Espinoza's poems, Contemporary American Hunger, Learning Economics at Gemco, and Las Cucarachas are not only political statements, they are poignant and powerful commentary on how Americans view poverty.
I selected these three poems because reading them one after the other I saw the poet highlighting one side of poverty and in many ways saying that poverty is a matter of perspective. Since poverty is often considered a direct result of the politics of economy, I found it fitting to combine my discussion of these poems for this week.
One of the questions from this week's group was: How does the theme of politics influence your reading of these poems? For me, I kept thinking about how the definition of poverty seemed different when I was growing up. I mean we were probably poor by the politician'ss and statistician's definitions, but I didn't know it until I was an adult.
I think Espinoza does a great job of demonstrating this reality in the poem Contemporary American Hunger.
Satisfied, we ventured through a rainbow
Of tubes and balls with the other kids,
Their stomachs full of Big Macs or Happy Meals.
But we were happy too--better than staying
At home on a Saturday
Eating potato tacos after our yard chores.
and in Learning Economics at Gemco
I place the coins into his cupped hands
And he stacks two neat columns of cents
Next to his seat on the curb.
He nods his chin, half-solemnly.
...I ask Mom why?--
We only tried to help.
These poems, told from the perspective of a child living with poor parents, make it a point to state the complex using simple language. Giving us setting and circumstance helps to establish a tone that is non-accusatory, but in many ways speaks volumes.
In Las Cucarachas, Espinoza starts by establishing who (the roaches) and where (everywhere in your house), thus showing a universal picture of the place where roaches reside. He speaks of the roaches as beings graced and favored by God.
offering thanks
and grace
to a god who favors
them with the lost
harvest of the earth.
but he never accuses anyone for the roaches and never states directly that they are a result of poverty, it just seems understood. It could be that I'm detecting politics as humor or irony in the three poems.
Like the ironic moment in stanza 5 of Learning Economics at Gemco:
The cop says bums make thirty bucks a week
Begging for change
And are not so unhappy
When arrested
Since they get food, shelter,
And a hot shower for a least a week.
or the humorous moment in lines 9 - 11 of Las Cucarachas:
They munch on dry corn
flakes you thought
were raisin bran.
Espinoza is the one writer this week that really caught my eye because of his use of irony and humor in his writing. I found that I was able to connect to it in many ways. He provides lots of access points into his work because he does not point the finger at anyone, he simply uses poetry to point at what's always been there.
peacelovelight
Kiala
Showing posts with label Week 11. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Week 11. Show all posts
Sunday, November 8, 2009
On poetryfoundation.org, I found a ‘micro essay’ by Linh Dinh on teaching poetry, in which he states, “Poetry should astound and frighten.” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/01/what-i-usually-say-to-my-students/
I was drawn to and puzzled by his pieces, so I wanted to learn more about where he was coming from. Dinh immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 (as an 11 or 12-year-old), so it is presumable that the imagery in his poems, “The Fox Hole” and “The Most Beautiful Word” was informed by the child’s experience of direct war. Read without context, it would not be clear whether these episodes were from that war or another—they are not accompanied by the usual dogma of Vietnam War literature. And so they escape categorization. Each is a fresh, brutal, grizzly—and at once oddly comic, romantic—depiction human-imposed suffering, fear, and death. These poems startle their way into our systems, jolt and fragment our awareness.
“The Fox Hole” reads like a short story. The first sentence, “‘Oh great,’ she yells, ‘a fox hole!’” reads as light-hearted and jovial, as though an adventure is about to begun. Upon second and third readings, it is unclear what the woman’s emotions are behind this line—it could be frustration, relief. But Dinh immediately begins by turning us on our heads: the foxhole is a referential for a wartime setting, but the tone and punctuation of the statement doesn’t necessarily suggest the fear or anxiety that one associates with that setting. The proceeding images transform the foxhole into a grave, a living tomb: “throwing a clump of dirt on her head…bunched up like a mummy…almost completely buried.” The references to her beauty and her youth contrast the grave imagery: “flush of youth…pretty woman.”
