Diction and Voice: An Analysis of Contemporary Poems (ENG 101)

This essay analyzes the relationship between diction and voice in contemporary poetry, focusing on two poems: "Shot Glass" by A. R. Ammons and "Incest Taboo" by Denise Duhamel. The essay explores how the poets' word choices (diction) influence the poems' speaking voices, drawing on the concept of the poem as a puppet whose voice is shaped by the author. The essay discusses the importance of careful listening and analysis to understand how diction creates voice, providing specific examples from each poem. It examines how the poets create unique voices through their selection of words and how these choices contribute to the overall meaning and impact of the poems. The essay also touches upon the broader context of contemporary poetry and the significance of understanding the relationship between diction and voice for effective literary analysis.

Running head: AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETS
AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETS
Kay Ryan was born in 1945, in California and accept as one of the most unique and
indigenous verse maker of contemporary English poetic works. She is the author of a number of
poetry books, like Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000).
She has achieved the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2010 for his book The Best of it : New and
selected poems (2010).
Ryan has a very different style of his own that is much epitomized and newfangled for
the contemporary world, an original abbreviated theme of writing. Her writing has a subtle
attachment with the writing style of Emily Dickinson and Marian Moore. Her great experiment
with the use of "recombinant" rhyme developed with thorny voicing made her to an appreciable
position among the living American poets, and eventually she got appointed as U.S. Poet
Laureate in 2008. Ryan's laureateship kept her beside from the poetry world for long and she
always has stood beside of the common generation of poetry. The inquisitive, perplexed,
esoteric, often contemptuous verses are the harvest of many years of perception. The writer
herself has said that her ballads do not begin with symbolism or sound, however it rather grew up
finished a fundamental deliberation of thought "the way an oyster does, with an aggravation."
Sharp visualization of philosophy and the very concept of life and nature are quite perceptible in
the nature of her own style of writing. Critic Meghan O'Rourke has composed of her work that
every ballad winds around and back upon the contention like a stream following its way and they
are educational in soul, however a bedrock mind underpins them. (Gilbert, 2014).
From many of Ryan's written verses, "Album" is quite acknowledgeable in where she has
tried to portray that death has a life its own. It has an album which grows with four different
seasons of lives, the album of death does not only contained with the archive of the dead but
more than this it comes with the rhythm of succession of existence. When we step outside of the

2AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETS
moments kept them behind us, they become the parallels with the other point of time. But they
all are different from each other. The expressions that are used in the poem is metaphoric to a
great extent. The symbolism used as "cherry blossoms" or "sharp blot" have the depiction of
transient life over the irreversible of an entity. "In fact you couldn’t prove they're not." the
ending narrates the optimism of renewal of a mortal soul (Churchill, 2017).
In the poem "All Your Horses", she has given the idea of a thought process of an
individual being along with different imageries in understanding this strange chaos of water and
numbers. Like a rapture in water which can’t rapture of course, expression like this has taken the
poem to the stature. She has defined that to be chainless is the embodiment of potential healing
process, to accept what comes in the next moment.

3AMERICAN CONTEMPORARY POETS
REFERENCES
Churchill, S. W. (2017). The little magazine Others and the renovation of modern American poetry.
Routledge.
Gilbert, R. (2014). Walks in the World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry.
Princeton University Press.