We are always warned about using nebulous statements and phrases in our work and are told to revise toward more specific aspects of our work. So when ever I read a poet who uses these statements immediately wonder how the poet is able to get away with using such statements. After reading Jimmy Santiago Baca's Black Mesa Poems, I found my self wondering how is he able to get away with this. For instance in the poem Matanza to Welcome Spring Baca runs through a list of things in a song

"Tonight life is
lust
death
hunger
violence
innocence
sweetness
honor
hard work
and tomorrow I will go
to church" (43)

Alot of these are big idea, and as a reader hard to connect with, but for some reason Baca pulls it off. I think he is able to due to the strong sense of place in all of his work. Because the reader is immersed in Baca's wonderful description of the South West and the reader feels so connected to the area through these descriptions it felt like his overarching statements about life were no longer are abstract concepts, but more tangible concepts rooted in place.

The strong sense of place in these poems also got me thinking about the duty of poets in society. Do poets have a specific responsibility to their community? I think this question will bring about a whole slew of questions and debate topics about the advantages and disadvantages of globalization, and whether or not people should think globally or locally.

I do not think I am equipped to answer the question of whether global or local is better, but I do think that poets have a responsibility to their communities. And not just poets but all writers. If we don't write about the small nooks and crannies of our communities they'll disappear and take with them a treasure trove stories and ideas.

So, I greatly enjoyed reading Baca's work, and greatly enjoyed reading about the nooks and cranies of Baca's community. I think the greatest thing I will learn from Baca is how to take these larger than life ideas and squeeze them into a region in order to make those ideas something we can actualy grasp.

What I like most about Ai's poems was her ability to take the persona poem and really make the poem about the persona. In many of the poems I felt like I was immersed in the characters she had created, to the point were it felt like these people were really writing the poems themselves. Given the topics Ai writes about this often became unsettling. Not in a bad way, but unsettling none the less. For example in "The Kid" when Ai writes

"and I squeeze the rod, raise it, his skull splits open.
Mother runs toward us. I stand still,
get her across the spine as she bends over him." (36)

I felt like this kid was actually writing the poem, and the thought of anybody actually being able to do such awful things really gives her poems a dark and unforgiving tone that really cuts into the reader. Sometimes I even wondered if it was necessary for Ai to add these horrific elements to her poems. Like in "The Hitchhiker" I was uncertain what exactly Ai was going for, and I began to wonder why I was reading a poem about a guy murdering some woman. In this poem the graphic elements, and the poem itself felt like it was simply for shock value.

Of course I may just not be getting the poem, I still cannot figure out what the number 35 in a tear has to do with the poem, and I get the feeling like it might be important. But I still felt this way about other poems of hers. Even in "The Kid" I wondered if it was necessary to include all the violence.

Another aspect of Ai's poetry that really stood out was her ability to capture not just a person, but an entire time period. I thought this was a very clever way of capturing an era. Like in "The Detective" when she writes about this man who had been to Vietnam, she does not just write about the man, she writes about an entire time period, and an entire era of people.

I normally do not care for poetry that is political, or poetry which overtly tries to capture the feeling of an entire era, mostly because I think it often times feels preachy or didactic. However I think Ai gets away with it because she is capturing just one person, and in capturing one person, she captures all the shades of politics and the feeling of an era. To use the example of "The Detective" again,

"I look into the back seat
The Twentieth Century is there,
wearing a necklace of grenades
that glitters against its black skin.
I stare see the pins
have all been pulled.
Drive, says the voice"

I do not know what it was like to live through the Vietnam war, but I imagine it felt a lot like this. I never really thought of persona poems as tools which could allow the poet to write about these things, which is why i think I liked many of Ai's poems, they were always surprising me.

Lucille Clifton

After reading Broumas, and Sexton it was interesting to see re-visioned myth's that were not from a western tradition. I thought it was interesting that Clifton choose Kali as a figure to revision. I really liked the whole part of the Kali myth that depicts the goddess as not only a symbol of death and destruction, but also as a kind of maternal life giving god. This duality is really shown in Clifton's "the coming of Kali" where she writes

"with her skulls and breasts.
i am one side of your skin,
she sings softness in the other
you know me well you know me well, she sings," (135)

While I enjoyed reading these poems I do think a lot of the time, and judging from the previous myth poems we have read for class, the evocation to a mythical character distances the reader from the poem. I felt this same distance when I read Clifton's Kali poems. The poems seem to have a lot under the surface, and at times it seems like that something is just screaming to get out. In the same poem as above Clifton writes

"she is persistent with her
black terrible self, she
knows places in my bones
i never sing about but" (135)

That is an intriguing idea that the poet as places within her self that she does not explore, yet this deity knows. And in the proceeding poems I think Clifton explores these unsung parts of herself through Kali. However the poems all use Kali as a kind of lens to look at these areas, and like with Broumas, it seems like a mask to shield the poet from writing unabashedly about the regions with in her self which she as never explored before.