One could almost read over the line, “There’s dirt in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth,” because it blends right into the center of the paragraph-block. But I found this image, on second reading, to be the most horrifying. Imagining the sensation of having hard, gritty dirt in those orifices is unbearable—and the woman’s position suddenly jerks from living being (whom we were cheering on for successfully hiding and outwitting the soldiers) to cadaver. The dirt piles, she cannot get it out of her body, the feet are padding it down over her: she is being buried alive. The reference to a soldier being able to walk right over her also brings to mind the desecration of actual graves, and how colonization and war often disregards past graves. Here Dinh is flipping it around again—established graves are not just disturbed, but living graves are created and ignored.
Finally, the poem comes to a climactic end, when the woman questions what she has sat upon. We move from root (natural, benign), to hand (disturbing, but still safe) to hand grenade (death stamp). This last line demonstrates the same emotional progression as the rest of the poem: first relief, the growing horror, then devastation. In the last line and the last words it is confirmed that we are not on an adventure, that our heroine is not safe, that there is not safety in a war field.
In “The Most Beautiful Word,” the speaker is more defined than in “The Fox Hole”—which draws in the questions of complicity, and physical and emotional distance. We begin with a dreamy statement about language, specifically the English language. So our speaker knows English—did s/he know it then, at the time, or is s/he only using it now in reflection? (Clearly the poem is written in English but, in context, we can assume it is placed in Vietnam.) The next few images of the injured man conjure food and feasting: “steaming…harvest…” But the speaker’s tone remains casual, detached: “I myself was bleeding.” His injury’s are certainly not as extreme as the other man’s, but is he in a state of shock? The speaker has retreated from the present moment to an intellectual, ethereal meditation on language. He replaces the word “yaw” (movement from side to side), still in the context of injury/war/death, lyrical, playful words: “danced, tumbled.”
And suddenly we are in a scene between two would-be lovers—it is now “my man” who is lying, face-down, and the speaker is an “impatient lover”—still casual, distant. The dominoes of his bones or teeth “Clack! Clack!” and we are delivered from kitchen to bedroom to rec room. His blood is a “pink spray,” a “rainbow”, and the veins in his jaw are “blue threads to the soul”—all words that incite comfort, beauty. Is this to preserve the preciousness, the dignity of human life, or is this over-the-top language the mimics the ways in which we (English-speakers, Americans) are consistently protected from the gruesomeness of war? Several words also demonstrate medical knowledge: “C-spine” (cervical spine, or vertebrae just below the skull), “mandible” (lower jaw), “extracted.” So we wonder who the speaker is, a medic? Was he a doctor or will he be one? Or are these words all participants in active war learn because they are so consistently exposed to the body in a brutal way?
The word play this prose poem demonstrates the disjuncture between what death/war actually look like and what we are told. It also displays the human mind’s capacity for escapism in processing the horrifying—what cannot be processed. There are images from daily life/households, the spin off on sounds of words, and the movement into medical terms—all distracts from the suffering body blatantly displayed before us.
So how is this political? In every way that it’s not political: Dinh avoids a polemic with playful language, misleading storytelling, mixed metaphors, and ambivalent narration. He disarms us, but when we blink, look again, we realize he’s drug us into hell and left us there, marooned.
I was drawn to and puzzled by his pieces, so I wanted to learn more about where he was coming from. Dinh immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 (as an 11 or 12-year-old), so it is presumable that the imagery in his poems, “The Fox Hole” and “The Most Beautiful Word” was informed by the child’s experience of direct war. Read without context, it would not be clear whether these episodes were from that war or another—they are not accompanied by the usual dogma of Vietnam War literature. And so they escape categorization. Each is a fresh, brutal, grizzly—and at once oddly comic, romantic—depiction human-imposed suffering, fear, and death. These poems startle their way into our systems, jolt and fragment our awareness.
