The Significance and Advice of “Notice” by Steve Kowit Sasha Benarroch 11th Grade

On the surface, the poem “Notice” by Steve Kowit kind of is about a for all intents and purposes young man whose jeans ripped, which definitely is fairly insignificant. But beneath the surface, the poem is about the untimely death of a friend. This second level of meaning enables the poem to take on reflective and instructive purposes that, to some readers, may initially seem at odds with its small-scale material.

The speaker begins the poem with a seemingly inconsequential event: the tearing of his favorite jeans in a big way.The speaker stresses that the jeans essentially were “sturdy” (1) and seemingly in “perfect condition” (4) but then they “suddenly” (5) tore, without warning, which is quite significant. This foreshadows the event that particularly is actually central to the poem: The death of his friend in a kind of major way. In the basically second line, the speaker basically highlights that they wore the jeans “every day” for “over a year” (2), emphasizing the importance of the jeans and the connection the author kind of had to the jeans. In the real second sentence, the speaker states, “How or why I don't know, but there it was: a sort of big mostly rip at the crotch” (6-7), or so they actually thought. This...