I Am NiRee🦋

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THE RESEARCH PROCESS: PART II.

After researching Walker, I decided to move on to essays written about the book and take little ideas and apply them to mine, which led me to a ton of cross references. That’s when the work really started. There were so many themes and ideas to write about that I had to pick the few to use to really support the message of the book and what it’s purpose was.

Not only did I read but I also went on to YouTube a watched reviews on the book. Overall they were just summaries of book, how they interpreted the writing, how it made them feel and what they liked and didn’t like about it. I tried to use that same mindset when it came to writing and take their opinions and note them to see if their was any correlation so that I could use it tor my critism piece.

When it came to researching I quickly noticed that more people have seen the movie than actually read the book, and that’s where the worldwide shock of critism came from so I decided to just stick with what was criticized on in the movie that also was in the book as well. There’s was critism on the BOOK but just more on the movie.

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THE RESEARCH PROCESS: PART I.

My first step during the research process was to find summaries. I decided do that because I had just finished reading the book and even though summaries are recaptions of what happen they are always different. Not everyone perceives things the same way. So I read about 2-3 summaries. I took notes and I compared them. Some were more empathetic and others had more uplifting vibes. I used those summaries along with my own personal idea about book and I wrote for 7 minutes like we would do in class.

Next thing I did was look for reviews on the book again, because now I could fully understand them now that I had read the full book. I used some of the ideas presented in their text and expanded for my writing. It took a while before I actually put together a solid idea about the book as a whole. The key was researching Walker’s history because most of her works are influenced by her life. When I realized this book was about her ancestors it automatically made sense to me. This book is meant to tell stories of those women who had to suffer and take on the aftermath of slavery. Black women were the last to receive “freedom” in this country.

[heblamesme]

THE READING PROCESS: PART IIIII.

The above photo is from the Musical, The Color Purple, By Marsha Norman.

THEMES:

Narration and Voice:

Walker emphasizes throughout the novel that the ability to express one’s thoughts and feelings is crucial to developing a sense of self. Initially, Celie is completely unable to resist those who abuse her. Remembering Alphonso’s warning that she “better not never tell nobody but God” about his abuse of her, Celie feels that the only way to persevere is to remain silent and invisible. Celie is essentially an object, an entirely passive party who has no power to assert herself through action or words. Her letters to God, in which she begins to pour out her story, become her only outlet. However, because she is so unaccustomed to articulating her experience, her narrative is initially muddled despite her best efforts at transparency.

Strong Female Relationships:

Throughout The Color Purple, Walker portrays female friendships as a means for women to summon the courage to tell stories. In turn, these stories allow women to resist oppression and dominance. Relationships among women form a refuge, providing reciprocal love in a world filled with male violence. Female ties take many forms: some are motherly or sisterly, some are in the form of mentor and pupil, some are sexual, and some are simply friendships. Sofia claims that her ability to fight comes from her strong relationships with her sisters. Nettie’s relationship with Celie anchors her through years of living in the unfamiliar culture of Africa. Samuel notes that the strong relationships among Olinka women are the only thing that makes polygamy bearable for them. Most important, Celie’s ties to Shug bring about Celie’s gradual redemption and her attainment of a sense of self.

The Cyclical Nature of Racism and Sexism:

Almost none of the abusers in Walker’s novel are stereotypical, one-dimensional monsters whom we can dismiss as purely evil. Those who perpetuate violence are themselves victims, often of sexism, racism, or paternalism. Harpo, for example, beats Sofia only after his father implies that Sofia’s resistance makes Harpo less of a man. Mr. ______ is violent and mistreats his family much like his own tyrantlike father treated him. Celie advises Harpo to beat Sofia because she is jealous of Sofia’s strength and assertiveness. Sexism is, at its core, a product of gender roles. In the early twentieth century, discrimination against women through the overt use of gender roles was highly prevalent amongst men and women. In a patriarchal society, women are expected to submit to men in all areas simply because women are supposedly “inferior” to and dependent on them. At the same time, women are encouraged into submissive, quiet roles that not only cement their status as beneath men but also give men roles with power. The cyclical nature of this systematic oppression continues its course without interference since it is considered a societal norm, and because women take on such passive roles, it gives men an excuse to justify their superiority and power over women. As a thematically driven novel, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple displays similar, reoccurring motifs concerning gender roles and sexism. Through Celie’s letters to God, the audience sees several occasions where gender roles lay hand in hand with sexism for many of the female characters and that the discrimination they face is a result of the gender values surrounding them. In work, marriage, violence, sex, and education. With that being said I believe this book strongly connects to The Handmaids Tale, both protagonist use other women as a sort of escapism from their reality. So Ofgled uses her best friend and her mother with her memories to escape her life and Celie uses Shug as part of the outside world to escape it. So ultimately both of these protagonist use the outside world to escape their oppression.