“The Fox Hole” reads like a short story. The first sentence, “‘Oh great,’ she yells, ‘a fox hole!’” reads as light-hearted and jovial, as though an adventure is about to begun. Upon second and third readings, it is unclear what the woman’s emotions are behind this line—it could be frustration, relief. But Dinh immediately begins by turning us on our heads: the foxhole is a referential for a wartime setting, but the tone and punctuation of the statement doesn’t necessarily suggest the fear or anxiety that one associates with that setting. The proceeding images transform the foxhole into a grave, a living tomb: “throwing a clump of dirt on her head…bunched up like a mummy…almost completely buried.” The references to her beauty and her youth contrast the grave imagery: “flush of youth…pretty woman.”
One could almost read over the line, “There’s dirt in her nose, in her eyes, in her mouth,” because it blends right into the center of the paragraph-block. But I found this image, on second reading, to be the most horrifying. Imagining the sensation of having hard, gritty dirt in those orifices is unbearable—and the woman’s position suddenly jerks from living being (whom we were cheering on for successfully hiding and outwitting the soldiers) to cadaver. The dirt piles, she cannot get it out of her body, the feet are padding it down over her: she is being buried alive. The reference to a soldier being able to walk right over her also brings to mind the desecration of actual graves, and how colonization and war often disregards past graves. Here Dinh is flipping it around again—established graves are not just disturbed, but living graves are created and ignored.
Finally, the poem comes to a climactic end, when the woman questions what she has sat upon. We move from root (natural, benign), to hand (disturbing, but still safe) to hand grenade (death stamp). This last line demonstrates the same emotional progression as the rest of the poem: first relief, the growing horror, then devastation. In the last line and the last words it is confirmed that we are not on an adventure, that our heroine is not safe, that there is not safety in a war field.
In “The Most Beautiful Word,” the speaker is more defined than in “The Fox Hole”—which draws in the questions of complicity, and physical and emotional distance. We begin with a dreamy statement about language, specifically the English language. So our speaker knows English—did s/he know it then, at the time, or is s/he only using it now in reflection? (Clearly the poem is written in English but, in context, we can assume it is placed in Vietnam.) The next few images of the injured man conjure food and feasting: “steaming…harvest…” But the speaker’s tone remains casual, detached: “I myself was bleeding.” His injury’s are certainly not as extreme as the other man’s, but is he in a state of shock? The speaker has retreated from the present moment to an intellectual, ethereal meditation on language. He replaces the word “yaw” (movement from side to side), still in the context of injury/war/death, lyrical, playful words: “danced, tumbled.”
And suddenly we are in a scene between two would-be lovers—it is now “my man” who is lying, face-down, and the speaker is an “impatient lover”—still casual, distant. The dominoes of his bones or teeth “Clack! Clack!” and we are delivered from kitchen to bedroom to rec room. His blood is a “pink spray,” a “rainbow”, and the veins in his jaw are “blue threads to the soul”—all words that incite comfort, beauty. Is this to preserve the preciousness, the dignity of human life, or is this over-the-top language the mimics the ways in which we (English-speakers, Americans) are consistently protected from the gruesomeness of war? Several words also demonstrate medical knowledge: “C-spine” (cervical spine, or vertebrae just below the skull), “mandible” (lower jaw), “extracted.” So we wonder who the speaker is, a medic? Was he a doctor or will he be one? Or are these words all participants in active war learn because they are so consistently exposed to the body in a brutal way?
The word play this prose poem demonstrates the disjuncture between what death/war actually look like and what we are told. It also displays the human mind’s capacity for escapism in processing the horrifying—what cannot be processed. There are images from daily life/households, the spin off on sounds of words, and the movement into medical terms—all distracts from the suffering body blatantly displayed before us.
