this poem and share it with the rest of you. I went into reading this poem thinking that it would be all about mangoes, and I guess it was, but the author used mangoes as a way to take a deeper look into today's society.           The poem is describing, what I think is, a dinner party of some sort. Everyone is joining in on the delicious dinner and then the mangoes come out for dessert. Everyone is given some and then...

Dina Bengelsdorf - Week 1 - “Pick a Poet” - Richard Blanco - “One Today” “One Today” by Richard Blanco: We the People As I read Richard Blanco’s name on the poet list for this week’s blog, I knew I had remembered the name from somewhere. I searched up his works online and at once, the memories of the first months of my sophomore year came flooding back. I was assigned The Prince of Los Cocuyos for my summer reading, and I remember the book’s powerful effects on myself and my tenth grade English class. Blanco’s memoir shed light on the challenges of having to pretend to be someone else around friends, family, and most importantly, oneself. To me, his story conveyed the importance of embracing myself and my heritage, under any and all circumstances. “One Today”, a poem written by Blanco and read by himself at Barack Obama’s second presidential inauguration, expresses important national messages in a broader perspective. The inauguration poem begins with a peaceful image - one of sun, un...

  Adi Chaham Week 1: “Poem for the First Day of the Poetry Unit in Language Arts Class”  https://guante.info/2022/03/29/languagearts/      The poem, “Poem for the Poetry Unit in Language Arts Class”, is a relatable poem for most teenagers and brings kids, such as myself, to a bit of a comfort zone. For this assignment, I went through about 20-25 different people on the list of poets to find one that I felt most connected to, most interested me and that I understood. Finally, I found Mr.Myhre and his untraditional poems. As I looked through other poems, I noticed that Mr.Mhyre’s poems in specific, were longer than most and had a different structure to them. Rather than being in stanzas or rhyming, his are in paragraph form and do not rhyme.  As I continued reading the poem, I realized the deeper meaning behind his untraditional type of poetry. This poem specifically, reminds students, such as myself who don't particularly love poems, that poems don’t nee...

For my poem, I decided to write about “Blue Springs” by C. Dale Young. Honestly, I read through so many poems until I found C. Dale Young. I wanted to find an author that resonated with me, not only from a singular poem but as well as their messages and writing style throughout their poems. “Blue Springs” was the first poem I read by C. Dale Young. For this poem, I connected with the theme of appreciating the world around you.  The poem describes the experience of visiting a lovely blue lake. It is said to be a beautiful spot with water that is bluer “ than the heart of a sapphire.” The author then addresses a conflict that most people face when it comes to nature. A simple choice. The two options of “the paralysis of awe, or the quick nonchalance of acceptance.” This line is what captured my attention.  I tend to contemplate different topics I come across. Recently, the ability to stop for a second and appreciate the world around you has been on my mind. I find that it is sur...

One of Rachel McKibbens's many poems (which is unfortunately untitled) is meant to be a message to her daughters. Her poem is about love, but not just love alone, the last love. McKibbens poem lists the many requirements one must have in order to prove themselves to be a last love.  McKibbens's skips over the first love, the second love, the third love, and all of the other loves in between and jumps straight to the last love. The last love is the most important, so that person must be someone special. They must be someone "whose love lifts its head to you despite its broken neck" and does all they can to make you feel loved regardless of their pain or suffering (Lines 3-4). McKibbens's uses the example of lifting a head despite its broken neck to highlight the selflessness the person must show to her daughters in order for them to truly be their last love.  After analyzing the structure of the poem, I realized that the last half of stanza of this poem that with t...

  The poem “Cornfields” by Anna Leahy transports the reader to a different place: the small farm in rural Illinois. Leahy describes life on the farm, including the sights, feelings, and tasks. She does not attempt to glamorize nor disparage the farm, merely stating the experience in a list of sensations. However, despite the laborious chores a farmer must complete, Leahy notes the experience is positive due to the world around her. Leahy makes it clear that though there are negatives in life, “any place on earth can be lovely” if one takes a closer look at their remarkable surroundings. Leahy’s message is made clear through her unique writing style which evokes a sense of longing and nostalgia. Her picturesque description of “ever-even stalks” that glisten in the “late July” sun make the reader desire to travel to this farm, even if they have never been to a farm before. Additionally, she uses simple language throughout the poem, which serves two purposes. First, it exhibits the si...

