Diction. Tone. Voice.

Mary Oliver's chapter on diction, tone, and voice was at first very confusing so I decided to read the chapter once more, unfortunately the second time was just as confusing. Maybe it was all of the vocabulary words, or rather Oliver herself understood yet could not easily put into words what she knew, but I was left wondering what I had just read.

From what I did pick up, the author is very knowledgeable and meaningful when he or she decides to make a poem intimate for the reader. I've always wondered how much time it take poets to write a poem, according to Oliver, there are a lot of things to consider when trying to write a good poem. Oliver ends this little section on contemporary poems by saying that the poets want their poems to be like parables, showing the meaning of life for them. Next, Oliver talks about negative capacity, which to be honest I have no idea what she was talking about.

Oliver moves into talking about the types of poems: lyrical poem, narrative poem, the longer poem, and the prose poem. This section was pretty easy to understand and I believe I could pretty accurately identify what type of a poem is present after reading the descriptions by Oliver. I have always thought of poems as being relatively short, so when Oliver said that the Odyssey was a poem, I thought to myself, "Hmmm, you learn something new everyday."

Next Oliver describes the pros and cons to different word choices, saying that poetic diction, cliche, inversion, and information language was bad. After reading through all of these I could not imagine what other words or phrases there could be, I almost felt restricted. Even after Oliver showed us what was good to use, I continued to feel like poetry is way, way harder than what I had imagined because now I could only use certain words/phrases.