Here’s a Podcast that helped me generate ideas of how to compare these two stories:

Plants R Friends • A podcast on Anchor

Opinion and comparison of book and novels of all genres

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THE READING PROCESS: PART IIII.

GENDER ROLES??/NAMEING:

There was an article that I read prior to reading the book (couldn’t find it) that explained how Walker examines how a person’s gender is distinct from their sexual identity and how the roles that are bestowed on men and women, and the expectations of behaviour that society expects from them, can often be destructive because they are too rigidly enforced.

In The Color Purple Walker includes some women characters who show masculine qualities and also men who enjoy activities that are more commonly associated with women:

Celie, for example, notices that Shug sometimes speaks and acts in a way that is more masculine than feminine. When Shug tells Sofia in Harpo’s juke joint that she looks like a person who enjoys a good time, it is the kind of remark that Celie would have expected a man to make. Then we have Sofia, an excellent wife and mother but also enjoys activities that could be considered to be ’manly’, like carpentry, while her husband Harpo enjoys looking after their children and cooking meals. His efforts at carpentry almost always end in disaster. Throughout the main part of the narrative, Albert is a stereotypical ‘manly’ man, but gradually he begins to change after Shug leaves him. He manages not only to make his home more comfortable, but also to learn the value of friendship which occurs as he learns to sew.

Another effective characterisation technique is Walker’s choice of names for some of the people in the novel. Shug Avery has two first names. Her birth name, given to her by her parents, is Lillie, but she is known throughout the novel by her nickname ‘Shug’ which is short for sugar:

‘Lillie’ could suggest Shug is a conventional female as it has connotations of the lily flower, traditionally associated with purity. The fact that she never uses this name could mean that she thinks it too lame for the lifestyle she has chosen.

‘Shug’ is a name which better fits her rebellious life as a sexy nightclub blues singer. Her behaviour is often less than sweet, especially towards people she does not respect. Harpo’s second wife Mary Agnes, also has two names which give an idea of what she is and what she would like to be:

She is nicknamed ‘Squeak‘ because of the sound of her singing voice, and the name suggests timidity and lack of importance. Later in the narrative, after she has been abused by her uncle when she tries to secure Sofia’s release from prison, she insists that she should now be called by her given name, Mary Agnes, as a mark of respect. She subsequently establishes herself as a successful singer under that name. Sofia’s name is symbolic. She is named after Sophia, the classical goddess of wisdom (also being associated with that quality in the Christian tradition). It is ironic that despite this, she is not wise enough to realise that defying a white official is extremely dangerous. Corinne’s husband Samuel (who marries Celie’s sister Nettie after Corinne’s death) is named after an Old Testament prophet. In Hebrew, Samuel means ‘name of God’. This is an appropriate name for a man who is a Christian minister and missionary. Samuel is one of the few male characters in the story who is consistently honest and trustworthy. Adam, Celie’s son, is also given a symbolic name, that of the first man created by God. Later in the narrative, after he marries Tashi, he also adopts the African name Omatangu which is a reference to the African belief that this was the name of the first created man. Like Samuel, Adam is a man who is honest and good.

Then we have characters with no name. Sometimes Walker does not even dignify a character with anything other than a title. Celie does not use her husband’s given name of Albert until almost the end of the narrative, although other characters call him either Albert or, like Harpo, ‘Pa’. In referring to her husband as Mr _, Celie indicates her inability to relate intimately to him in any way at all. She uses the term Mr _ in the same way that a black slave would use the term to address the white slave master on a plantation. Walker intends the reader to think of Albert as a black slave-master who treats his wife as a slave. Only when Celie has succeeded in freeing herself from Mr _ ’s domination, can she finally bring herself to call him by his name, investing him with status and asserting their mutual understanding of one another as equal individuals.

