Responding to a Poem

Making our own opinions to different pieces of literature is important. We are entitled to our own opinion and we should be allowed to fully express it. I will be responding to two poems, which were unexpectedly shocking to me. They have completely different emotional meanings, but they were equally touching in some way.
“The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche was one of a kind. The imagery in the poem was absolutely…disturbing! I’m not a person with a weak stomach, but when it comes down to murdering people and body parts that are no longer connected to the body, I’m very disturbed. The colonel from the poem seems cold and very “alpha-male.” It’s almost like he is too into himself and his needs to care about having human ears on his kitchen floor. In the poem, it was repellent that, “He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass” (Forche 1). That part of the poem was absolutely the one that stood out the most to me. The description of his house was kept and the fact that he actually had a pistol on the cushion made me believe he was probably a much disliked individual. Constance Coiner stated in an article that the ears belonged to people from El Salvador that were murdered and tortured and that Forche really experience what she stated in the poem. I think that the poem is unique in structure, but the content is very nauseating! It’s almost hard to believe that these occurrences are very real and they still happen in our generation.
Kevin C. Powers wrote a poem that is short and sweet, but it clearly states the point of it. “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” is a poem that makes me think back to all the love movies where the guy gets deployed and goes to war. For such a short poem, it has plenty of emotion. It makes sense that he would write a poem like that because “Kevin C. Powers is a poet, writer, and veteran of the Iraq war” according to Poetry Foundation. This poem really brought a great deal of emotion because I know men that are deployed and have one true love are miserable. They especially go through loads of pain if their partner breaks up with them at war. I watched the movie “Dear John” and it’s a movie with this same setting. He goes to war and she breaks up with him through a letter. It’s just really heartbreaking! The reality is though, that distance can break or make a couple.
Both of these poems were really touching to me in different ways. They both had really good points to make and from my research, they were both based off true life events. Without realizing, the poems I chose had a completely different emotions. “The Colonel” was a very disgusted emotion and “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” was more of a hopeful emotion. It’s remarkable how different poems can have different moods.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnmsGYk1adw&feature=related