So how is this political? In every way that it’s not political: Dinh avoids a polemic with playful language, misleading storytelling, mixed metaphors, and ambivalent narration. He disarms us, but when we blink, look again, we realize he’s drug us into hell and left us there, marooned.
What's in a name?
Politics. Discussing politics whether they be identity, cultural or governmental can be a bit of a minefield. People that you care about can turn out to have political ideals that offend or frighten you and change the way you look at them forever. Fights can break out, friendships can be destroyed, relationships can be broken, reputations damaged beyond repair. For all these reasons a lot of people do not discuss politics just as they don’t discuss religion. Politics, especially identity politics, become the elephant in the room, the presence of it cannot be denied but the discussion of it is stifled and repressed, made invisible. Of course this is mostly for the benefit of those that belong to the dominant group, so that they won’t be uncomfortable when discussing politics in which they are the privileged part of the equation. This effectively silences marginalized people positioning them as a “troublemaker” if they break the enforced silence.
Diane Burns’ poem Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question takes this forced invisibility of identity to task. She plops us into the middle of a conversation and only allows us to hear one side of it, her side, the side that matters to her. In this case she has reversed the silence and made the dominant position the one that is rendered unable to speak for itself. In this case her words take prominence and are the only ones that give us any context for the conversation taking place in this way she shapes the whole of the conversation. We are taken out of the world in which every conversation is in some way shaped by the white heteronormative patriarchal society in which we live and instead she becomes the shaper, she is in control of if not the direction of the conversation itself then in our perception and understanding of it for sure.
In the beginning of the poem she uses repetition to build up the momentum and emotion to a fever pitch.
No, I’m not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I’m American Indi—uh, Native American.
No, not from India.
No, we’re not extinct.
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
Yes, Indian.
The calmness of these replies, the stillness and steadiness point to the fact that this is not the first or second or even third time she’s had to answer these types of questions. These are questions that she has had to deal with numerous times before and the answers turn into a rote response to an interrogation of identity. The hesitation when identifying herself as American Indian is unexplained at first and then with the next line becomes clear. This is a part of the conversation she was hoping to avoid this time but she does not get to. Then with the break of the repetitious “No” beginning is a affirmation of her Indian identity and yet at the same time it’s not the identity she actually presents. She calls herself “Native American” and only by going back to an identifier that many Native folks have chosen to throw off as a name placed upon them by colonialists can she make her identity understood by the dominant culture.
The whole thing made me think of the politics of silence and the politics of naming. Who chooses who speaks? Who chooses who is silenced? Who chooses what we are called? What if no one acknowledges the name that you claim?
Diane Burns’ poem Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question takes this forced invisibility of identity to task. She plops us into the middle of a conversation and only allows us to hear one side of it, her side, the side that matters to her. In this case she has reversed the silence and made the dominant position the one that is rendered unable to speak for itself. In this case her words take prominence and are the only ones that give us any context for the conversation taking place in this way she shapes the whole of the conversation. We are taken out of the world in which every conversation is in some way shaped by the white heteronormative patriarchal society in which we live and instead she becomes the shaper, she is in control of if not the direction of the conversation itself then in our perception and understanding of it for sure.
In the beginning of the poem she uses repetition to build up the momentum and emotion to a fever pitch.
No, I’m not Chinese.
No, not Spanish.
No, I’m American Indi—uh, Native American.
No, not from India.
No, we’re not extinct.
No, not Navajo.
No, not Sioux.
Yes, Indian.
The calmness of these replies, the stillness and steadiness point to the fact that this is not the first or second or even third time she’s had to answer these types of questions. These are questions that she has had to deal with numerous times before and the answers turn into a rote response to an interrogation of identity. The hesitation when identifying herself as American Indian is unexplained at first and then with the next line becomes clear. This is a part of the conversation she was hoping to avoid this time but she does not get to. Then with the break of the repetitious “No” beginning is a affirmation of her Indian identity and yet at the same time it’s not the identity she actually presents. She calls herself “Native American” and only by going back to an identifier that many Native folks have chosen to throw off as a name placed upon them by colonialists can she make her identity understood by the dominant culture.
