Wazzy's Analysis of Civil War Photograph

Civil War Photograph

Flesh and blood turn mathematic.
The limbs illustrate opaque angles,

the sky rotates three hundred sixty
degrees around eyes burning

black zeros into its center. The light
is solid geometry, testing the premises

of interlocking masses: rifle stocks
that won't be stripped of hands,

legs nesting among the salley branches,
brocades mounting bones, sheer

vests and their torsos intersecting
brambles, plains crawling forward

into the smoke. The scratched lens
is a blackboard solving equations,

each one for its elusive X: maybe
a single cell regrouping, maybe the tasteless

cleanup of an unrelenting sun, maybe a wild
animal tracking fresh scent into focus.

War is a classic event used in poetry today. It is something that anybody could imagine given the proper use of imagery. James Doyle has done a fantastic job capturing the essence of somebody who has returned to a battlefield after death has occurred. The images he uses don’t describe a soldier in battle, rather a man who is examining the aftermath in an attempt to uncover what has happened. The narrator of this poem seems to be looking at a blood soaked battlefield ready to capture the moment with his camera.

I love the fact that this poem makes a statement in the first line and then proceeds to use language that refers back to the first line. “Flesh and blood turn mathematic” illustrates the type of person that is examining the battlefield. It seems as if it is a scholar who is looking at the mangled bodies trying to understand. He speaks in a purely analytical sense and makes countless references to the “mathematic” appearance of the scene. The second verse  uses mathematical terms to create the image of wounded soldiers staring up at the sky for days on end. The fact that the sky had rotated three hundred and sixty degrees seems to represent the idea of days passing. The forth line uses that term geometry in order to show that the bodies were so mangled that they no longer resembled people but rather that they resembled shapes. The scratched lens that he refers to in the sixth verse only provides more information into the narrator’s identity. It is as though he is using a camera to capture the essence of the carnage so the he may attempt to relook at the scene and understand what has happened.  The only time that the other strays away from his analytical thinking is the final verse when he states “maybe the tasteless cleanup of an unrelenting sun, maybe a wild animal tracking fresh scent into focus. Even though he is referring to his previous statement about solving equations he finally brings a natural feeling into the poem which allowed me to finally see the battlefield as a place of pain rather than the lines and angles that originally described the scene.

The Narrator is attempting to do the same thing that anybody who reads a war poem is trying to do, understand. He is trying to understand war and its complexities the best he can. But he is unable to look at the field with the emotion necessary to understand the pain felt by the bodies.  He turns soldiers into the variable “X”, a simple math term that can stand for anything. This takes away from the sacrifices that have been made by the soldiers that were in the battle and turns them into simple data. In a way it is almost as if he is dehumanizing war, making Civil War Photograph different from any other war poem I have ever read. Overall, even though the poem was lacking in the emotional department (which is usually a requirement in war poetry)  I thoroughly enjoyed being able to view war from a different perspective and not get caught up in the feelings that arise from other war poems.

Analyses of The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life

The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident.
I Thought of My Life

The egg had frozen, an accident.
I thought of my life.
I heated the butter anyhow.
The shell peeled easily,
inside it looked
both translucent and boiled.
I moved it around in the pan.
It melted, the whites
first clearing to liquid,
then turning solid
and white again like good laundry.
The yolk kept its yolk shape.
Not fried, not scrambled,
in the end it was cooked.
With pepper and salt, I ate it.
My life that resembled it ate it.
It tasted like any other wrecked thing,
eggish and tender, a banquet.

When given the chance to choose your favorite out of a selection of items, it doesn't mean that the item chosen 
is special or impressive at all. In fact, it simply means that you like it more than the other choices presented to
 you. Jane Hirshfield's The Egg Had Frozen, an Accident. I Thought of My Life was just one of seven topics that I 
have been given the chance to write about. After reading all of the poems presented to me for this week I came
to realize that I disliked every one of them. But, out of every one of them it was The Egg Had Frozen, an
 Accident. I Thought of My Life that caught my attention more then the others. So in a way Hirshfield's 
poem was my favorite of this week, but by no means would it be a poem that I would recommend to others.


Jane Hirshfield's blatant attempts at conveying her meaning by stating it only shows that she is ill equipped at 
using the English language as way of creating a metaphorical representation of her lack luster life. In her defense
if she had not stated that she "thought of my life" then I would have had no idea what the poem was meant to
represent. So the incredibly amateur technique of spoon feeding the reader into understanding the overlying 
themes of your poems was in fact the only way that the reader would be able to understand the poem at all. 
In the basic sense, she forced everyone to seem dumber than they most likely are in order to gain the mental 
advantage and save us from our confusion by aiding us in finding meaning in The Egg Had Frozen, an 
Accident. I Thought of My Life.


