Mckay's tropical topical poetry

Claude Mckay. Wow...could this guy be any more topical? This guy seriously reminds me of the indie and hardcore artists that come out with one word song titles for their entire album. Relatively, this is exactly what Mckay has done. He picks a topic and rolls with it. He chooses to discuss, describe and expose the subject of choice in a way that captures the attention of his audience. I easily find his poetry a lot easier to read than say Eliot's. He gets right to the point of what he is trying to get across. As such in his poem "The Tropics in New York", he uses descriptive views of the surroundings to illuminate the bigger picture. For example, the lines "Set in the window, bringing memories of fruit trees laden by low singing rills" and "Bananas ripe and green, and ginger root" further emphasize the tropics of New York. But then he goes into a much deeper tone that focuses on the emotion of the moment.
I would say that the poetry Mckay writes has a more modern feel to it even though his works were written in the early part of the 1900's.
http://lemonhound.com/2014/02/28/george-murray-three-poems/
George Murray writes a few poems here and there for lemonhound.  I chose to pick out his poem "Indicator Click" because of his use of topical poetry. For instance, this poem is situational in it's use of topic and takes a look in depth to the specific subject as well as possibly a deeper meaning. This poem, of course, is about the little things that happen here and there while driving down the road. It spurs the emotion to think about the smaller things that happen in everyday life that way may not even notice because we are simply too busy. It kind of does reflect the other poem a bit with the use of this tactic of the simple things of everyday life that we may or may not notice.

The garden

One thing that struck me about H.D.'s poetry was how she slowly crept in to talks of being a recognized poet by simply going along with the flow of expressing herself through her vivid and distinct works. Her writings being recognized in that time period was unheard of. Of course, Pound had a huge part to do with getting her stuff out there but nonetheless, her material spoke for itself and wasn't totally over the top for her audience to read. Compared to Gertrude Stein, she wasn't as outspoken about feminism but was very subtle with her opinion. It almost seemed as if she was just content being where she was and never really pushed the boundaries. As said before, she wrote what she was passionate about and tried not to cause a stir within the poetry world. Although, there may have been a poem or two in her works that would question he audiences motives about supporting a male industry of writers. One poem in particular that stood out to me is the work "Garden". This is a tremendously and beautifully written poem. It gives just an amazing and vivid view of nature throughout. H.D. acts as the narrator making  requests to "mother nature" as we see it and asking certain things to happen within its domain. Lines such as "O wind, rend open the heat, cut apart the heat, rend it to tatters." and "Cut the heat- plough through it, turning it on either side of your path" really harsh side of nature in a very tender way.
 http://lemonhound.com/2014/03/14/michael-casteels-two-poems-and-one-frog-pond-sudoku/
Another poet I found quite interesting, Michael Casteels, writes a sonnet that has a setting within nature in one of his works. Lines such as "The irises arrive, serene and swallowing
the orchard" and "A pheasant
integrates from treetop to treetop; the curtains
part and there she is" help set the mood of the overall poem. Surprisingly this poem is about an out of order type writer but the author does a great job captivating its surroundings within its setting.

The Waste land of Skin and Fish

Eliot's "Wasteland" or really any of his poetry, for that matter, was very hard to articulate and analyze to any degree. This is definitely a poem you can actually write a couple commentaries on because of the material presented with the poem. You can tell that his material is very well thought out and used in a very cultured and refined manner. After discussing it in the last class, reading it for the first time was very confusing because of the amount of information and different points of narration given throughout. The narration is very hard to follow and it confuses the reader because it switches off suddenly without any kind of notice.
I'm going to compare Jaime Forsythe's poem "Skin to Fish", a more modern work, to T.S. Eliot's Wasteland. For Eliot's poem, he uses an enormous amount of symbolism to represent the picture of the wasting away of society as we know it. Forsythe uses a similar tactic with this of giving a tremendous amount of imagery within the text keep the reader interested. Both of these authors use clever words or illustrations to further identify the point or story they are telling. From an outside perspective, "The Waste Land" is a rather large poem conditioned to go into every living detail that the chosen narrator dictates if you really sit down and look into it. But from a broader perspective or outside view, Eliot paints such a big picture of what is going on that it's almost hard to fathom the idea of what the actual point of the poem is. Fortunately for Forsythe's poem, his poetry could've gone to a deeper level of illustration and he could've gone for a couple more pages, but he chose not to. He puts in just enough to keep the reader interested. Of course, his poem was found on a blog site, so I guess He had no choice but to keep it to a certain length for attention deficit reasons with his audience. There is definitely a lot more I could say about both of these poems but these are few things that stood out right off the bat.
http://lemonhound.com/2014/03/07/jaime-forsythe-two-poems/

Ezra Pound's poetry is very significant in the way that a lot of his works feel like a narrative with a meaning behind it. In the poem "Portrait d'une Femme", Pound paints a very vivid picture for his reader and is anything but discreet when it comes to telling the story within his poem. "In a station of the Metro", Pound uses two lines to portray a picture of a Paris subway. But is it really? To the common reader this could mean a lot of different things. Well let's take a closer look. "The apparition of these faces in the crowd." The common consensus is that the poet is simply seeing different faces within the station. Well yes, this is true, but if the faces are blended together, wouldn't that mean that the station would in fact appear crowded? On to the next line, Pound recites "Petals on a wet, black bough." This line, in fact, takes us to back to the first line. It simply describes the faces of the people. I can't say I'm exactly sure what the author is getting at but it seems as though he's telling the audience of the gloominess of the subway station. After reading this, I turn to the next page to find that the poem has ended. This came as a disappointment personally because Pound did an amazing job drawing his audience in just two lines. You could actually dwell on these two lines for a while and still come up with different ideas of what they mean. So why isn't there more to the story? He definitely left me in the middle of the subway station without a ticket on this one.
George Murray recently submitted a few poems to lemonhound recently and one of them appeared as a simple narrative to the common reader. "Proper Punctuation" being the poem, it sets up a stage of something that's about to happen and is situational. Compared to Pound's two line poem, this one just isn't as formal and seems to be "dumbed down" to a sense where it doesn't make you think at all. Of course, the writer had his own style and his own message he was trying to give with his form but it's no where near the craftiness of Pound. http://lemonhound.com/2014/02/28/george-murray-three-poems/