The Shared Emotions

My focus this week is on a poem by Adrienne Su, Savannah Crabs. Su's poems in this anthology are all written about what seems like her personal experiences, yet she has a way of pulling me in and making me feel my personal story in her poems.

Savannah Crabs pulls my southerner out and reminds me of the many, many, many stories I could share around the event of live crabs being brought into my house. From the time I was three I played with live blue crabs, learned to put them to sleep, and, like Su, would watch as "the first mute batch reddens and stills." Su takes me back to those times and to times when I was older and passed my blue crab lessons on to the younger kids in the family.

The fact that this poem is about more than just blue crabs really comes out in the last line of the poem when she reveals the prophecy of the hermit crab, "You'll find joy, but you must leave the family." Right here, I just grabbed my chest -- she punched me. I won't go into my personal family stuff on this blog, but I will say that I wanted to stand and applaud Su for this landing.

Other elements of this poem that really stood out to me are:
1.she titles the poem "Savannah Crabs" which makes me think of Savannah, Georgia -- a beautiful coastal city near Jacksonville, the last Florida city I lived in. Georgia and Florida share a border on the north east side of Florida yet Florida is known for its oranges and Georgia for its peaches, so the choice that Su makes to say the crabs were "packed tight as oranges" is an important one, I think. You can't really pack peaches tightly or they will bruise -- which I think says a lot about the conversation under the words about family and home.

2. the way Su moves us in time is really important in this piece. We start in the present "they come from the coast in the iced trunk." Then she moves us to the future, "She does not think / of her mother, who'll die this fall..." Then back to the present and a shared moment between siblings and parents -- she and her brother crouching and poking the crabs as the parents chase two across the lawn. Then the crabs predict the future, "You'll ache; you'll smother; you'll never be able to talk to each other." Then back to present, "It sits on the dryer." Then finally the last line gives us a glimpse of the future (as proper prophecies should). The use of time in this piece gives a greater picture of the family Su is profiling in this poem. Not only do we get the story that is happening with the crab, but we get the future stories of the relationships between siblings and between family in general. It's a powerful use of chronology.

3. Her verbs are amazing in this poem. Here are the ones that struck me most:
packed tight (S1:L1)
sunk in thoughts (S1:L3)
dread that will stain her (S2:L1)
tends a back pain (S2:L2)
crouch by the crate (S4:L2)
poke slow ones (S4:L3)
scuttle and flip (S5:L2)
we salt them (S5:L4)
reddens and stills (S8:L1,2)
I peer (S9:L1)

Su is my new favorite, this week. Her ability to make the personal seem universal is a powerful moment of a poet (if that is your goal). I look forward to more of her work in my future.

peacelovelight
Kiala

I really liked the work in Aloud this week especially that of Reg e. Gaines. He created such a strong sense of voice in each of his pieces and each one while having similarities the voices are very distinct. His content feels fresh despite the fact that it might feel like something we’ve heard before and I think it’s great that he just states the facts and doesn’t feel the need to be abstract. The first poem, Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans, was my favorite of the poems.

When I first started the poem, I took the title to be the voice of the narrator and I really liked the switch up. I originally thought that this poem would end with the narrator being robbed for his Jordans and at first, this seems like a viable story, the opening stanzas lead us to believe that the kid is rich and can have whatever he wants:

“ my air jordans cost a hundred with tax
my suede starts jacket says raiders on the back
I’m stylin….smilin…looking real mean cuz
it ain’t about bein heard just bein seen

my leather adidas baseball cap
matches my fake gucci backpack
there’s nobody out there looks good as me
but the gear costs money it sure ain’t free”

The kid is just another spoiled boy who roams the street pretending to be a badass exactly what you would think . Quickly the reader discovers that this isn’t the case. We, the reader, discover that what is important for the boy is still appearances but it’s getting to the appearance that’s the key. Gaines makes us accomplices in the behavior of this kid. We haven’t taught him to value his education, we haven’t taught him that his clothes don’t make him a man and in fact rap videos and media make him believe that how you dress and what you own are all that matters. Of course this is all in the subconscious because as he says “and the reason I have to look real fly/ well to tell ya the truth man I don’t know why”. Then we become an accomplice to the murder that he commits. The reader is the only witness to the murder and the only one who hears this other boy’s last words. Then he quickly dismisses the death and moves on.