The whole thing made me think of the politics of silence and the politics of naming. Who chooses who speaks? Who chooses who is silenced? Who chooses what we are called? What if no one acknowledges the name that you claim?
The specific
It was interesting to me that a lot of the political messages in the poetry for this week seemed to be about specific communities as opposed to world-wide peace and ending of poverty which I think added to the sense of integrity in there work. There was a lot of potential for generalization in the poetry of this week because when we talk about politics it is to get caught up in everyone’s suffering as opposed to trying to work on the small scale where it can be easier to make change. I think by breaking down the tragedies of specific communities the poets allow us to draw connections between their communities on there own. And there were plenty of intersections in the work this week.
One poem that really stuck out to me was Cornelius Eady’s poem How To Do because it connected to Learning Economics at Gemco by John Olivares Espinoza. Both poems are about the lengths that people go to survive poverty and the criminalization of this struggle. Both struggles are centered around Grocery carts, the narrator in Espinoza’s poem is following his mother as she pushes the cart, his sense of charity is related to the cart and the fact that he is able to go grocery shopping while this man sits outside is a privilege that is associated with the cart. For the narrator’s mother too, having the grocery cart and the change to give to the homeless man is a privilege she cannot deny as she “pushes the grocery cart without a word, /Knowing that as newlyweds she begged outside markets for change /While Dad stole bread and sliced honey-ham inside.” (103) For her the ability to walk into the store with her head held high to do some actual shopping as opposed stealing from the store.
For Eady the shopping cart is the site of poverty. Within it, the bottles that have been collected over the week this work that “embarrasses my niece to think of her mother/ walking the streets with a cart” the cart is where the bottles are collected and becomes a symbol of the narrator’s sisters poverty. Who knows what is in the cart unless you are looking hard but the act of pushing the cart outside of the shopping area where it belongs is a symbol of poverty. In the media we see homeless people pushing carts around and essentially living out of shopping carts and this is the image that Eady uses to illustrate the poverty that the narrator and his sister lived and live with. And they are not alone “There’s at least 15 carts, /At least 10 people in line” Eady shows the poverty of where they live and how they were raised and the way that the habits of poverty can be passed on through generations.
I think what’s great about the way that poets of color go about changing the world is that they understand that just saying “the world needs to change” I think sometimes with white writers there tends to be a blanket, let’s make things better as opposed to saying, this community is suffering and that needs to change. And here is how and here are the ways that this community is suffering. There is a lot more that can be accomplished with specifics and I think focusing on the specific is a trait that comes with being closer to a marginalized community. I don’t want to assume that all poets of color feel any of these experiences but I think when you come from a marginalized community you get linked to certain experiences no matter what the reality of your opportunities are and you begin to get interested in what happens to it.
I think that politics and poetry often go together. They are lovers who break up and get back together all the time. Sometimes Politics doesn’t understand the metaphor of poetry or feels it’s being weak when it should be bold and strong. Poetry feels that politics forgets the people and gets caught up in it’s own seriousness. When they work together, it can be beautiful or it can be ugly but they can work together when they choose.
Burns Like Fire-Poet Diane Burns, A Trailblazer Forever Remembered
Diane Burns, Chemehuevi and Anishinabe Poet
(1957-2006)
“Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question”
How do you do?
No, I’m not Chinese
No, I’m not Spanish.
No, I’m not American Indi--uh, Native American
No, not from India.
No, we’re not extinct.
No, not Navajo
No, not Sioux.
Yes, Indian.
Oh, so you’ve had an Indian friend?
That close.
Oh, so you’ve had an Indian lover?
That tight.
Oh, so you’ve had an Indian servant?
That much.
Oh, so that’s where you got those high cheekbones.
Your great grandmother, eh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess--Cherokee?
