ask and you shall recieve, leeper.

Yes. This is for Leeper who said "If you're quitting facebook, you should write on your blog more."
You convinced me. I can't stop anyway.

Well, you might regret this, because this post is about poetry.
my favorite.

these are my two favorite poets. I don't care that it's cliché. Frost and Sandburg.
I want to relate an incident that occurred in my American Literature class the other day.

Our homework had been to read Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens. The class was in an uproar. They ALL hated it. It seems that I am the only one in the entire room that had an unconditional and heart-wrenching love for modernist poetry.

"What does it MEAN?" they asked. "We don't understand The Emperor of Ice Cream, what is Birches about? The Red Wheelbarrow is DUMB! The chickens are irrelevant, and the imagery is stupid."
They ripped apart my soul, and stomped on it.
The teacher tried to explain, "You are looking for a reason." he said. "This isn't about reasons. As mormons, you believe in Truth, with a capital T. But this is poetry. This is relativity."
They only bellowed the louder. "This isn't poetry!" they called.
"It's not about reasons!" I exclaimed, and they turned in horror. "They arrange the words to create and stir emotions, and feelings. Read the words, and let them do something to you. Don't look to do something to the words."
"But what does it mean?" they asked again. Each of them searching for the clarifying couplet at the end of a sonnet.
One boy raised his hand.

"I did like Grass," he admitted. "By Sandburg. I thought it was beautiful, and hopeful. Surrounding the death, there was new life. However bloody, there was still green and springtime."

Kill me. You did not.

That is not even remotely what that poem is about. Let's take a look.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo,

Shovel them under and let me work--

I am the grass; I cover all.




And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?




I am the grass.

Let me work.

We forget. We forget and we kill again. The grass covers up the bodies, until Gettysburg is nothing more than a monument and a speech. We don't remember and we kill again.

"What does that mean? 'I am the grass?'" a girl asked. Her brow furrowed.
"It's a poetic form."
"Why is he the grass? What does it mean?"

Oh my goodness. If someone asks that again, I will go crazy.
What does that mean?