Featuring, George Wallas.

The poetry reading which I attended was hosted by Cliff Bleidner. He wasn't onl the host but he read a few of his own poems as well, most of which I believe were haiku's.

The first poet up to read was George Wallas. Before George went up there we were given a lot of information about him and several of the awards he has received. The first poem he had read was called "I Wanna Go Where The Garbageman Go." It was interesting hearing the poem aloud, you could hear what words the speaker was trying to emphasize. If I were to be reading this poem on paper I don't really think I'd be reading it like the speaker intended, he read it very fast paced I think I would have been reading it slower. The main idea I believe of this poem is to not let little things stress you out, and he compares it to a garbageman and how they don't let things like razors and newspapers bother them.

"Stuck On The BQE Thinking About Jimmy Skyler," was the next poem that Wallas had read, and I hard a hard time understanding this poem because I don't know who Jimmy Skyler is.

The next poem, "That Girls a Chevrolet," was a humorous and easy to understand. The speaker was trying go compare a classic car, to a woman who he believed to be so great that you "can't touch a thing like that."

"This is for the Night Shift Guy," was a very hard poem for me to understand, it was so fast paced I felt lost while trying to keep up with what the speaker was saying.

The last poem he had read, "Then I Kissed Her," didn't even feel like a poem to me, it basically felt like a short story because there were no pauses, no breaks, no rhythm or anything.

Another poet which went up to read, was Carol Bergmann, and her poems were my favorite. She wrote sonnets, beautiful ones about life and love that were just so great to hear.

Another interesting that I heard while I was there, was a man, Robert Windoph, who was translating poems from another language, Slavic I believe, but before he translated the poems he read them in their original language, and the just sounded so beautiful.

Overall I enjoyed going to this poetry reading, but I'm confused with what I like more, hearing the people read them or reading the poems myself. Sometimes it's hard to follow along with the reading, and since I'm so use to reading the poem myself and then listening to it on youTube, I'd most of the time have the poem up on the screen as well just to follow along. I liked the reading a lot though, and the people there were very friendly, it was great to see the actual writers of the poems performing them aloud, because then you're really getting the poem how the speaker wants you to.

Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt, by Jorie Graham

Before looking at any of Klimt's work, I read Jorie Grahams poem. From the very beginning of her poem it seemed as if she was describing this marvelous picture. She is describing the glitter that is coming off the trees, and is trying to say that those beautiful trees aren't doing the world enough justice as they should be. Then she begins to say how the chips that are catching the rays of sun is beautiful, and comparing that to how humans are beautiful. She then begins to speak about how those who are dead, would probably give up anything just to be back here on this beautiful earth again.

When Graham begins to describe Klimts work, it's almost as if she was going from one thing to a complete opposite. I failed to see any connection by talking about what she was, to then mentioning an artist and his work. When she described his work however, it's as if she is trying to say that the details of the art, is what really makes the art. The work wasn't finished but the way that the woman looked, the way her body was drawn out from her mouth to her legs gave the painting such an emotion. I find it interesting how the last lines of the poem are referring to the painting having something to do with pleasure.

After analyzing and reading the poem, I felt as if it would be time to look at the actual paintings, and see if it gives me anymore insight into what the poem is about. The first painting in which I looked at was Buchenwald, which was mentioned in the poem. I found that painting at, http://arthistory.about.com/od/klimt/ig/blochbauerklimts/p_1_ig.htm. While looking at that picture I felt drawn into it. The amount of detail that was used, especially on the trees, including the moss that was so meticulously drawn onto the trees really made the painting so interesting for me. The leaves on the ground look so real with their density, it's almost as if someone had been walking through the woods and took a picture with their camera. Looking at this picture you can see exactly what Graham was describing when she was talking about the beauty of trees. In fact, upon looking at this picture I felt like it was so great that I had sent it to my phone to use as a background.

I think it's great that poets can include works of art in their poetry, because it gives us as readers who enjoy looking at poetry a chance to see what inspires the poets to write.

"One Train May Hide Another", Kenneth Koch

Like several of the poems this week, I had a difficult time interpreting the poem at first. I listened to Koch read the poem two times, and then I read it aloud to myself. At first I felt like he was just going off on a tangent about things that didn't make much sense, and then I began to put more and more thought into it.

I feel like he is trying to show how things will overshadow one another. His whole poem is full of them, but for example, "One small complaint may hide a great one." To me what it means is that you may be complaining about the tiniest thing, when there are other people who have much more severe problems then the small thing that you are complaining about. I feel like I see this a lot, because where I work, we take in complaints from the people from Town of Hempstead, and I find it so frustrating that people will be calling to complain that there neighbor has too many cars in front of their house, or that a shingle is loose on the top of their neighbors house. Meanwhile, there are so many more issues going on then that one little shingle. I think that this poem is basically just a huge metaphor for life. To take things as they come instead of worrying about little things. People are so quick to judge and get things over with that they aren't looking into what really is there already.

Langston Hughes "The Weary Blues"

Reading the poem"Ballad of the Landlord," the first thing that came to my mind was that Langston Hughes was writing to entertain. Watching this video, I couldn't agree any more. Between the music, the tone and the videos/images that were being used to make this video it was hard to even tell it was supposed to be a poem, that it could have easily been turned into song.

I watched the video several times, after the first time I had brought up the poem itself so I could follow along, and while following along I noticed a strange rhyme scheme that was being used. I don't really think it has a pattern but I also think that makes the poem work better. If he were to follow a set pattern through the poem, such as the first seven lines with A A B C C B B, then of course the wording would be different, and he wouldn't have come up with the same result.

I really enjoy reading the work that Hughes does, because he makes his poetry literal, he makes you feel like you were right there in that room while that man was playing the piano, and singing the blues. In this poem I really enjoyed that he actually made words which would be to song and put them into the poem, because that also gave us as readers a sense of what the man was feeling, not just how he was playing.

I think the video did a great job at bringing this poem to life, and the way the images in the video were used, and the videos inside the video were used really tried to capture the moment of how things may have been during that time period.

Poe, Dickinson, Whitman Video Blog

Christopher Walken's reading of The Raven, had actually frightened me a little. I've read the poem before, I've gone through it in classes before. But the tone of his voice, the pauses he would take and even the picture of Poe that started off so tiny and enlarged throughout the reading had made the feeling of the poem a lot more intense. In the video of "Because I could not stop for death" from Emily Dickinson, it certainly was freaky. I think that having the woman in the background saying the poem, gave the reader a much better view on the poem, because when I was reading the poem before watching the video I read it in a more upsetting tone, and throughout this video the speaker is going through several different tones. She starts off very seriously with the first line, but then when talking about the school, fields and setting sun the speakers tone changed and was a lot more soft. I absolutely loved the reading of "O Captain! My Captain!" from Walt Whitman. I think the speaker did a terrific job on emphasizing certain points of the poem and the change of tone throughout the poem really made the listener want to listen. I think it would be very difficult for a person to read the poem and to recite it this way, between the lengths of pauses that were taken, the seriousness of the voice at certain points it really made a huge difference to the poem. In Earl Jones reading of "The Raven," I enjoyed this video a lot more than Christopher Walkens. I think Earl Jones did a better job at showing the softer side of the poem, while Christopher Walkens was more concerned with the horror part of the poem. The two different videos for the same poem were just an example of how people can interpret a poem in many different ways. Overall I think that the videos were able to help us look at a different way of viewing the poem. When we all read poems we all interpret the poems differently, and hearing how other people are reading the poem helps us as poetry students look at the different meanings that the poem is trying to give off.