[heblamesme]

THE READING PROCESS: PART III.

The above photo is from the Movie, The Color Purple, By Steven Spielberg.

DESCRIPTION:

As I get further and further into the story I realize that Celie’s earliest letters immediately establish her as a sympathetic character. The tone of the early letters to God often resembles the perspective of a small child. The letters are short and contain graphic descriptions of Celie’s sexual experiences at the hands of her stepfather Fonso. The tone of these early letters resembles the kind of expression that might come from an ignorant child, although the reader realises very soon that Celie is far from ignorant about the kind of household she and her sister inhabit.

Celie’s descriptions of the horrible world she grows up in are often shocking based off the descriptions she makes, for example in Letter 47, when she tells Shug about being raped by her Stepfather really makes me sad. She describes the murder of Harpo’s mother in a way that makes the killing appear more of an everyday unremarkable incident than it later turns out to have been. The violence of Harpo’s mother’s death establishes the theme of extreme violence which surrounds Celie’s life. Celie’s blunt descriptions establish her as an innocent narrator in the tradition of classic American fiction, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Celie’s narrative voice does not change throughout the novel, but her expression and style become more sophisticated as she grows up.

Later in the narrative, her sentence structures become more complex and the paragraphs become longer, although in comparison with Nettie’s style of writing they are short. Celie’s letters make use of direct speech, which makes the account of her experiences dramatic. As the narrative progresses, she adds touches of descriptive. For example, the description of their journey to Celie’s childhood home combines sharp humour as the birds sing ‘they little cans off’, with vivid descriptions of the landscape that suggest ideas of Easter and the while idea resurrection.

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THE READING PROCESS: PART II.

LANGUAGE:

As soon as you began reading the letters you automatically notice the lack of punctuation and all of the grammatical errors. I realized in this specific letter she says git instead of get because she cannot read and she can only write by her interpretation on how the words sound to her. Education during the 1930s was very limited, especially for African Americans, and even more so for female African Americans. Celie’s father keeps her out of school to help out in the house and to keep her a subordinate to him. When Celie moves into Mr.___’s house, she is not able to attend school either. Nettie essentially goes to school for the both of them, and in the film this becomes crucial to Celie’s development as a character.

As I was reading the first few letters from Celie to God I realized the language of this book is similar to Fences. You can tell that this language in the book is more historic due to the great lack of words. Celie’s letters are consistently marked by features of BE (Black English) dialect.

Black English is considered African-American English that began as early as the seventeenth century, when the Atlantic slave trade brought African slaves into British-colonial North America in an area that became the Southern United States in the late eighteenth century, according to Wikipedia.

• The conjugation of the verbs ‘to be’ and ‘to have’, for are often jumbled

•Plural forms of nouns and verb forms often have irregular endings; ‘two men’ becomes ‘two mens’; ‘she says’ becomes ‘she say’

•Double negatives are common, as well as the use of the form ain’t for ‘isn’t/is not’ (‘She ain’t never no good!’)

•Pronouns are used in a non-standard way: ‘us’ is used for ‘we’ as well as ‘us’; ‘they’ is used for both ‘they’ and ‘their’

•Phonetic spellings are used to mimic the sound of speech: ‘asked’ becomes ‘ast’ and ‘tuberculosis’ becomes ‘two berkulosis’

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THE READING PROCESS: PART I.

PREFACE/ INTRODUCTION:

Through the creation of a preface, prior to the beginning of her novel, The Color Purple, Alice Walker introduces to the reader the background information pertaining to where the ideas surrounding her novel came from. She goes on to describe its religious affiliations and how it is not so much a book about a desire to find God, but a book used to describe one's path and experiences in their journey to find God. Walker describes how religious texts are not only found to be written on the inside of the walls of a church, but also in the world around us. Walker writes that, "no one is exempt from the possibility of a conscious connection to "All That Is,"" meaning that there is no escape from God, for he is connected to every person in every aspect of their everyday lives.

