The Great Blue Heron

“The Great Blue Heron” is a stanza free verse poem written in memory of Kizer’s mother, Mabel Ashley Kizer. It depicts a young child seeing a tattered looking heron on the beach when she is young, and seeing it again when spreading her mother’s ashes on the beach fifteen years later. The heron’s tattered appearance is described using simile and metaphor. Kizer uses detailed imagery and connotative language. The tone of the poem is mournful and nostalgic. Enjambment is used throughout the poem and creates a unique flow to the poem. Kizer uses foreshadowing in the poem to help create structure in the poem. When the narrator shows her mother she realizes, “My mother knew what he was.” This foreshadows the future death of the mother. Herons are symbols of life prosperity, so Kizer’s use of it as a harbinger of death is paradoxical. The theme of this poem is to describe death and its effect it has on memories. The poem is mostly spent in reminiscence of the past as the narrator remembers standing on the beach “fifteen summers ago.” It is shown the beach was a place of many happy memories in the lines, “So many rockets ago/So many smokes and fires/And beach-lights and water-glow.” But the happy memories serve only as time passed between the appearances of the heron. Most of the poem is spent describing the heron. It is the narrator’s awareness of the possibility of her mother’s death. As time passes, its physical form becomes more substantial. At the start of the poem the heron is, “Shadow without a shadow,” but at the end of the poem when the narrator is spreading her mother’s ashes, the heron is “Denser than my repose.” The heron is a “Superimposed on a poster/Of a summer by the strand.” The memories of summers on the beach are blocked by the heron that foreshadowed her mother’s death. “The Great Blue Heron” showed mourning and how it can alter and overshadow memories using vivid imagery, foreshadowing, and enjambment.

Outliers

Outliers: A Story of Success is a novel written by Malcolm Gladwell. It discusses how extremely successful people came to be. Gladwell uses numerous studies and examples from history to prove his points and draw conclusions. The book is divided into two sections: Opportunity and Legacy. In Opportunity, Gladwell describes the stories of Canadian hockey players, geniuses, a man named Christopher Langan, and New York lawyers in 1950s. In the second part of the book, Legacy, Gladwell illustrates how our heritage and culture we inherit affects how our personalities. Gladwell uses examples of family feuds in the Appalachians, airplane crashes, Asians’ ability to excel in mathematics, and KIPP Academy. Gladwell writes in an informative tone, but manages to avoid becoming dry facts. He uses vivid descriptions of the background of each of the stories he tells to give the studies and history life. Gladwell breaks down the romanticized view we hold of incredibly successful people, and thoroughly explains what factors in their lives and background attributed to their success. Gladwell explains that success is not just a matter of hard work and talent. He uses the example of Christopher Langan, an incredibly brilliant man with an IQ of 195, who ended up a college drop-out because he could not get opportunities to help him finish a higher education. Langan was talented and hard-working but he was not able to succeed. In Opportunity, Gladwell concludes that success is a matter of being born into the right circumstances, with a drive to succeed and work hard. The second part of the book was what I found the most interesting. In this portion of the novel, Gladwell describes and explains how the cultural legacy we inherit from where we’re from and our family distinctly affects our personalities and how we act. One example he uses is the phenomenon of Asian countries success in mathematics. To explain this, Gladwell goes back to the history of southern China and their dependence on rice paddies. The process of rice farming is incredibly labor intensive and needs constant care and attention. Since China had such a need for rice it created a culture that put an extreme value on hard work. Meanwhile in European countries, the crops grown needed to be rested every few years and is much less labor intensive than rice paddies. This difference in agriculture created the idea in European culture of the necessity of rest. Gladwell proves that this phenomenon is still relevant today by talking about standardized testing scores. The TIMSS is a standardized test that has a 125 questionnaire and is very difficult to finish. The students that were able to finish the questionnaire were the same students that did well on the math section. These students were mostly from Asian countries. Gladwell correlates this success to the cultural legacy from the rice paddies. Outliers: The Story of Success is an incredibly interesting read that helps create a new perspective on the idea of success and what leads to it.

Carolyn Kizer

Carolyn Kizer is an award winning American poet. I have read a few of her poems, the two I have looked into the most are "A Child's Guide to Central Ohio" and "Afternon Happiness." In both of these poems she creates a new perspective on romaticized moments of life. "A Child's Guide to Central Ohio" reveals the trapped and suffocated feelings of a child. It uses strong imagery and diction to depict an angry child riling against its captors. She uses a formal diction and strong connotative language. In "Afternoon Happiness" she takes a jab at those who believe art must be about pain and suffering in order to be profound and meaningful. Kizer also looks at love and realizes that although in the present it is wonderfully happy, it will end in heartbreak. Her poems have strong imagery and connotative language. In both poems she is able to depict the feelings of the narrator beautifully and convey her ideas. She reveals unseen perspectives on different aspects of life. Carolyn Kizer's poetry is incredibly beautiful and amazing to behold.