Please post a 200 word response to one of the poems from the readings assigned for today's class (Carruth 525, cummings 526, Reed 534, Strand 538), but before you compose your response for this post, read the poem that you selected aloud, at least once. For your response, focus on two questions: 1) What does the speaker of the poem have to say? and, 2) What poetic techniques does the speaker of the poem use to say it?
There are millions of words in the English language, yet we choose to repeatedly apply the same ones until we are desensitized to them and they lose almost all meaning. In Hayden Carruth’s “An Apology for Using the Word “Heart” in Too Many Poems”, he demonstrates the forms in which the word “heart” is used and often misused. He begins by saying that “sometimes it’s a muscle/Sometimes courage or at least hustle/Sometimes a core or center, but mostly it’s/A sound that slushily fits/The meters of popular songwriters without/Meaning anything”. Though the word is equivocal, many use it simply for end rhyme or to maintain a specific pattern. Later on, as the speaker’s anger about the word’s misuse grows, the poem’s beat of rhythm begins accelerating by removing punctuation like periods and commas. This technique is meant to simulate a quickening heartbeat. There are numerous times in which the meaning of “heart” implies that the speaker is not sincere in his apology, however as he goes on, his casualty wanes. The final two lines of “An Apology for Using the Word “Heart” in Too Many Poems” seem entirely earnest and unpretentious. “But given/This definition, driven/Though it is out of a poet’s necessity, isn’t/The word needed at present/As much as ever, if it is well written and said/With the heart and the head”.

There are a number of times of the meaning of “heart” that might be construed as being not serious or extremely casual and frivolous,