Poem Response "Home" : Wk 4; M, 9/2

While reading poems, some of us become accustomed to the same format: four lined stanzas evenly spaced out until the end. It is the familiar way that poems are written, but poems do not always have to be written this way. In fact, most times, the message of a poem is influenced by the way it is formatted. In Winner's poem "Home", we see wider stanzas with lines that aren't evenly spaced out. Instead, we see two paragraphs, with the first one being larger than the other. It is written almost like a story, and it engages us like a story. It wouldn't have made sense for the poem to be written in the comfort of the familiar four lined stanzas. And, because of the way it is written, it feels like I'm reading an interesting story regarding a man's sad home life in the Bronx. The description in the poem made it all the more engaging with words like "blighted","bleak","damp and dingy","bluffed", and "unremembering". This is a story about a desolate city, and we're made sure that that message hits home.