Gaines really implicates the larger society in this poem. He uses the voice of this teen that we see depicted in the media, on the streets, in our friends and in our families. This boy whose voice Gaines embodies is no one new to us and that is what makes him so compelling. Seeing inside the head of someone you pass on the streets everyday is really interesting and Gaines keeps the work compelling by switching our perceptions. This boy isn’t just playing delinquent as we might think…he’s taken the next step to murder without remorse. As you read you begin to wonder, is this the fifth time he’s done it? The hundredth? How much of his gear has come from murder? What also makes the poem compelling is the rhyme scheme. I’m not usually a fan of rhyming as a rule but I think it works here as a way of creating voice for us. With the voice of this boy and what we know about him, the rhyming adds an amateur rapper sort of feeling to the poem, which you might imagine this narrator to be. I think it’s really great that Gaines keeps this poem feeling fresh despite the fact that we might feel we have a handle on this character already.

I really enjoyed the work from Aloud and Bum Rush this week. Not that I didn’t enjoy the other poems that we had to read but I really appreciated that the poems, which were written to be performed and read on the page, had a great honesty to them. They really stated things plain, which I always like. Sometimes I feel like we take abstract and metaphor too far as poets, I do it too sometimes. I think what I really like about these poems is that they are written to be enjoyed by the masses because that’s the way that you win competitions. I am definitely of the poetry is for everyone and not just academia so I liked the work.

The selections from Bum Rush the Page present problems of academic analysis that are difficult to resolve. The overtly political, gritty nature of the poems emphatically resist the establishment, including the “white” canon, which embodies most “academic” literature. In Bum Rush’s spoken word poems, the rift between white and black, academia and street smarts, oppressor and oppressed are kicked into overdrive; and for this reason, to interpret them using the same language reserved for the poems of academia would be to dishonor them, to strip them of their power and dilute their meaning. Spoken word poems often flout or manipulate academic “rules”, using instead their own languages, poetic devices and forms that result less from a theoretical, intellectual approach to writing poetry than with an ear toward rhythm, masculine rhyme, and the vernacular. The poem’s arrangement on the page is far less significant than the poem’s message and so the poem comes to life only through vocal expression. Spoken word poems are inciteful, not quietly reflective. Thus, for the literary critic, the question becomes: how does one explain the inner mechanism of a poem designed to thwart mechanism? To write “academically” is to approach poetry writing with an eye for theory and the traditional idea of form (I think back to William Carlos Williams’ description of the poem as a machine). The ideal academic poem contains no “useless” words. Great care is taken with line breaks, with page arrangement, with concealing rhyme cleverly, and with metrical/syllabic/quantitative considerations (generally speaking). In order to write “academically,” one must step back from the work, from the emotion that produced it, investigate it objectively and approach it with the intellect. Conversely, the spoken word poems that have the greatest effect are those that are pounded out from the heartbeat, from intense emotion, that radiate in the heat of the moment. Otherwise, they lose their power, their ability to incite. This is not to say that spoken word poems do not have form, use poetic devices, or possess great academic power. But these concerns are secondary to the raw emotion from which the poem seeks to capitalize and to its message. These poems are written out of necessity and are, therefore, necessary. 

“In Praise of the Seattle Coalition” begins with an impossible statement: “They came from around the globe to change the shape of the globe.” This opening line sets up the fantastical nature of the poem, and prepares us to receive an inventory of the poem’s impossible tasks: ending human rights violations, slavery, the marketing of unsafe food, racial profiling and senseless violence. Why am I expecting impossible tasks? One simply cannot change the shape of the globe, that’s why. From this, I would expect that the remainder of the poem will present the reader with unresolvable situations, impossible images, and unlikely resolutions. Certain “impossible” images include “the town salmon agreed to wear union windbreakers for the week” and “the air sucked up to help out” and then “dolphins swimming in mid street.” These impossible scenarios are not simply frivolous, however. They speak to the deeper themes of equality, global environmental responsibility, and the pitfalls of rampant capitalism. But the very fact that the images are impossible foreshadows the revelation that the desired outcomes are also impossible to attain. Human beings are greedy by nature, for example. Yet, the line, “Of course the corporations were defeated” seems incredibly unlikely considering our nature and the lessons we should have learned from the past. The poet says, “of course,” with a wink and a nod, knowing that there’s no certainty about it. Money always wins. It always has. The likelihood that this will change is virtually nil. This is irony. The irony, while said with a smirk, belies a deeper sadness that I believe the author knows we will never truly overcome. You can’t change human nature and you can’t change the shape of the globe. 

Even with this pessimistic realization, it is hard to determine whether or not the poem ends on a sad note. Even though we can’t change human nature, the poet tells us that we are not necessarily fighting alone. Perhaps if we can’t beat our own destructive nature, Nature itself will help us. In the poem, the mountain ranges are saluting the effort, the Pacific is roaring its approval, the air is keeping itself clean, the trees are in a stand off with the World Trade Organization, and did I mention the salmon? Perhaps the underlying message of “In Praise” is that with nature’s help and nature as the focus, perhaps we can solve these impossible tasks. Perhaps not. After all, you can’t change the shape of the globe. Or can you?

--H.K.