Elena Jiang '23 shares some of her favorite poems!
1. Mad Girl's Love Song, by Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
This is the opening stanza of Sylvia Path’s Mad Girl’s Love Song—a poem that is simultaneously an expression of love and a confession of loss. She goes on to write about fallen Gods and waltzing stars and burning hell, capturing the intersection of a crippled love and a deteriorating mind with heartbreaking sincerity. And perhaps, even if not all of us can relate to her on such a level, we have all experienced these limbos in our mind where we question what we’ve seen and experienced. But as this poem denotes, our realities are just as valid as anyone else’s.
2. Unknown
“Burn bridges
and dance naked
with your tribe
on the islands
that you make.”
I’m going to be honest—this poem was probably on one of my 7th-grade Pinterest boards, and now it’s here, and if that doesn’t say something, I don’t know what does. It’s this feeling of letting go that has stayed with me; the idea that each of us are entitled to an island—a little bubble of existence—that is entirely and irrevocably ours, on which we are free to do whatever we please. On a subtler level, I think this poem alludes to how we frequently disregard indigenous culture, and how even though this scene is beautiful, it is exactly what we have deprived from indigenous people.
3. Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson
“Talk into my bullet hole. Tell me I'm fine.”
Okay, this isn’t a poem, but bear with me. Jesus’ Son is a hauntingly provocative collection of short stories that encapsulate the lives of addicts, felons, and wanderers in rural 1970s America—those marginalized and shunned to the very borders of social and cultural acceptance. And this quote…this quote hits deep. I think it epitomizes our tendency to dehumanize the struggles of those who are stigmatized (drug addicts are lazy, felons don’t deserve re-entrance into society, the list goes on and on), to the point in which we scoff and turn our heads even when their wounds are gaping in our faces. And what breaks my heart is what comes in response: a tone of passive aggressiveness and utter hopelessness—because what else can they do? We’ve shown that we are incapable of legitimate, unprejudiced understanding.
4. pity this busy monster, manunkind, by E. E. Cummings
“listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go”
Go? Go where? This is the last two lines of E. E. Cumming’s poem pity this busy monster, manunkind, in which he criticizes the rapid technological progress of society to be misdirected and over-glorified. Despite being penned in 1944, this poem holds shocking applicability to our current society. What must we have we done to Earth to herald the search for a new planet next door? And what will this planet—this new universe we will colonize—look like, stripped bare of the technological miracle and wreckage we have left on Earth? And when the time comes, will you go?
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