From the roots

I thought it was great how some of the poets paid homage to their families as helping them become writers. How you grow up is really important to the things you value as you get older and it seemed to me that despite the problems or family issues that were expressed in these poems the poets came out with a love of writing and literature. I really enjoyed how this was presented in Garrett Hongo's Winnings.

Essentially this is just a poem about a day in a cycle of days. As I read this poem, I really got the sense that Hongo spent every Saturday afternoon "near closing time/ at the thrift store". There is a keen awareness of this everyday mundane moment: “ The register rings up its sales—$2.95, /$11.24, 26.48 for the reclaimed Frigidaire-- /and a girl…begging a few nickels for the gumball machine.” (T 132) To me this seems like something you could see essentially anywhere. The only things that distinguish it are the prices and the fact that someone purchased specifically a Frigidaire. It is this lack of description that really allows the reader to see what’s important.

What really makes this a particularly special moment is the feeling of love and happiness that comes in the second to last stanza:

“My father comes in from the Rainbow
across the street, ten hands of Jacks
or Better, five draw, a winner
with a few dollars to peel away
from grocery money and money to fix
the washer, a dollar for me to buy
four pounds of Pocket Wisdoms, Bantams,
a Dell that says Walt Whitman, Poet
of the Open Road, and hands it to me,
saying ‘We won, Boy-san! We won!’
as the final blast of sunset kicks through”

There is such ambivalence to the money won and how it was won and a real emphasis on the books that were going to be purchased. The specific titles are used here when we haven’t had any real detail up until this moment. The store is unnamed, there is no discussion of the other people in it, except the little girl, and generally, our minds are drawn to these details. We can see that the books are the most important to him. So despite the fact that this situation is in no way good for a child, after all his father leaves him to go gamble, there is still hope to be found for him in this literature and he can look past it. And use it as inspiration for the next poem.

It was interesting to me how much I really connected with a lot of the family experiences in what we read. Family is always a moment of connection for people and I always think that's kind of strange. Every family is different and has it’s own level of happiness but somehow we can all connect over family memories. In college my friends and I would always some how end up talking about punishments when we were younger. Some would say, “My mom used to use a wooden spoon…” and then it’s all over because we have to have an hour to go over how we were disciplined and then another hour to go into how we’re going to tramatize our children. Lol.

Sorry my entry is a little shorter than usual….one of those weeks.