When I started to read Clifton's persona poems, however, I started to feel that distance close, and I felt closer to the poet. For instance in the series of poems in some jesus Clifton uses great imagery to render these biblical figures in a new light, like in moses when she writes

"I walk on bones
snakes twisting
in my hand
locusts breaking my mouth
an old man
leaving slavery home burning in me
like a bush
God got his eye on" (93)

Similarly, when I read her poems about tyrone and willie b I felt almost not distance from the poem. It felt like Clifton really was close to these characters, and really captured these characters. These poems felt more natural. As a result I was more connected to the stories of tyrone and willie b.

The distance I have felt with many of these revisionary myth and fairy tale poems could be attributed to the fact that I do not know much about a lot of these myths and fairy tales. I have a basic understanding of the myths and only remember the fair tales from Disney movies. So it is difficult to try and dive into these myths and fairy tales which people much smarter than I have spent life times analyzing and interpreting. It is a lot of baggage for a poem to carry around, and I think it is fair to ask if these poems need that baggage. This is also probably why Clifton's poems with Judea-Christian biblical figures resonates in me much more than her poems dealing with Kali.

Structurally I loved Clifton's poems. I love the short concise construction of her poems, getting the most bang for your buck, as well as her voice which seems very organic. For example in willie b (1) I thought Clifton really captured the voice of this character. In many of her other poems too it felt like she was capturing this same voice. I love how she repeats lines in her poems, and when her voice combines with this it really gives her poems a bluesy feel. If there is something I will defiantly take away from Clifton it is her superb control of language and voice, as well as her short dense verse.

One of the most interesting things about Olga Broumas's book Beginning with O was her use of line breaks. In all of these poems she uses every line break to her advantage wasting none of them, like in "Beauty and the Beast"

For years I fantasized pain
driving, driving,
me over each threshold
I thought I had, till finally (55)

By breaking on these end words she is able to make each line it own statement which almost functions separately from the poem, yet at the same time adds depth to the poem's ultimate meaning. These line breaks make her poems slippery at times. When I was reading a poem I thought I knew where the poem was going and where Broumas was taking me as a reader. I thought I knew until I read the next line. It kept me on my toes, and kept me guessing until the very end of the poem. This was one of the things that I enjoyed the most about all of her poems.

It was also interresting to compare Broumas's fairytale poems to Sexton's fairy tale poems. When I began to read these poems I could see the influences that Sexton had on Broumas. I also liked to see Broumas's take on these particular fairy tales which where at times fairly close to Sexton, and at times no where near Sexton.

The thing which really set Broumas's fairy tale poems apart from Sexton's was the way Broumas jumps right into her transformation of the the tale and really transforms the fairy tale. Like in "Beauty and the Beast" where Broumas does not even seem to pay the original tale any mind. Instead she simply uses it as a framing story for the story she wants to tell.

I remember reading in one of the essay's at the begining of this class something along the lines that re visioning these fairy tales and myths is a kind of mask, so I have to wonder sometimes whether or not Broumas used these poems to hide something she did not want the reader to see. While with Sexton's poems I had to ask what exactly was being re visioned, with Broumas I have to ask why are these being re visioned. Why is Broumas using this mask in her poetry? It could be because it meshes well with her subject matter. It could be to protect her self, after all if you're not careful a poem can steal something from you.

Ochester

This is my first time reading Ed Ochester, and I must say that I enjoyed it. The thing which caught my attention was the conversational tone of his work. He seems to invite the reader in to the poem. Along with the conversational tone of these poems, I also enjoyed the narrative aspect of his work. Every poem was like a story that I was being told, not one I was reading. The poem Leechburgh, PA I think illustrates this unique blend of Ochester's conversational tone and narrative style.

