Poetry Reader Response

Mary Oliver’s American Primitive and Billy Collin’s Picnic, Lightening are both great collections of poems. While one focuses more on nature and the other on more day-to-day things, they both caused me to look at ordinary things in a different way.

One of the most interesting poems that I came across was “Paradelle for Susan” in the Billy Collins collection. It was written in a form that I have never seen before. At the bottom was a note explaining that it is a demanding French fixed form. It is structured so that the first sets of two lines are identical and the following are jumbled lines using the words from the proceeding ones. This is a very refreshing way to look at poetry since all of the other poems have basically the same structure.

American Primitive seemed to have main topics and themes throughout the collection. For example, I noticed that many of the poems were about either ponds (water), honey, and dreams. As a whole, it is concentrated in nature poetry. She seems to enjoy summertime as many things such as blackberries and honey are related to happiness itself. For example, in the poem, “The Plum Trees,” Oliver writes, “the only way to tempt happiness into your mind is by taking it into the body first, like small, wild plums” (84). It almost seems that the plums are a metaphor for happiness. In the poem titles, “Cold Poem,” it seems that the poet is trying to say that winter exists so that we can better appreciate summer. This seems evident to me in the part that reads, “Maybe what cold is, is the time we measure the love we have always had…” (31). As for the subject of ponds, two of the titles include the word, pond, in them, and many other poems involve ponds or water. “White Night” begins with “All night I float in the shallow ponds…” (54) and “A Poem for the Blue Heron” has the line, “Now the Blue Heron wades the cold ponds of November.”

A question I had specifically about a particular poem in the American Primitive collection is that I want to know what Mary Oliver is trying to say about time in the poem, “Blossom,” where it is written, “…into the night where time lays shattered, into the body of another” (50). I cannot fully grasp the meaning here.

I thought it is very interesting how Billy Collins writes about the most random topics. It makes the poetry relatively interesting to read when there are titles such as, “Taking off Emily Dickenson’s clothes,” and “I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey’s Version of “Three Blind Mice”.” I found some of them to be comical because of the subject matter and how they were written. Overall, I think that Billy Collins is my favorite of the two poets.

Since all poetry uses a lot of creative language devices, I think it is important to comment on some of the ones that I found in the collections of poetry. A personification that I really liked was in American Primitive: “The rain rubs its shining hands all over me” (45). In “Taking off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes,” there are a few metaphors at the end: “Hope has feathers, that reason is a plank, that life is a loaded gun that looks right at you with a yellow eye” (75).

Overall, these collections caused me to have a greater appreciation for poetry than I did before. Billy Collins and Mary Oliver both create an interesting atmosphere with their writing and I enjoyed that the poems were relatively easy to follow and obtain their meanings.