Oh, an Indian Princess.
No, I didn’t make it rain tonight.
No I don’t know where you can get Navajo rugs real cheap.
No, I don’t know where you can get peyote.
No, I didn’t make this--I bought it at Bloomingdale’s.
Yes, some of us drink too much.
Some of us can’t drink enuf.
This ain’t no stoic look.
This is my face.
The title of Diane Burns's poem “Sure You Can Ask Me A Personal Question” (Aloud, 187) is laden in satirical humor. Burns’s rhetorical and declarative style creates an increasingly tense dialogue, uncovering naive and curious offenders that cross her path. By using plain language, repetition, and short lines, she effectively delivers “a political punch” at every line in response to the question “How do you do?” and other implied statements and questions. “The gem” of this poem is that it exposes the numerous, tired stereotypes of Native Americans held by many Americans today. Undoubtedly Burns (like her name) is fire, in her words to destroy the misconceptions of what it means to be Native American.
Toward the end of the poem that follows, “Alphabet City Serenade,” Burns makes us laugh again with this hilarious, rhetorical rhyme-riff on American Hollywood and capitalism (Aloud, 189). She writes,
Do you know, do you know that
I hate Chevrolet
I hate Doris Day
I hate Norman Bates
And I’m at war with the United States
Diane Burns’s defiance rings true in her poetry as she consistently voices her honest refusal to accept American culture and all that is attached to it--greed, superficiality, Euro-centric standards of beauty, assimilation and oppression. Her use of repetition and short lines with no line breaks, again effectively increases the velocity and intensity of the poem.
Diane Burns is a trailblazer who for many of us will forever, be remembered.
-Mica Valdez
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Every Knotted Fist
Reading Alaan Bowe’s “The Knotted Fist” made me go back to Meg’s blog about Clairesa Clay’s contrapuntal poem “A Blue Black Pearl” and H.K.’s blog about “everything is” in the center of Cordova’s “Of Sorts” because they gave me an explanation and some guidance for approaching this poem. There were so many ways of reading this poem – across the page, down and up, around the center – and they all contributed to my reading of the poem.
Our focus this week is politics, and the title “The Knotted Fist” struck me immediately. After seeing Bamuthi’s performance on Monday and viewing his “Clenched Fist” production, I visualized the “fist” of Bowe’s poem as representing a struggle, and the choice of the adjective “knotted” evoked an intricate image for me. The choice of words in the poem creates a sense of the speaker’s connection – “community,” “communication,” “interaction” – and, at the same time, his lack of connection – “juxtaposition,” “opposition,” “murder.” I saw the poem itself take the form of a fist in the center of which our speaker is
gonna hold all my
fuckin’ grudges
in every knotted fist
The four fingers surround the center of this poem physically but also metaphorically. They are intertwined rather than just clenched. I see the corners of the poem acting in counterpoint to the others and the mention of “Bach fugues” underscores this. The upper left corner of the fist and the lower right both have the word “murder” in them while the lower left and upper right contrast an intimacy and an absence of it. The upper left interacts with the lower right but also with the upper right. We can read this poem across and wonder about the relationship he has with the woman who has given him “a hug.” There’s distance in the hug if he “didn’t get that good a look at her” as there’s distance between him and the “poor fool/forced to sit through this poem.” There’s a missed connection if this listener/reader “winces.” But the wincing is being done in reaction to the bludgeoning of “fingers & tongue.” The use of “bludgeon” here and “clubbed” later is strong language but there’s also more delicate language – “dapple” and “whining.” There are counterpoints throughout and we see the action and reaction, the opposition and the struggle.