The Hermit Crab is a poem by Mary Oliver in which she reflects on an encounter she had with a hermit crab and the observations she made while watching it find a new home.  I believe that the ocean, which Oliver describes as always “shouting and hissing toward the future,” every wave “leaving the shore littered” with “ornaments of death,” is a symbol for time. (lines 19-25) The hermit crab fights against the ocean by making a home out of the old shells it had discarded. This “rebellion” is also a way of fighting against time, “connecting everything, the past to the future.” (lines 29-33) I interpret this part of the poem to be a metaphor for remembering and learning from our past, as by holding on to our memories, we are effectively rebelling against time and its efforts to wash the past away.   In the first stanza of poem, Oliver writes, “Once I looked inside the darkness of a shell folded like a pastry and there was a fancy face.” (lines 1-4) Upon reading this, I thought...

     After reading through the introductions of many poets, I decided on reading through Donald Hall. The first poem I picked of his was titled “White Apples”. Initially, I chose this poem based on the imagery presented in the title. The title invoked a sense of curiosity in me as I tried to imagine what this “White Apple” could mean. Based on my imagination, I predicted reading a poem with a positive connotation. I expected something that would uplift me and make me feel a sense of joy. While I was not disappointed in the poem, I was pleasantly surprised after reading it.       The poem starts with the line, “when my father had been dead a week” (Line 1). Immediately I felt a sense of darkness: the poem was about death. In this short, 9-lined poem, Hall is able to say a lot about the topic. The poem tells the story of a man, Donald Hall, mourning the loss of his father. He gets up from his slumber hearing the voice of his father. After looking at the ...

      “Prayer for the Mutilated World” by Sam Sax takes the reader on a journey into a future where all of the superficialities of today’s society are non-existent. Throughout the poem, Sax gives many specific examples of this future, such as highways being taken over by forests, phone lines doing nothing, and “after the water taps gasp out their final blessing.” To many, including Sax himself, these frightening thoughts are too much to handle; he “dare[s] not consider” what would happen in this hypothetical future. However, according to Sax, we shouldn’t even be thinking about this in the first place and enjoy every moment instead.      A few things in this poem really stood out to me - the most notable one to me, however, is how Sax calls today’s world a “last extinction.” Thinking about today’s society as being on the brink of extinction is a crazy thought, but one that may, sadly, be true. However, we can only control what we can control, and the fact t...

                  Ariella Green Week One: “Your Son Has a Beautiful Voice” by Sierra Demulder In choosing my poet for this assignment, I decided to base my picking on whether or not I liked the sound of the person’s name. I came across performance poet Sierra Demulder’s website. After I read her first poem, I became hooked.       Her poem titled “Your Son Has a Beautiful Voice” caught my attention first because of the beautiful, yet also simple wording of the title. At first glance, she’s essentially giving a compliment to the people who raised the boy she’s interested in. After reading the poem, I understood just how deeply she feels about this boy that she’s “... a fraid [she] love[s] him enough to listen to it forever”. This boy lost his mother at a young age, and in a way, she is telling the mother that she did a wonderful job raising him, but how pained he was with her absence.     ...

I'm incredibly glad that I randomly picked Aziza Barnes as my poet because I loved her poem, " HOW TO KILL A HOUSE CENTIPEDE BY SQUISHING IT BEHIND A PHOTO OF  MIRIAM MAKEBA WHILE CONTEMPLATING VARIOUS ITERATIONS OF RIGOR  MORTIS IN MY GENTRIFIED APARTMENT COMPLEX ON 750 MACDONOUGH  STREET BROOKLYN, NY 11233," the second I read the title. While the title is incredibly specific, I feel like we've all been in a spot where we have an insect infestation and try to kill the bug or bugs, but we never think about what we are doing. The literal reading of this poem made me think about how to react when I'm faced with a bug. While they may be annoying, they are just trying to survive like the rest of us. The fact that they chose my house to live in is simply coincidence, not out of spite or bad luck. So why should I have to kill the bug? But then I think about what if it gets away and if there is a larger infestation just like Aziza did in the poem. Now is the dilemma of d...