Poetry is where we are ourselves.

For some reason at first I did not comprehend that Elizabeth Alexander wrote the poem, Ars Poetica #100:  I Believe.  There is a sense of everyday life in this poem, which was also evident in the poem Praise Song for the Day.  For instance, Alexander compares poetry to dirt in the corner, or what you overhear on a bus.  This means that poetry is everywhere, and is just waiting for someone to be inspired.  She uses parenthesis to channel thoughts, or to simply commentate specific ideas.  In these parentheses, Alexander mentions Sterling Brown, who was a black poet during the Harlem Renaissance.  Jazz and blues influenced Brown, and his poetry, like most poems of that time period, reflected racial issues.  The poem can either be read with the content in the parenthesis or without, and the poem makes sense.  However, with the parenthesis, the reader is given an insight to the speaker’s thoughts for their work.  They help to enforce the motives and artistic choice of the author.

Now for the form, Alexander uses enjambment and couplets to push the boundaries of this poem.  She uses multi-syllabic words together in one line, after a simple line with few syllables.  This creates an offset flow, making it seem somewhat like a tongue twister when alliteration is used.  As previously stated, enjambment is used frequently throughout this poem.  Usually the words of enjambment start with the last word in one stanza, and continue in the next couplet.  This serves a purpose because it helps to connect everything together, for example in the third and fourth couplet, the poem shifts from the image of “clam flats” to “the proverbial pocket book.”  If someone asked me to draw a connection between these two things, I’m not sure I could accomplish it as smoothly as Alexander did.  I enjoyed this poem more than Praise Song for the Day because the shifting enjambment keeps the reader on his or her toes, and each stanza has a different message about the meaning of poetry, and in the end these all come together to form one giant image.   The poem evolves full circle from the lines, “Poetry/ is where we are ourselves,” to “Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)/ is the human voice,/and are we not of interest to each other?”  To me, this is saying that poetry is in everyone and everything; we just need to look around every once in a while and notice the beauty.