Sharon Olds and Frank O’Hara offer two takes on a conversational, almost confessional style. Choose one poem from each and use the compare-contrast form to work out not only how each poet engages with the form and how their different or similar approaches help you read the other.
Olds’ and O’Hara’s poems offer windows into the mind of the speaker. (In each case the speaker seems mostly consistent through the works.) What theory of mind, of thought, of perception, of interaction between the world and the subject perceiving it, do these poems propose. Develop your ideas using specific poems as test cases, and by offering clear close analysis of key elements in those poems.
