How the Environment Influences the Body Plans of Organism

The first poem I decided to analyze is Ted Kooser's Happy Birthday. The author Ted Kooser was easy to research as he is currently serving as the United States Poet Laureate. He hails from Nebraska but was born in Ames, Iowa. He currently lives on an acreage outside of Lincoln, Nebraska and serves the university as an occasional speaker and guest. Kooser brings a voice to everyday situations and brings new depth to everyday life. He is the first Midwestern poet to receive the Pulitzer Prize and be the nation's Poet Laureate. Afraid of flying, Kooser has spent most of his time as Poet Laureate traveling in the car to promote poetry across the nation.

The poem, Happy Birthday, is not difficult to understand. The poem describes a man sitting and reading until dark and then instead of utilizing false light, he accepts the dark as a time to sleep. There is more to the poem than at first glance, however. I personally interpreted it to be the personal reflections of an old man, perhaps a deceased or dying man, who is looking at the book as an allegory for his own life, smoothing the creases on its pages as one would smooth the events of his life upon reflection. Memory and remembering are subjective things and as one ponders his life in the darkest hour or at the end of one's life, the creases may need much smoothing!

Biographically, the poem makes more sense since Kooser was born in 1939 and is an aged man himself. As a poet, he is also prone to much introspection and reflection on his life - not only for material but as an enlightened, aware, sensitive man.

Sources:

http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/kooser.html

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1269

The second poem I decided to analyze is Elaine Sexton's Public Transportation. The author has limited biographical information available via the web. She is listed as living on the East coast, having been raised in New Hampshire, possibly near water. Her birth location was Germany. Other than that, I could not find much biological information. Having published two books of poetry, she is a relatively new poet. Both volumes have been critically well received.

Her poem, Public Transportation, I thought was fantastic! The poem reflected something I personally do almost every day in public - put myself in someone else's life and imagine. Sexton takes that one step further, however, in that she twists the words and, thus, the scenario to include what could possibly a shocking reality. The woman she initially describes as a brain surgeon, exits the bus and is, in reality, a driver of another bus. The interesting angle is that she describes this bus-driving woman as one who regularly envisions the lives of those who ride her bus. None of these are realities as Sexton indicates with precision when she describes what the reader might believe as the