Imagery And Real Life Experiences English Literature Essay

Bruce Bond a poet and editor for American literary review and an English professor at University of North Texas wrote the poem Pill in Best American Poetry. This poem was one of the few I actually really enjoyed. His background in music, English, and teaching really influences his poetry. His has won almost every poetry awards, and has recently written a book. I believe this is because of the way he deliberately places his words, metaphors, and images to influence his reader’s deepest emotions.

Pill by Bruce Bond I could relate to, I enjoyed his poem that seems like it was a narrative story to his life. “Pill” relies solely on a distinguishing crucial arrogance, centering the indication of a “sobriety tablet”, playing with a minor definite idea of a small problem that begins to escalate as his reader gets deeper into his poem. Relating the habits from addiction is something bigger than the sun. Resulting in his readers can relate to from life experience. The opening verse he ties in a sobriety pill with “descend the nerve of the heart” forcing the user to become sober when the addict yearns for the high. “I don’t need, I don’t want!” Bond shows his deep thought on addiction, opening up his soul in great detail of how naked an addict is without the clothes of their drugs, leading me to recall my past addict that still lives inside of me. His poem becomes more emotional revealing with each line read, inverting the world, alerting it to the drug epidemic, as it must, highlight the compulsion for a high to soberness necessarily imposing the harsh reality of an addicts world, shared experience all addicts have, where we inescapably share an unavoidable outcome. My line I liked the most that really shows how deep he was into the drug was “In time you are addicted. And it takes more of the drug to get you back” I remember I was always chasing that first high. I never caught it; I was lost wondering like he was in the poem that he wrote reflecting back on his harsh times.

One of his poems called freaks is about how we stare at disfigured people. With disgust we stare, take pictures, point and laugh. This poem felt as if he was referring to the stares being the freaks. He writes “to look or not to look, choose your self-reproach, which says, it was never the act of looking that mattered, only the power that bears our shame.” His use of imagery as various altered associations and meanings can transport a complete human understanding in limited words. Not considerably a mental picture, metaphors in his poems express to every of sense plus it is characteristically conveyed by metaphorical language. In freaks he paints a picture with these words “When the flash goes off we go blind, given over to a place made of possible blindness. Light overflows the eye as if to clarify the dark we see with.”

The poem Night Arrival is another enjoyable poem. Automatically begins with its imagery he writes “my eyes read my eyelids when I dream.” His imagery words throughout the poem represent actions, feelings, and other sensory and extra-sensory experiences. His obligation is to get their point across in merely a small number of pages, and one of the best techniques to reduce a lengthy story is to use imagery. The conceivable uses for symbolism and imagery in poetry are infinite, and a brilliant poet can use a solitary image to create many altered statements. Bruce bond is a brilliant poet. The last stanza in Night Arrival he writes “The limits of my language are the beginnings of my world. Wait and see, says the world. And see, and see, the tunnel of the eye.” Sums up the way he relates the world with poetry. The way he places all words into lines, lines into stanzas is unlike any poet known. His creations are unique and metaphors inspire more reading. He implies “Alive bed to the floor, floor to the planet. The heart beats its pillow like a path.” It’s exhausting is his point like hiking on a path.

My mother’s closet is an emotionally written poem from his life experiences. He tells the story about after his mother’s death he had the heartbreaking task of cleaning out her home and evenly distributing her belongings. He describes her belongings as once being alive has died with her. He writes “glowing, lost to hours of waking sleep. So dim, her books, she saw no end, only the long dark well of questions, however deep she bowed her head, anxious to believe.” I enjoyed the way he convey imagery in poetry by writing using figurative language implicating metaphors, symbols, and metonymy. Some of his images overlap and combine; resulting in a very deep perspective that the reader comprehends at their level of understanding. The words he chooses are carefully placed to insure to freeze an image; they link a life experience on a sensual level. Capturing a moment, like a picture and the chance of lost experiences helps gives his images power.

The poem that has the best use of metaphors is Wake. Describing his real life experience, that releases an emotional and intellectual complex in a few brief stanzas. Utilizing human behaviors or features to a non-human ideal. The form of his work includes via words and expressions with a meaning very different than the ordinary explanation; thus delivering an impression or sensation. “One day now since my father last tried to speak, since the outer provinces of his body shut down like small cities when the power goes, just the enormity of starlight to guide them on their cold journey into the dawn.”

His collection of writings are similar to the poem in Best American Poetry Putting onto paper what readers experience emotionally, intellectually, and concretely at any time during life. The experience becomes stationary in words, permitting the reader to dwell in and remember it each time reading the poem. He uses his personal triumphs and failures shaping reality, like addiction, dreams, and love, that ultimately become an enduring experience that impacts your own thoughts and feelings. He said in an interview that I believe in inspiration, though I’m also a big believer that the imagination need not vanish once our critical intelligence becomes engaged. It’s possible to imagine critically, though it remains a mystery how this happens. The poem Wake is clearly rooted in factual experience, though I hope it offers some emotional and imaginative resistance to the literal. That tends to be what I aim for.

WAKE

One day now since my father last tried to speak,

since the outer provinces of his body shut

down like small cities when the power goes,

just the enormity of starlight to guide them

on their cold journey into dawn. I am writing

at the edge of the other half of life, the part

without my father in it; I feel the strange

sure pull of the earth I walk here,

the polish of the grass, the distance between me

and my students who look up and wait

for my first questions, knowing so little

of my life, just as I know so little of theirs,

only a poem at a time to hold us together

like children before a fire in the woods.

These months I have heard him steadily

fading in my telephone, his breath gone

short, just the occasional brush of wind

and language, here and there an angry stutter

and release, the little sighs that resign themselves

to his own deep and smoldering basin,

his own coastal reaches tossing in their tides.

The living too leave their ghosts behind.

And his, clearly, always the first to rise.

Somewhere a fork beats a metal bowl;

a strip of bacon crackles like paper at Christmas.

These days moving from room to room

I feel the shadow of this house begin

to lengthen, to feed the other pools of dark.

It’s a mystery still, how vast the valley

inside a body. Blood. It’s what you hear

when you cover your ears, that far surf

where life first sprouted its legs and crawled

ashore to dry its tail in the morning sun.

It’s what sparks beneath a nurse’s mercy,

a red gem brightening in a sting of air.

It’s what calls you to a father’s ragged breathing.

Somewhere a lung fills with water.

Somewhere a great and weary muscle

beats the tender drum of the sky.

It’s the father who knocks on the door

at daybreak, the knock that says, it’s time

son, rise and shine, it’s time to go, it’s time.