the form of peanut butter

I want to dedicate this blog post how Wanda Coleman executes her poem Of Cucarachas and Peanut-Peanut Butter. 

First off, the title. It swoops us in with musicality and reference, and intrigues us with the dedication and the already obvious tongue and cheek, perhaps mocking tone of it. 

We see those long lines and initially long stanzas - indicating a kind of too-much-to-say exasperation which winds down into shorter stanzas with a punch. The poem, a de-masking of portended liberalism and fame, directed at a particularly offending man, of symbol of a man, works its magic, besides its obvious smart and cutting content, through it's shape and line-breaks.

Take the first line; "he is always crunchy, followed in crowded museums." End stop. This brief description, drawing attention to the spectacle of the man, also contains a distancing quality. Wanda Coleman will not follow any crunchy Mr Birdsong through crowded museums. The rest of the lines to follow drop down on one another, spiraling across of depiction of his elite "edged-closer life." The second stanza becomes more choppy in it's line breaks, cutting off compound phrases and pausing a quick moving line in the middle. The second line ends "sitting under his/" and leaves the propietary pronoun hanging before falling down to "ass." Which enhances both the humor and the contempt int he poem. Further down Coleman write:"who speaks, replies, and/receives." Breaking the line in places where the breath might not normally break and adding a sense of being pulled downward while also emphasizing fragmentation. This emphasizes Mr. Birdsong's distance from the realities that this poet and those he feels charity for experience.

The third stanza drops and separates out even more. The sounds are staccato and fast paced, which adds to the funny and angry exasperation. We break after to be verbs, again after the possessive pronoun his, after he has, and between for and himself. The line breaks feel at times like unnatural places to take air, but for me don't actually interrupt the flow of the poem. It pulls me from one line to the next, and gives a kind of heightened accent to the mocking and contemptuous and calling out poem that it is. What Mr. Birdsong sings about and what the underside or truth of that is unwravels with Coleman's telling him off. The third stanza ends with two difficult lines about the violence down with Mr. Birdsong's ignorance and entitlement, but then lead into the last two, much shorted stanzas with are straight slams. Coleman disses Mr. Birdsong with such eloquence and shape that we can only imagine him left stripped and cowering.

Hell yeah, Wanda.