I need to write 4-5 pages MLA format poetry analysis on 3 poems. I have attached the word documents with the 3 poems and the instructions.
Common Read and Poetry Interpretation Paper on Akbar’s Poetry
1.Choose one poem from each part – three poems total.
2.Imagine you are a literary critic writing an article to a scholarly journal. Write a compare/contrast essay discussing the poems’ tone, message, and Akbar’s writing style. In conclusion, think how all of these features come together to create the understanding of the poem? Do these poems have a literary merit? You may use two outside sources to support your claims in addition to the poems. Your article should be 4-5 double-spaced pages long. Use MLA formatting style and follow convention of the standard English.
3.Keep in mind that your article should have a title.
POEMS:
Looking for a Second Chance: Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar
Part I
STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE
I can’t even remember my name, I who remember
So much- football scores, magic tricks, deep love
So close to God it was practically religious.
When you fall asleep in that sort of love
You wake up with bruises on your neck. I don’t
Have drunks, sirs, I have adventures. Every day
My body follows me around asking
For things. I try to think louder, try
To be brilliant, wildly brilliant. We all want
the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,
like the first man to hear a parrot speak), but we live
on an enormous flatness floating between
two oceans. Sometimes you just have to leave
whatever’s real to you, you have to clomp
through fields and kick the caps off
all the toadstools. Sometimes
you have to march all the way to Galilee
or the literal foot of God himself before you realize
you’ve already passed the place where
you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember
the being afraid, only that it came to an end.
Part II
BEST SHADOWS
You love when I’m like this, coated
With ranch dressing and rum. Look under
The bandages- an entire saint! Here’s
What I own: a blackened coin and yes
for an answer. The countdown to the next major miracle
is on. Till then, I’ll manage less and less. Did you rejoice
when you left? If you spin around quickly enough,
it’s almost like being drunk. This has to do
with the liquids in your skull. I never told you
about the tiny beetle I saw crawl out of your ear, afraid
you wouldn’t sleep in my bed again if you knew.
I wish you were here so I could bend a mirror
Around your face, pour you back into you. Ah,
there goes another wish. Minute to minute I’m fine-
right lung, left lung, blink- but the late hours
get so long. One of the best shadows I cast is the one
that ripples over water. There is so much ink
in our river now; it’s swallowing up all the green.
Do you know how hard it is to dig a new river?
To be the single tongue in a sack full of teeth?
Sometimes I get the feeling you’re never coming back.
Part III
GOD
I am ready for you to come back. Whether in a train full of dying
Criminals or on the gleaming saddle of a locust, you are needed again.
The earth is a giant chessboard where the dark squares get all the rain.
On this one the wet is driving people mad- the bankers all baying
in the woods while their markets fail, a florist chewing up flowers
in the air while the ocean hoots itself to sleep. I live on the skull
of a giant burning brain, the earth’s core. Sometimes I can feel it pulsing
through the dirt, though even this you ignore. The mind wants what it wants:
daily newspapers, snapping turtles, a pound of flesh. The work I’ve been doing
is a kind of erasing. I dump my ashtray into a bucket of paint and coat myself
in the gray slick, rolling around on the carpets of rich strangers
while they applaud and sip their scotch. A body can cause almost anything
to happen. Remember when you breathed through my mouth, your breath
becoming mine? Remember when you sang for me and I fell to the floor,
turning into a thousand mice? Whatever it was we were practicing
cannot happen without you. I thought I saw you last year, bark wrapped
around your thighs, lurching toward the shore at dawn. It was only mist
and dumb want. They say even longing has its limits: in a bucket, an eel
will simply stop swimming long before it starves. Wounded wolves will pad
away from their pack to die lonely and cold. Do you know how scary
it can get here? The talons that dropped me left long scars around
my neck that still burn in the wind. I was promised epiphany, earth-
honey, and a flood of milk, but I will settle for anything that brings you now,
you still-hungry mongrel, you glut of bone, you, scentless as gold.