tma+DEATH

For this project, I chose to use death as my binding topic for four different poems. The poems I studied were "I Heard a Fly buzz-when i died", "Ghost of a Chance", "We Real Cool", and "Aunt Jennifer's Tiger". Throughout all the poems, the poets write about the movement between life and death. In the poem, "I Heard a Fly buzz- when i died", I, as the reader, interpreted this poem to discuss the person's thoughts and feelings as she realizes they were no longer going to be a part of this world. When Emily Dickinson says, "And then the windows failed, and then I could not see to see" explains how this person has now died. In "Ghost of a Chance", the poet writes about a man who is experiencing the process of death. He is still alive, but struggling, " like a fish half-dead from flopping and almost crawling " is the way that Adrienne Rich describes his process of dying. In "We Real Cool", Gwendolyn Brooks writes this poem, in my opinion, almost as if it were a time line. The poem starts as children who think it is cool to skip school, and then moves on to them staying out late, swearing, fighting, drinking, and soon this all causes death. In "Aunt Jennifer's Tiger," the poet writes about how Jennifer feels regret about not living a happy life and is ready to die. She will move on to death, but life will continue with the memory and hope she left behind in her art. These four poems explain how while you live your life, you are creating a path that eventually leads to your death.

Of all the different poems that I studied, I found "Ghost of a Chance" to be the most empowering. It created many questions in my mind to what the poet was actually trying to say. When Adrienne Rich writes, "You see a man trying to think", makes me wonder what this man is thinking about. This question made me want to read on in the poem. Unfortunately, even after I read the poem ten times, I still was not able to fully uncover what this man was trying to think about. Another line that caused questions in my mind was, "You want to say to everything: Keep off! Give him room!". Why did this man want to be alone, why did he need room? All these sorts of questions made me like this poem more and more as I read it over and over. I like how when I read "Ghost of a Chance," each time I interpret it differently. The first time I read this poem, I thought it was about a man drowning in the ocean. The next time I read it, I simply thought it was just about a man who was about to die. For me, I find poetry especially intriguing when the poet makes you confused and question the main idea of the poem, like Adrienne Rich does in "Ghost of a Chance."