Tocqueville

In class Tuesday, we talked about the book Tocqueville and the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird". The book Tocqueville is a collection of poems about US foreign and domestic policy written by Khaled Mattawa. The book is written in his opinion on the policy and is very interesting and eye opening as it opens a new point of view on early US foreign and domestic policy. The book includes the US war on Iraq, Somalian war stories, Vietnamese battles and etc. 

The book is interesting because it includes a different element to poems by including a power point and that is not something you normally see. There are many poems in the book, and the one that I read is called Airporter. It's a short poem and I didn't fully understand it but if I had to guess, I would assume that it is about someone waiting in an airport. It takes place in Yardley, Pennsylvania, and he describes it as a not so clean place. It then talks about a woman, but I didn't understand that part.

The other poem that we read is called "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", written by Wallace Stevens. The poem is about a blackbird, and has thirteen separate sections. What I took from the poem is that the blackbird is misunderstood, and people tend to look past it. The poem also portrayed them to be ominous and dark. I really liked the poem and thought that there was a lot of imagery included as well.