rex

i had to draw the tin roof with light straining through to fully appreciate what Abani was saying with that image. the death of his language is slow and quiet, “slight” and “pursed.” i thought of single words in his language filtered through the holes in the tin roof—an expansive privileging of euro-and-ethno-centric culture, language, art, history. i imagined these single words fragmented, fighting through small spaces in the dense roof. the lines of the poem are just as important as what exists in the space between them: silence, space.

i’ve never read a poem like “Dearest Jane” before (in terms of theme and subject matter). how important to document a female-bodied soldier’s experience of war, especially the Civil War, one where our US American memory is mostly (cis)male-centric, aside from tired southern belle and mammy stereotypes. also, given how many actual female-bodied people participate as men in war, the chronicling of this perspective is critical (and has been overwhelmingly hidden). this persona poem is so effective and believable because of its means of delivery (letter) and also because it’s not written with complete dedication to the reader of the poem, but rather to whom the letter is addressed. it’s not about what the reader wants or needs to know: there are things left unsaid by Henrietta to Jane that the reader would probably like to know (less of the mundane details, more specifics about the war, why this person is presenting as male, etc). these things go left unsaid, though, because Jane already knows. often persona poems break the voice by attending too carefully to the reader. the poem is also not overly “poetic”—it’s casual in language and tends to the character, though the poetic is there (embedded rhyme, line breaks, etc).

poetry is situated, has a context—historical, temporal, political, cultural, linguistic, etc. it reflects experiences, time periods, and histories. it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. it does compile history, even if it’s not as apparent as Abani’s poems or Harper’s “Advice to Clinton.” poems like this one point us to histories we leave out,  ones that have been misrepresented or under-represented (as with the Elaine race riots and trials). also, "Faulkner's Centennial 9 25 97"--how interesting for a poem to have that title and to conjure Mammy Callie--who exists in the background of Faulkner's version of the South, and is no less important, but is unknown.

I was drawn to Harper's language play in "Natal Visit" pointing to what comes into common language and how such loaded, potentially meaningful words and phrases like "land's end" and "discover" become branded and capitalized upon.

um, okay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil! i was blown away by how i could feel, see, touch, taste her poems. the rice rolled into a ball catching bones in the throat, the eggs in their blue cup, the cherries making a gun of the mouth. also, the language is so rich and full, but the tone and delivery are casual and understated. ghazals are so complicated and intricate, hard to pull off, and hers reads seamlessly.

she plays with cliches and tropes about love and sex--red, cherries, fruit--we've all seen these figures conjured in love poems, poems about the body and pleasure. she uses these in a new way, and smartly. also, it’s not a poem that exalts love and sex. it’s regretful. her writing is visceral and sensory, detailed. “mouth stories” maps out the geography of the tongue and gives each area of taste in the mouth its own story. again, breathing life into the sensory, oral experience of love, sex, loss.

“AN ELLIPSIS OF ANTS ON THE WALL” !!!

i want to leave my comments about Maria de los Santos for class.

-rex