Week 3 (1/30-2/5)

City Eclogue

This week was even harder for me then previous weeks.  Not in terms of writing my own poems, but trying to understand the poems that others write.  I got used to one type of poetry from Shakespeare and other sonnet poem writers, but when I had to read City Eclogue I had to get used to reading and understanding a totally different type of poetry all together.  The way that Ed Roberson, who is the writer of City Eclogue, writes his poetry is something that you have to get used to when reading.  The way that he writes is very unique in that he puts large spaces and gaps between words that sometimes make it hard to understand where the pauses are.  Also he seems to hide the real meaning behind what he writes.  This leaves room for different interpretations, depending on the person reading it. 

What you may think the writer means from initially reading it may not be what he or she really wants to convey.  Reading the poems two or three times and also really thinking about what the meaning behind the words are before guessing at what the poet is trying to convey.  This proved very hard for me at trying to paint a picture of what the poet wants me to see.  City Eclogue opened a new view of poetry for me that I didn’t understand and had never really worked with before.  A great example of this is on page 76.  The poem is called Engine.  It is fairly short so it doesn’t drag out.  It wastes no time getting to the point and has strong meaning behind the words that are written.  For example, “You can experience the need to leave     as noise in an otherwise harmonious system     the blues     the leaving and not sets up     as a physical chatter tear you apart”.  This line/section not only started the poem, but it also had a strong message behind it.  I think this is because it taps into the mind of a person and kind of shows how broken or in pieces it is.  While I think that the spaces in lines and sections are to try and make you pause and slow down what you are reading, I also think it adds to the drama behind what he is writing.

One of the poems in City Eclogue that I found really interesting was The Open.  The way that it is written can be very confusing at first, but once you read a few of the poems that he writes, you start to understand why he writes the poems the way that he does.  With these things being said, I found that Roberson used very strong words that helped get the meaning of his writing across.  For example, in the poem, The Open, he used words like strangled, lynched, impossible, segregation and unremittingly to help the reader understand the picture that he is trying to paint with his poem.  Some quotes that I really liked were, “as if it were the strangled neck      of the hourglass that was going up”, and also “God’s strange rope spinning things open out of sky,   up in smoke     our tornado     our lynched black pillar of light.”  I thought that this was referring to Civil Rights or The Civil Rights Movement, along with a lot of the rest of the book.  It is also extremely graphic when you think about it.  I believe he wants you to picture the black pillar being lynched.  This could refer to the death of either Malcolm X or Martin Luther King Jr.  These topics really hit a soft spot with most people and because so, it helps the reader understand what the writer is trying to say.

After reading the entire book two times and some poems three times, you finally start to understand why the poet writes the way that he does.  I believe that Roberson writes a little cryptic because he wants you to think about what the meaning is behind his words.  I also have realized that the large spaces that he puts in the middle of sections, sentences and thoughts are to try and make us pause for a short time to take in what he is saying.  I also think it was to try and add a dramatic effect to what is about to be said in the next line or next section.  At first I didn’t find this technique effective, but after analyzing his writing it actually makes a lot of sense as to why he wrote the poems the way that he did.  I have learned a lot from reading Ed Roberson’s, City Eclogue.  I will take what I have learned from this reading and use it when reading and trying to understand future poetry.