One could almost be happy here.
the corner drugstore, Steinburg's,
like the fifties in Brooklyn
with a window full of surgical
appliances and pantyhose,
and in front on Friday night
a group of hoods
talking about getting laid maybe
but obviously not doing it,
their big dumb dicks
wrapped away like tubular chimes
on the symphony off-night,
like exclamation points
looking for something to happen
on Friday night, at Steinburg's
in Leechburgh, Pennsylvania. (61)

This poem also illustrates the kind of humor Ochester utilizes in his poetry. It is a far cry of Sexton's dark, wry humor that made you want to laugh and cringe at the same time. It is more of the kind of humor that simply makes you want to laugh, like in the poem Monroeville, PA when someone on the street yells hey asshole and everyone turns around.

I also liked that for the majority of the poems I did not have to put a lot of thought into the poem. This is not to say I thought the poems were easy or basic, but that I did not need to spend a lot of time trying to get into the poem. Instead it felt like my grandfather was telling me a story. I really admire poetry that is accessible and easy to get into. After reading myth poems for a couple of weeks now, this is a nice change of pace.

The topics of Ochester's poems also struck me. It was amazing to see the wide range of topics he writes on, everything from social commentary, to his personal life. I loved how in his poems about society and culture, he was able to get his point across with subtlety. It feels like whenever I read a social commentary poem it bashes me over the head with things like pop culture, or how fat Americans are, or one of the many other obvious problems everyone talks about. In Ochester's work however he is able to get that point across with enough subtlety so it did not feel like he was preaching to me about the trappings of our modern society.

After reading Ochester's work, I am excited to hear him read, and even more excited at the opportunity to pick his brain on Tuesday.

Transformations

The first thing which struck me about the poems in Transformations was the subtle humor Sexton used in her poetry. Granted this humor was very wry and sometimes dark, and always with a sarcastic tone. Like in "Cinderella" when Sexton writes

"The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring fourth.
That is the way with amputations.
They don't just heal up like a wish." (56)

I think these lines are a good illustration of the humor found throughout the book. It is a humor which is not overtly funny, and in fact at times is quite disturbing. I was curious as to why exactly I found some of the things in Sexton's poems humorous, so I went on Wikipedia to look up humor. I found an interesting quote there as to the orgin of humor.

"The theory is an evolutionary and cognitive explanation of how and why any individual finds anything funny. Effectively, it explains that humor occurs when the brain recognizes a pattern that surprises it, and that recognition of this sort is rewarded with the experience of the humorous response."

Granted this comes from Wikipedia, so the actual scientific validity of this statement may vary. However, regardless of its scientific validity, I think that quote has interesting ramifications for Sexton's poetry. Namely, what are the surprising patterns she creates to evoke a humorous response from the reader? For me these patterns arose when she transformed the fairy tales to make them her own and to expose some part of the tale to give the reader a new and fresh look at an old story.

Sexton's humor is one of the things which really allows her to transform the poems and shed a new unique light on them. The other way in which she does this is through the opening parts of her poems, the parts before she gets into the fairy tale. In these parts Sexton tells the reader what she wants them to take away from the retelling of the fairy tale. For instance in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" Sexton opens with

"No matter what life you lead
the virgin is a lovely number:
cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper,
ares and legs made of Limoges,
Lips like Vin Du Rhone,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes,
open and shut." (3)

I feel like these lines capture everything Sexton is trying to say in the poem. Because these opening parts were, I think, the main device she used to transform the fairy tale, I kept wondering why the fairy tail needed to be retold. It seemed that for the most part Sexton stays faithful to the tail she is trying to cast a different light on, apart from her running commentary throughout the poem. And in some poems, even the commentary on the tale is so subtle that it seems like Sexton is re-telling it verbatim. For instance in "Cinderella", while she does cut the poem up with moments like the one previously mentioned here, she also has moments where it felt like she was absent from the poem.

"Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
She planted the twig on her mother's grave
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat" (54)

Sometimes it felt like Sexton was simply writing down the details of the fairy tale because she had to, not because they were transformed by her own voice. So the question I immediately asked myself is why not just leave out the fairy tale part and let the opening poem speak for itself?

When I was reading the poems I tried to imagine what the poem would be like if Sexton left out the fairy tail part. For some, I think the poem would have actually been stronger without the fairytale. Rapunzel is one of these poems. If the poem ended at “A woman / who loves a woman / is forever young." (39) I think Sexton would have been able to say everything she needed, and would have strengthened the poem. So the ultimate question I have after reading "Transformations" is why did she have to, or choose to, retell the entire tale.