Now that I have expressed my true feelings about this poem I can know do an honest analyses of Hirshfield's 
poem. The poem begins in the same way as life, with an egg. An egg that has been frozen in time and won't
change anymore until it is exposed to the world. The simile that she uses comparing the white of the egg to 
laundry is not only an expression of her role as a typical woman in today's society. Towards the end she 
writes about how her life is nothing special at all. Her egg wasn't scrambled or fried, scrambled being the 
exciting and random life while the fried egg is the neat and tidy life where everything is in its proper place. 
In fact she goes onto say that her life was like any other wrecked thing, for it was as if her whole life she had 
been trapped in the frying pan with no means of escape. She was thrown into the pan with a little bit of butter 
so that she would have the ability to escape but never made it out. The line that stuck out the most to me was
 "My life that resembled it ate it", and how bad it is. There is no enjambment to save this line from the crime of
throwing out the book of basic sentence structure. I feel that she attempted to convey an extremly deep 
emotional idea but unfortunatly her attempt ended in failure. This is the only sentance in the entire poem that 
makes literaly no sense to me. She attempts to say the she ate the thing that represents her, but in a way doesn't 
that show an even deeper meaning into what her life is like. If so then everything we have been told to believe 
represents her life has to be deeply reinterpreted thanks to this line. Therefore in order for one to understand this 
poem it must be read a minimum of two times in a row because its the only way to understand her overly complex
writing. Even if it ruins the poem on the first read the fact that one is forced to reexamine the entire poem is the 
most intriguing thing about this poem, if it were not for this I would have never had shared this poem with those 
reading. The only thing that this poem has is staying power, you want to read it one more time so that you can 
understand her ramblings. After that the poem is put into the bottom shelf of your mind, where it will never be read
again.

Nobody Care About Persian Cats

A Found poem from the TV Guide

A New York love story,
without Oprah or Ellen
The world is fatal
For I am a Family Guy,
Or I was, before
I met your Mother
Now I want to
Be a Millionaire,
With Golden Girls and the Nanny,
The Final score, the end of days,
How Mad Men are made
the last temptation, Go! Reba! Go!
But Don't Forget
I almost got away with it,
political assassination, two bodies in the lab,
What would you do?
Alone in your Chamber of Secrets,
a villain who can't feel pain,
A master piece classic, a perfect getaway without a trace,
 cops obsessed,
six died of fright
con artists pick quirky heiress for last hustle,
Babes, Blasts and Blahs

By Wazzy

Suicide Poem 


Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it "Chops"
because that was the name of his dog
And that's what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and a gold star
And his mother hung it on the kitchen door
and read it to his aunts
That was the year that Father Tracy
took all the kids to the zoo
And he let them sing on the bus
And his little sister was born
with tiny toenails and no hair
And his mother and father kissed a lot
And the girl around the corner sent him a
valentine signed with a row of X's
and he had to ask his father what the X's meant
And his father always tucked him in bed at night
And was always there to do it
Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines
he wrote a poem
And he called it "Autumn"
because that was the name of the season
And that's what it was all about
And his teacher gave him an A
and asked him to write more clearly
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because of its new paint
And the kids told him
that Father Tracy smoked cigars
And left butts on the pews
And sometimes they would burn holes
That was the year his sister got glasses
with thick lenses and black frames
And the girl around the corner laughed
when he asked her to go see Santa Claus
And the kids told him why
his mother and father kissed a lot
And his father never tucked him in bed at night
And his father got mad
when he cried for him to do it.
Once on a paper torn from his notebook
he wrote a poem
And he called it "Innocence: A Question"
because that was the question about his girl
And that's what it was all about
And his professor gave him an A
and a strange steady look
And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door
because he never showed her
That was the year that Father Tracy died
And he forgot how the end
of the Apostle's Creed went
And he caught his sister making out on the back porch
And his mother and father never kissed
or even talked
And the girl around the corner
wore too much makeup
That made him cough when he kissed her
but he kissed her anyway
because that was the thing to do
And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed
his father snoring soundly
That's why on the back of a brown paper bag
he tried another poem
And he called it "Absolutely Nothing"
Because that's what it was really all about
And he gave himself an A
and a slash on each damned wrist
And he hung it on the bathroom door
because this time he didn't think
he could reach the kitchen.

by Stephen Chbosky

10 GREAT poems

10. Children of Gaza, by Michael Rosen
9. Phenomenal Woman By Maya Angelo
8. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
7. LOCKED OUT by Robert Frost
6. Longing by D.L. Whited
5. Amazing by Jaclyn R. Svaren 
4. Blesseds by David Weller
3. If You Forget Me By Pablo Neruda
2. To You By Walt Whitman
AND #1 best of all time, Suicide Poem by Stephen Chbosky