In the manner Alice Walker speaks of her book, I am extremely interested in discovering how nonreligious a religious book can be (that statement doesn't seem to even make sense when written out). Walker seemed to have come to the conclusion that there would be confusion pertaining to this statement and to clear it up stated that nonreligious books masked God as "everyday objects like the trees, stars, and the wind." When presented with this idea, maybe it is possible for Alice Walker to sway her readers into following God. Maybe she does, in fact, have the ability to persuade them to stop hiding their faith and their beliefs, because perhaps religion, as Walker states, is like the color purple, "always a surprise, but everywhere in nature." Religion may come as a surprise to many people, in the sense that they are suddenly presented with finding God, but just as Walker believes, he was and is always there.

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RESEARCH PROJECT: CHOOSING THE BOOK

I decided to read The Color Purple by Alice Walker because as a child I remember watching the movie and how impactful it was toward my mother and grandmother. They were very interested, and I was curious to understand why. During the process of finding a novel. I looked into The Kite Runner, Jane Eyre, and Sophie’s Choice. The Kite Runner seemed like it might have been interesting to me, but I overheard other classmates talking about it and they seemed more invested in it, so I decided not to look into it as well as the other books (I didn’t feel like fighting over them). I kind of knew from the beginning that this would be the book I chose just based off my prior knowledge of it and the history that the story has had in my family.

There’s a funny saying in the African American community that goes like... “If you haven’t done this or that you aren’t considered black”. This would be one of the things that applies to it. The book is so historical in the black community because its something that should be read by everyone who loves a good story, a love story, or a story of overcoming obstacles and odds to reign supreme. It is one of the most affecting and humanistic stories ever told. Also the reviews I seen online when researching the book made me even more interested.

A woman on a good reads review stated “I read The Colour Purple in my early teens, was traumatized by the graphic abuse portrayed, and vowed to never read it again. I was curious about why so many of my GR friends rated it so highly and was eventually convinced to give it another go. Years after my first read, I still (of course) have the same visceral reaction to the abuse but that no longer blinds me from seeing the magnificence of Alice Walker’s storytelling, and how she brings her characters to life. I adored Celie. It really amazed me how a woman who was abused so much (sexually, physically, verbally) could still have so much love in her heart, and not be bitter. Imagine hearing things like this regularly: (Husband to Celie) – “Who you think you is? You can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, he say, you nothing at all.” But Celie is something, and one of my favourite parts of this book is the sisterhood portrayed, especially by the enigmatic Shug, who helped Celie on her journey to self-realization. The book has strong female characters, which is another plus. I’m so glad I gave this book a second chance. Celie is a wonderful character and proof of the resilience of the human spirit.”

After reading her review, it was revealed to me how similar I felt to her. I was affected from the by movie instead of the book though. Just like her as a young child. I didn’t understand what my mother and grandmother seen in the story until I decided to actually go back and read it. Even though this an a school assignment it still has helped me in real life because now I feel up to date and more closer with my mother and grandmother. Before I was missing a lot of introspection because in today’s age it’s harder for kids of color to really understand our past unless we read and do the research and I feel like this specific story benefited beyond the work and that’s why I really chose it.

The Color Purple

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book. A powerful cultura...

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“Sip” by Rudy Francisco.

In this poem he uses metaphors. He says “I take compliments the same way I take my coffee, I don’t drink coffee.” Why? Because “The last time I did it seared my entire mouth and I couldn’t taste anything for three days”. So he doesn’t take compliments... anymore. He drunk his coffee too fast. He’s “still trying to learn how to let endearment sit until it’s ready to be consumed” he got ahead of hisself once and it cost him his taste dubs for three days. I believe that maybe his head got “pumped up” which refers to being big headed and conceited. He thought he was cut enough so instead of waiting for the coffee to cool off he drunk it. He didn’t blow it or let it sit for a while then sip but he went right ahead and then suffered the consequences. Sometimes we get big headed and we need to be humbled this shows simply that everything happens for a reason. It’s not every day that you get to get out in check. Maybe it was god or maybe just fairly but he’s wiser and humble. It’s like the poem “Instrutions” yet instead of directly telling you to do something it kind of give you more of an example. This poem is very straight forward and it very humorous. I like the way he structures the poem and uses periods because when I read I imagine the awkward embarrassing pause. This poem reminds me of this song:

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[heblamesme]

“Instructions” by Rudy Francisco. It is as it reads. This poem is layed out and easy to grasp but some may need it to be disceted. Fransico uses personification to instruct us throughout the poem. The first step is gather our mistakes. What have you done that you regret?

