Poetry and its Power Essays - Diospyros, Persimmon, Emotion

Poetry and its Power Essays - Diospyros, Persimmon, Emotion Poetry and its Power English 002 Online Professor Cobene Essay 4 Poetry and its Power There is a significant power in all poetry. There is symbolism and power in the words. Poetry creates and gives us all the power of what we cannot say or may not want to say. Instead, we use poetry to convey our loves, or wants and desires, and all of our innermost feelings and thoughts that we normally cannot divulge or say to people in normal writings or settings. Poetry becomes the vehicle by which we can use to move people through our thoughts, feelings, experiences, and lives, and we can tell our story of our journeys along the way. Jane Hirschfield, author and poet of Poetry and the Mind of Concentration puts six central realms or energies onto what lies beneath poetry. In the exploration of poetry, Hirschfield explains that there are six realms that poetry can be put into: music, image, emotion, sound, rhetoric, and voice. Here, we eliminate music and voice, although they are not totally void in these poems, but we focus more on image, emotion, sound, and rhetoric. In the poetry by Li-Young Lee, Persimmons, we find the imagery of a fruit, the persimmon with its taste and look. The author Lee, gives us a vivid rendition of the fruit, by saying what it looks like, what it might smell like, and what it is. Lee writes about ripe persimmons as being soft and brown spotted. He also writes about how they are sweet and fragrant, and how you eat the fruit. There is a joy in this fruit because it invokes images of being sweet, ripe, and smelling good. Lee then goes on to talk about Donna, a woman lying in the grass with him, who is also sweet and smells good. Lee goes on to talk about watching his mother tie yarn, and make animals out of the yarn. Lee talks about how his mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, and we can see the images of a persimmon looking like it has a sun inside of it, in our heads. Lee talks about his father, and him holding the persimmons, and we can see this image as well. We can see Lee in the cellar rummaging through, look ing for different things in his cellar. In the poetry by Debra Allbery, Chronictown, we can see a young girl affected by the fact that she has had to deal with adversity growing up, because those images are described so vividly. Our imagination goes to what Allbery is writing, and we can see every word she is writing. We can hear the metal rattle of the elevator freight lift in her building, and we can see the mattresses on the floor, because it takes our minds there. Allbery wants us to see the life she was living, how she grew up, and what experiences she had had. The poetry by Allbery leads our imaginations to see green floors and walls. This is where the poet wants our minds to go with the imagery. I think that both Lee and Allbery are using imagery to talk about times of their pasts. I think they are outlining or detailing their experiences, and wanting us to share in them, so they are sharing them with us. They are making us see what their lives were like, when they were little, or when they were growing up. For Lee, I think the most important things to him are remembering his times growing up, his mother, his father, and his love or maybe even first love, and comparing a sweet life to sweet fruit. Allbery shows us a different life, one that was close to the nurses and the ill and the sick. In other works, I believe Allbery is showing us the imagery of the hospitals clinics, saying that she then got over that, grew up, and here she is. I think the Allberys works could center on overcoming what was, and Lees work could focus on becoming who he is, from what was. I see the emotion in both of the poems by Lee and Allbery as emotion from the past of emotion from growing