Above the River

There were two poems written by the same man in our place poems packet that really stood out to me and made me have to read over them more then 4 times each. James Wright is a writer who is obviously well disconnected from his own life and feelings and therefore he employs his trajectories into his own poems. For Example, In his first poem Lying in a Hammock in William Duffy's farm in Pine Island, Minnesota I was completely caught off by the title, seeing as no other poem I've ever read had such a literal image of the place where their small story is taking place. The next thing i noticed was his use of simile to compare the butterfly in the yard on the black trunk to "blowing like a leaf in a green shadow." He then goes on to describe how "the cowbells follow one another into the distances of the afternoon." He delivered such short phrases of descriptive imagery in his writing that it was hard to read between the lines that he seems to be utterly bored with his simple and quiet life that he has had while lying in the hammock in William Duffy's farm. He even went so far as to say that he wasted his life. Revealing to me that he is not satisfied with the simplicity of this life.

The second poem is also written by James Wright and it is also titled explicitly so as to envision the location they are in.
In Response to a Rumor That the Oldest Whorehouse in Wheeling, West Virginia Has Been Condemned, is another poem he wrote with the same simplistic feeling, only this time it had a more lonely feel to it. He described that he would be "alone as he always was alone when he strolled down along" here I saw a little bit of assonance here with the repetition of words that have similar vowel sounds. The next verse went on to describe his creep like ability as he hid in the hobo streams and watched down river as the women swung their purses and poured down the long street in the river, showing a bit of ambiguity to me, and honestly i have no clear understanding for what he meant by this when i read it. Towards the end he ends his poem with the mention of nobody committed suicide, but only found death beyond Bridgeport Ohio, which again, I still don't understand what he means by this. He ended his poem the same as the first with a depressing and somber tone.