The opposable thumb, which makes us human, is present in the beginning of the poem: “murder / rape / incest / torture” overarching the rest of the words. There is cruelty in human interaction, and “any” attempt to get closer “hurts.” The contrast between the “stroke of [his] pen” and his “tongue” has sexual connotations revealing a level of exposure and intimacy with the audience while also bringing up the struggle of an artist. Is he writing the poem on the page with his pen – drawing blood from his fingers, or is he performing it – spitting blood and “spit[ting]/any sound?” The sheets on his bed give a masturbatory image. Is the purpose of his writing then for his own satisfaction or is there a larger world? The relationship and the conflict between him and the audience is being explored.
There’s a well-ordered, complex construction to the form of this poem and to the layers of meaning as we untie the knots that reveal the artist’s struggle with himself, with his art, with his audience, and we find the grudges. I read “every knotted fist” as not just a singular fist belonging to the speaker, but as “every” member of the larger audience whose mind is closed and who won’t listen to what he has to say. This poem, and poetry in general, is an expression from the poet who gives so much of himself in each poem, each “a little death,” that he bleeds on the page or on the stage, and is “clubbed...senseless/if it’s done right.” There’s a dynamic to the interaction that starts with “One,” but if the audience follows the speaker’s directive “don’t mind me,” the struggle to connect packs a powerful punch.
Sheila Joseph
Our focus this week is politics, and the title “The Knotted Fist” struck me immediately. After seeing Bamuthi’s performance on Monday and viewing his “Clenched Fist” production, I visualized the “fist” of Bowe’s poem as representing a struggle, and the choice of the adjective “knotted” evoked an intricate image for me. The choice of words in the poem creates a sense of the speaker’s connection – “community,” “communication,” “interaction” – and, at the same time, his lack of connection – “juxtaposition,” “opposition,” “murder.” I saw the poem itself take the form of a fist in the center of which our speaker is
gonna hold all my
fuckin’ grudges
in every knotted fist
The four fingers surround the center of this poem physically but also metaphorically. They are intertwined rather than just clenched. I see the corners of the poem acting in counterpoint to the others and the mention of “Bach fugues” underscores this. The upper left corner of the fist and the lower right both have the word “murder” in them while the lower left and upper right contrast an intimacy and an absence of it. The upper left interacts with the lower right but also with the upper right. We can read this poem across and wonder about the relationship he has with the woman who has given him “a hug.” There’s distance in the hug if he “didn’t get that good a look at her” as there’s distance between him and the “poor fool/forced to sit through this poem.” There’s a missed connection if this listener/reader “winces.” But the wincing is being done in reaction to the bludgeoning of “fingers & tongue.” The use of “bludgeon” here and “clubbed” later is strong language but there’s also more delicate language – “dapple” and “whining.” There are counterpoints throughout and we see the action and reaction, the opposition and the struggle.
The opposable thumb, which makes us human, is present in the beginning of the poem: “murder / rape / incest / torture” overarching the rest of the words. There is cruelty in human interaction, and “any” attempt to get closer “hurts.” The contrast between the “stroke of [his] pen” and his “tongue” has sexual connotations revealing a level of exposure and intimacy with the audience while also bringing up the struggle of an artist. Is he writing the poem on the page with his pen – drawing blood from his fingers, or is he performing it – spitting blood and “spit[ting]/any sound?” The sheets on his bed give a masturbatory image. Is the purpose of his writing then for his own satisfaction or is there a larger world? The relationship and the conflict between him and the audience is being explored.
There’s a well-ordered, complex construction to the form of this poem and to the layers of meaning as we untie the knots that reveal the artist’s struggle with himself, with his art, with his audience, and we find the grudges. I read “every knotted fist” as not just a singular fist belonging to the speaker, but as “every” member of the larger audience whose mind is closed and who won’t listen to what he has to say. This poem, and poetry in general, is an expression from the poet who gives so much of himself in each poem, each “a little death,” that he bleeds on the page or on the stage, and is “clubbed...senseless/if it’s done right.” There’s a dynamic to the interaction that starts with “One,” but if the audience follows the speaker’s directive “don’t mind me,” the struggle to connect packs a powerful punch.
Sheila Joseph
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