Poem Response to "Naked Girl and Mirror" by Judith Wright

I have to reiterate that there is a distinct sound and flavor of professional poetry that I still cannot fathom.  Like stumbling out into a beautiful sunny day when all you know is darkened rooms.  I’m seeing beautiful things, but the light is too bright and their wondrous details are impossible to make out clearly. 

  The poem “Naked Girl and Mirror” is one such poem.   I feel like the “I” in this poem is at odds with their physicality.  Like they are seeing themselves for the first time and are repulsed by their own mortality.  I almost think the speaker in the poem literally is something outside of its reflection.  The word choice makes the speaker sound pleased with many elements of how they look, but still not completely willing to believe that it is themselves.  Like looking at clothing or some other inanimate object.  The end of the poem goes back to the speaker being unhappy with the girl in the mirror. “I resent your dumb and fruitful years” I interpret as being unhappy at … being young?  Being naïve?  Maybe the speaker is a sociopath?

Imagist poem

Pheasant

Emerald verdant hill

Sopping fog morning

Like a flash of fire.

A flame frozen in place, then burning to life, and then gone.

Poem Response: The Street by Stephen Dobyns

  My first reaction to the poem was that it felt like snippets of city life.  Each separate subject became a cuckoo clock figure that danced around in their scripted parts of their lives.  I feel that the author had time to observe these figures, that they were specific individuals that he ran into at some point in the city.  I'll take a guess and say this poem is done in the style of abstract poetry.

  While there are definite figures the descriptions come across in a way one sees a Salavador Dali painting.  I feel as if these events all some how make the author comment bleakly on their existences.  The things they do don't entirely make sense, the subjects and objects are disjointed from reality, even though they are apparent facsimiles of city life.  The final stanza of the poem paints the figures as self absorbed, oblivious, and alone.  I think the author would have preferred to live in the countryside.

Blackbirds, after Wallace Stevens

Sharp black outline on a power line,

While walking home

Words typed into a computer from a recollection.

Clacking of keys,

About 7,060,000 results in half a second

Most of them about an aircraft.

Turdus Merula, Turdus Boulboul, Turdus Albocinctus.

26 more formed into a list

Existing as bits and pieces

White bathes a dark room, the black birds arranged in rows

Many are exactly the same

Their eyes unmoving

Blackness eclipse them and toasters fly by.

Electricity recites them faithfully

In a song of ones and zeroes

The blackbirds are available to all corners of the globe

Conjured by fingers.

How many have seen them before?

How long have they flown?

When will they be reduced to information?

The cold scent of autumn sets in

Leaves crackle and shiver

Pull your jacket closer

A rustle of leaves and you look up

404 File not found.

Have I ever seen a blackbird?

Artists Among Poets

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