Thomas+Nicolella

"Poetry is the silent voice that is heard everywhere inside of us." - Unknown

Memory Poem: The Rival of the Water

The breeze, The constant swaying of the sand. The water, The dormant churning of the liquid oasis. The sky, The creator of the breeze, the compliment to the water. The sand, The constant rival of the water.

The sound of the breeze, The taste of the water, The sight of the sky, The feel of the sand.

Memory Poem: Shock

The day was normal, The school day had gone by and my head was pounding The thoughts had been flushing through my head

School was over, The ride home was fast The headphones released a wonderful melody into the bowels of my ears.

The short walk home from the bus was short to say the least. Summer was coming on and the birds released a harmony that formed a symphony, with the melody already moving within the confines of my ears.

The familiar smell of my mothers cooking was absent. I stuck the key into the lock and turned it to hear the gentle turning of the gears. The door opened and I was shocked to see my grandmother motioning me to come in.

Come in, come in, she motioned Your father is in the hospital I started to feel the sweat delicately slip down the side of my face.

He slipped into a diabetic shock My palms began to close shut and sweat began to produce itself inside of them like the magma at the center of the earth. I was in shock.

An Ode to Writing

The pencil moves to the left and to the right, It sprays onto the paper the words that would come from my mouth. Like an artist with his brush, I paint the words.

The words form a picture. The story within the words combine to make picture. The picture tells the same story. The words that made the picture move and shape themselves They reshape themselves with each word added. A symphony of words meaning something to me and something else to another

Riff Poem: Conquest

A battle raged: lances and swords conquest for revenge, domination.

The unbearable lust for what was once theirs. The metal boots smash the ground Piercing bellows of crushing soldiers break through the city walls now hollow as can be

Raging fires, pillaging soldiers, lifeless bodies

(First line originally from "A Book Full of Pictures" - Charles Simic)

Analysis of my own poetry:

My writing, I would say is a mix of what many people have seen before mixed with my own style. To myself, it is nothing special but others may say otherwise. My writing style with poems is much different when compared to the way I write an essay or article. When looking at an essay that I have previously wrote it is impossible to distinguish how I could translate that into a poem. Maybe it’s because I feel an essay should be as detailed as possible and this is not the case for a poem, in my mind.

When writing a poem I have a tendency to make up the time, setting, and the topic on the spot. I never find myself thinking up something to write about. I usually just pick a topic and write about it whether it is war, school, etc. I am very good at writing poems on the spot but I will not do well when I am given a topic to write about. I’d rather think up a topic myself and I feel more accomplished when I come up with my own topic and complete a poem to follow that topic or interest.

Usually when writing poems, I like to start them with long lines, followed by a line with one or two words that are really powerful. I often times have three to four lines that are fairly long but are very gentle and I quickly go into two or three lines that are very robust and have strong meaning to them. I also like the way a poem looks when constructed with both very long and very short lines of text. Something about a poem that looks good on paper just makes it sound better to me. An excerpt from one of my poems, “The Rival of the Water”

The breeze, The constant swaying of the sand. The water, The dormant churning of the liquid oasis. The sky, The creator of the breeze, the compliment to the water. The sand, The constant rival of the water.

My poem writing style may seem familiar to most people but I write in this way because it best suits me. My writing style is not encrypted, but straight forward but I write poems so that I will enjoy and hopefully others as well.

Poet Analysis: Charles Simic

Charles Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where he had a traumatic childhood during World War II. In 1954 he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his mother and brother to join his father in the United States. They lived in and around Chicago until 1958. His life in Yugoslavia definitely changed how he thought when writing and thinking of ideas for poems. Although his time in his home country was short, he seemed to love it there and most of his poems are consisting of memories of his birthplace in Yugoslavia.

Simic has written about a great variety of things about his time spent in Yugoslavia and in fact, most of his poems are about personal experience. He tells a different story in each poem and never talks about the same thing in two separate poems. His poems often reflect on what happened during the summer months of his life.

The poems that Charles Simic writes are always personal, but in almost every one of them he seems to add a hint of fiction, or something to make the poem more interesting or fun to read. You can see this in an excerpt from one of his poems, “A Book Full of Pictures”

The pages I turned sounded like wings. "The soul is a bird," he once said. In my book full of pictures A battle raged: lances and swords Made a kind of wintry forest With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.

Simic has published about sixty books of poetry, with only twenty of them containing his poems. The other books were translated poems from writers in France, Yugoslavia and Russia. I feel like seeing these poems and translating them has influenced the way that he writes as a poet. With his personal experiences and wisdom of other poets in his home country and others, he is able to combine the two and form poems that he thinks people will enjoy, which many do.