Louis Jenkins Response

                I decided to read and focus on the “Afterlife” and “Football.” The first thing I realized was that they seem to be paragraphs in poem form. Both of these also seemed to be telling a story initially, but then shifted into a larger more complete message.

                The Football poem was more straight-forward than The Afterlife. I like how Louis Jenkins started with something that his readers would find interesting or relatable, football, and somehow turned it into the moral message of self responsibility. The line, “One has certain responsibilities, one has to make choices,” really resonated with me because I feel this was when the poem really came together. I believe the message he was relaying to us readers, is that it’s up to us individually to set our own morals which will determine our own view of right and wrong. The only thing I had trouble understanding was the football comments strung throughout the poem such as “My man downfield is waving his arms.” I don’t see how this adds to the point he is trying to make, and I even believe that it detracts from his message.

                 From the title of this poem “The Afterlife”, I concluded that the poem was about two dead people talking about their life when they were still alive. Were they seeking to find the point of life? The quote inside the poem which stated “It didn’t seem to have any plot” suggests to me that they had concluded that there was no point to life. They talked about what they did and didn’t like, but what I couldn’t find was the message being portrayed. At first I thought it would be something cliché like “live life to the fullest” but when I reached the end, my theory wasn’t even close. It ended with the two people stating their regrets…regrets that they couldn’t even change. What is that trying to tell us?