The word only is fat and heavy to me. I thought it was interesting that so many poems in this section had numbered parts. Like, Easter:Wahiawa,1959, In My Father's House, Joshua Clark, etc. I wonder about this I don't know if it is because there is some technical poetry term for breaking a poem up in this way. I am sure there is a name for it. But I don't know it. So if any one can help me out. But, It made me think of how family is connected through the generations and chapters of lives and how family and all that the means is far to big to be contained in one poem with out chapters. I also like the idea that with chapters of family there will always be a sequel or the continuing saga. Even if a family is completely annihilated physical it continues as an entire movement that had marked the universe.
Sapphire, In My Father's House: Chapter 1. What struck me first is the use of lower case Until the use of I names, and quotes. I want to think the author took something back making the mother and father small, lower cased. The use of quotations, " She never wanted children", he explained. How the author shows the continued cycle of violence and the excuses of " barbed wire around wind." The brutal description used to expressed the rage and admission of coming so close to making the same choice of the father; attacking the weak and defenseless in the passage about the cat. The intense description ," beat skin, teeth, skull with my fists," and the couragous ownership and guilt regarding what she was about to do. The line " something stopped me."just cut deeper pronouning her shame for coming so close to switching from victim to abuser. The author makes no excuses, taking ownership of their own actions before revealing and using her father as an abuse as an
exuse.
How it changes to abstract description the words we use to distance herself from the memories that are chasing her. She dissapears in this paragraph exactly like she " disapeared 35 years ago."
Chapter 2.: how the phrases get small like the author , not expository as small as the the author that was raped.
Its too late and too hard I have to finish this when I wake up
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Suki,
ReplyDeleteYou're pushing
keep birthing
yourself
and let your heart pound
like the sledgehammer it is
keep processing all of this.
well i can't top aries
ReplyDeletee
I believe the "term" you're looking for is a sequence poem. In my opinion, it is often used when the subject matter is too long, intense and heavy to be addressed in one poem. The mind finds it easier to break things up in little chunks. However, I also find it useful when trying to examine different angles of the same subject matter. . .like a prism.
ReplyDeleteH.K.
Suki -- thanks for asking the question, and H.K. -- thanks for answering it. I had the same one. It struck me also that we had a few poems with numbered parts, and I wondered about them. Suki – I like your explanation of the chapters of families and the continuing saga. It's the interplay of the parts that adds up to even more (the gestalt, no?). I think it adds to the reading of the poems (and H.K. – it sounds like it adds to the poet’s act of writing).
ReplyDelete