Analogy of High School

Never Ask Why

White walls and empty hallways
don’t spash color
don’t stand out
never ask why

Busy streets
filled with mindless paper
puppets, afraid to speak
too loud, to move too
abrubtly, to breathe too
freely
Never Ask Why

obey and succeed
conform and you’ll grow as the
daisy in the linen closet
with a shaded lamp
for sunlight-
you’ll grow into the
muted, dwafed
weed you were planted
to be
NEVER ASK WHY

In the end nothing,
nothing was real.
The laughter stimulated, the smiles
Stitched onto nothingness…

Paper words with paper memories
And never-
Obey, surrender, give-in
Ask-
Conform, comply , live blind
Why
-Mandee Sorensen

Poetry Response 5- Wallflowers by Donna Vorreyer

Seeing as I'm really not in a deep, significant, poetic mood, The Wallflowers was a perfect poem to look at this week. It's really a good poem, but for different reasons than most the poems I enjoy. This poem isn't meant to define life's purpose or change the world's paradigm. It is simply a clever little poem meant simply to say something in a witty manner. She uses clever metaphors; her words flow together quite well. The author is commenting on the decay of decent language. As time goes on, our language becomes more and more impaired. Strangely enough, that was on my mind quite a bit this summer... hence the title of my blog. The author is just wondering why. Why do we have such wonderful words and let them go to waste? Why do we use select words over and over again, until the word becomes simply a word. I don't know why Donna Vorreyer, but if I figure it out, I'll be sure to publish a poem on it!

Poetry Response 4- Beginning Again by Franz Writght

"If I could stop talking, completely
cease for a year,
I might begin to get well," he muttered."
Off alone performing
brain surgery on himself
in a small badly lit
room with no mirror. A room
whose floor ceiling and walls
are all mirrors, what a mess

Above is the only part of the poem I could really understand. Well, I understood the rest but felt like I was missing something. The first stanza just reminded me of summer before this school year began. I started reevaluated everything. Why am I like this? Why do I do this? What can I change to make things better? Thinking about it, a year of silence might do me well. If people stopped talking about themselves for even a day maybe they would realize how much there is to hear. I love the part, "off alone performing brain surgery on himself." I would love to take apart my mind and just tweak it. Maybe I could be more social, smarter, more compassionate; maybe I would know what to say, or how to act; maybe I could stop feeling awkward or get rid of the negativity. Mirrors represent flaws to me. I look in the mirror and see what needs to, or should, change. We can see the physical mirrors everywhere, but the mental mirrors are all delusions. We can never truly change what's already there, as we can with physical features. We can try to improve the traits we hate, but the way we think will never change. I wish I could start again sometimes, make myself different, but it doesn't really work like that.
The form of the poem is interesting. It's actually similar to other poems of this style, but for a different reason. The lines are extremely choppy, the punctuation is there, and yet the lines are not completed by it. I think the process of beginning again is choppy. We try, fail, see no change, try something different, fail, or get worse. It's a confusing process which I think defines the poem through the style.
I wanted to focus on the first stanza, but the second is pretty interesting as well.
And still
it stands,
the question
not how begin
again, but rather

Why?

Maybe I should have been asking myself this all along. When we are sad, lonely, cynical, and just don't fit in, we try to change ourselves, but why? Wouldn't it be a better idea to change our environments rather than conform?

Poetry Response 3- To Myself by W.S. Merwin

Usually I avoid typing the entire poem on these responses, but this one is just so short and spectacular!

To Myself
Even when I forget you
I go on looking for you
I believe I would know you
I keep remembering you
sometimes long ago but then
other times I am sure you
were here a moment before
and the air is still alive
around where you and I
think then I can recognize
you who are always the same
who pretend to be time but
you are not time and who speak
in the words but you are not
what they say you who are not
lost when I do not find you
-W.S. Merwin

I think I really enjoyed this poem; it's centered around the idea of the 'facade.' We all naturally mask who we are, sometimes until we cannot really remember what we really are. "We pretent to be time but you are not time;" we try and fit in where we need to, for a little while. When changing environments, our facades change as well. Humans are chameleons of personality. Depending on the situation, we change our shape, color, texture, or tone. I think humans develop into our facades, it is a learned trait. As children our individuality makes us content, but the day we enter into a public setting, we learn to warp that individuality, or we are expected to do so at least. The more we age, the more our true identity fades. Even after my 17 years, I honestly am not sure what I am if someone were to remove the pressures of society and expectations. Yet it is ironic that as we loose our identities by choice, we then spend years looking for it again. So many young adults seek to find themselves in careers and family life. I have friends who are so confused to "who they are" they try everything to find something that fits as their identity: "Even as I forget you I go on looking for you." Our entire lives we are searching for what we had to begin with. Once we loose our individuality and 'me-ness' I think we can only ever see glimpses of it from then on. In it's entirety, it is gone forever. I love when the author says, "and the air is so alive;" I think we all feel that a little bit. We become so tired of pretending, it's almost as if our facade is suffocating us; yet it has become us, therefor we will never escape it.

Poety Response 2: A Chinese Bowl by Katha Pollitt

I have never been the genius child, but when my parents said to me on Thursday, "Oh, by the way Mandee, we're going to Utah this weekend," even I knew what they were really trying to say was, "Hopefully you didn't procrastinate your poetry blog this week otherwise you'll be stuck doing it at 10:15 on a Saturday night in a log cabin where you'll barely be able to access the internet let alone get your blog to load in less than fifteen minutes or so." Nevertheless, here I am.
We discussed "A Chinese Bowl" in class on Thursday and I decided then this was my favorite poem in the packet. (I will try my best to only say that once.) But no, I really did enjoy it. Katha Pollitt has such an incredible writing style! Her poem speaks of growing up, but she cleverly never blatantly says she is aging. She speaks of a filing cabinet not yet filled with the woes of adulthood. I especially love the lines:
as rain about to fall,
part love, part concentration,
part inner solitude.
Where is that room, those gray-

green thin-lined
scribbled papers
littering the floor?
How did

I move so far away
just living day by day
that now all rooms seem strange,
the years all error?

So many times I think we look back at our lives and wonder if we did everything wrong, "the years all error?" Our childhood generally seems so simple and perfect. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to the rooms of our home and have everything be simple again. To live without regrets and worries.
Just after those stanzas above, Pollitt uses an entire line to write "bowl" on the far right of the page. We discussed this in class and Joey Lopez thought it was because as a child bowls are harder to reach or something like that. I disagree. Seeing as our childhood seems simple, simple things represent childhood to us; a chinese bowl, or a blanket, a toy, a chair. As we grow up, we understand life less and less. Our paridigms become skewed, our logic flawed and the simple joys of life are harder to reach. What once represented what we "think is happiness" as the poem states, becomes only a stationary object and our expectations of happiness supposedly expand, when in all actuality, are decayed by regrets and failure.