The poet I'm going to be selecting for my final project is Gwendolyn Brooks.  She was an early African-American poet.  My partner is Darian Black, who has selected Evie Shockley as her poet.  The connection between our two poets is that they are both African-American.  However, my poet is one of the first major African-American poets, and Darian's poet is a much younger one who still writes today.  We are interested in seeing the differences between the older and younger poets.  Brooks' poetry appeals to me because her subject matter seems to be really varied (not every poem is about the same subject) and her poetry is quite easy to understand- you don't have to dig to find some shred of meaning, like you do with some poets.  I've been able to find many of her poems online, and she also has many print volumes (which I've had a difficult time finding, mostly because of my lack of skill using the library catalog search).

Denise Levertov's poetry was quite a bit different from Molly Peacock's poetry that I read for my midterm essay, but there were some similarities.  One thing that was quite different is that Levertov uses space and punctuation to her advantage quite a bit more.  While Peacock does use indentation, punctuation, and other ways to change how the poem is read, she doesn't do it nearly as much as Levertov does.  Levertov's poems tend to have a much more "wavy" quality to them when looking at them on a page, but Peacock's tend to look more like poems typically do.  Levertov, like Peacock, doesn't use rhyme very much.  While it is used sometimes, it's not part of the structure of the poem- rhyme is included when convenient, but not as part of the structure of the poem.  Also, Levertov doesn't seem to use sonnets like Peacock does (although I couldn't say that for sure without seeing more of Levertov's poems, I'm only judging from the ones included in The New American Poetry)  I don't want to say that Levertov's poetry is more abstract than Peacock's, since I don't think that's quite the word I'm looking for, but the meaning is hidden deeper- although that is not to say that Peacock doesn't have some difficult poems in Original Love.  I don't see one of them being particularly more challenging than the other, but I do think that you need to look for meaning more in Levertov's (although I had a tough time finding the deeper meaning in Peacock's poems without Jane's help).  
The poem "Scenes from the  Life of the Peppertrees" reminded me of the painting above, The Great Forest by Jacob van Ruisdael.


"Branch above branch, an air of lightness; of shadows scattered lightly."

Daniel McCall, Retired Anthropologist, Boston, MA-
Sonnet 29
 I think that he did a really good job reading the poem. 
For one thing,  he paid
attention to the punctuation in the poem and paused in appropriate places,
keeping the flow that the written poem has.  Also, the rhythm of the poem came
  across quite well, without being overemphasized. 
He also read it in a way that reflected the style of the poem, but wasn’t
overly dramatic. He also didn’t
make any blatant mistakes reading the poem, which I saw in one of the videos I
watched before deciding on this one- it’s really important to say the correct
words when you’re reading a poem out loud,
  obviously!

 Joan Thuebel, Chatham, NJ-
From  Lycidas       
I think that she did an excellent job expressing the emotion in the
poem.  The speed and tone of voice
she used to read were both very appropriate for the solemn content of the
poem.  Also, she paid attention to
the punctuation in the poem, pausing at appropriate moments. 
The rhythm of the poem came across without her emphasizing it too much,
  and I think it helped that she had a good reason for choosing this poem- she
  didn’t pick a random one that sounded good, which I suspect at least some
  people are going to do for their recitation coming up in
class.

My poem won’t copy and paste into the document correctly, so here’s
a link:


http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15403




           
The poem that I chose is “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E.E.
Cummings (Cummings often didn’t use punctuation or capitalization, thus the
  uncapitalized title- he actually would have preferred I type his name as ee
  cummings!).  I think that this is
a narrative poem since it’s talking about the story of a person, apparently
named“Anyone”, from a third-person point of view. 
One of the biggest pieces of imagery that stuck out to me was how lines
  like “spring summer autumn winter” and “sun moon stars rain” show the passage
  of time- nature progresses regardless of what we do. 
I’m also a fan of Cummings’ abstract form of writing. 
It makes you look deeper in the poem to find meaning. 
For some reason, the language also makes me picture this town working
like clockwork, with Anyone as the odd one out, thus why the others “cared for
[him] not at all”.  I think that
the biggest way the narration works to stir the reader’s interest is by using
the odd style of writing.  At first
glance, the poem looks like gibberish, but when you read it a second or third
time, you begin to understand the story. 
Cummings certainly knew how to use language to his advantage. 
The information from the article helped me understand which type of poem
  this was.  It definitely tells a
story with a beginning, middle, and end. 
However, it’s not an epic, which seems to be what the article focuses
  on.  I couldn’t find a poem with
just a few lines that reminded me of lines in the poem (the closest I got were
ones that showed the passage of time like I mentioned above, and I didn’t think
that was a good example), but the whole poem actually reminded me of “Kubla
Khan” on the thirteenth page of the article (page 112 in the original
book).  It reminded me of this
mainly because the way the two were written seemed very similar to me- the
rhythm and language used seemed very similar, along with the uneven line
lengths.