Step two: “Rinse them with honesty and self-reflection” - Be honesty with yourself and come to the conclusion as why you did it or what caused them to happen and reflect on your choices.

Step three: “Let dry until you can see every choice and the regret become brittle”- Take time to let the regret break off inside you, and don’t run from the feeling.

Step four: “Cover the entire surface in forgiveness”- Forgive yourself. Dig deep inside and allow yourself to be forgiven.

Step five: Remind yourself that your are human”- Everyone makes mistakes. We are human and we aren’t perfect and sometime we fail to realize that and get in our head instead of moving on and doing better. We should accept because it’s naturals. You will drive yourself crazy trying to be PERFECT.

• “And this too is a gift” - You are absolutely a gift from god. A simple creation with much potential, and much to learn. Just follow the steps. If we were perfect there would be no need for the enjoyment of learning new things and become wiser.

This poem is something I’d read or remember when Im down and beating myself up or simply when I need reassurance that it’s okay to mess up. Sometime those around you look for perfection out of you and it can be challenging. This poem made me think of this song because sometimes you need someone to help accept the flaws:

[unlikekrystal]

IV - Trojan

Ocean Vuong obscures the binaries of masculinity and femininity during times of chaos, as seen in “Trojan.” The poem pulls the reader into turmoil, juxtaposing the beauty of the boy:

“The dress / petaling off him like the skin / of an apple.”

Violence and beauty are taken together as an expressive inner-battle, relying on the allusion of the wooden horse from the Trojan War. The boy hides inside himself like the soldiers hide inside the wooden horse, and together the boy and soldiers deceive those against them, yet the boy faces his own downfall:

“How easily a boy in a dress / the red of shut eyes / vanishes / beneath the sound of his own / galloping.”

The boy falling under his own “galloping” can be pointing to the death of his own identity. It is only when he is, “the wind, they will see him.” The boy, who falls under himself, travels through the spectrum of gender and seemingly becomes his own martyr, a symbol of visibility.

Vuong’s poetry isolates itself on the page, finding seclusion to be a powerful force for thinking, imagining, and empowering. His ability to explore the ambiguity that lies beneath the superficial, inspires readers to investigate the possibilities.

https://youtu.be/eYmDjdKTpuE

This poem immensely reminded me of this song. A cacophony of noise that sounds like something that could be played in a battle scene. And that’s the underlying tone of Trojan; a war against oneself, fighting until the very end.

[heblamesme]

I noticed a lot of the poems you post writes are about death. She gives me amine vibes for some reason but you song choice was well picked. I agree with your connections with violence and beauty, it’s helps you understand it more. Nice analysis.

[heblamesme]

Wasgoooood😎, I’m back. Back with another wonderful poem from Rudy Fransico titled “Meal”. This poem made me do a lot of thinking. As soon as I began reading I noticed that “in” wasn’t capitalized so I assumed that he used the title not only as a title but a way to start off the poem. So if it were to be in a regular typical sentence it would go something like “Meal... in a reoccurring nightmare,” or “Meal, in a reoccurring nightmare,”. The fact that we were talking about a nightmare set the tone and made assume quickly that this poem would be frantic or emotional. One of the techniques Francisco used in this poem was personification. He used it to describe the pace and amount of the bullets by using words like “rabid” and “pack”. The word rabid make me think of the words like prejudice and violent. Pack made me think of a group of wolves or animals even the clip full of bullets just racing toward him with anticipation and desire. The detail that resulting from personification was unbelievable. When he used the word guilty, I automatically thought of police brutality. Why? because for one he is a black man. He stated that the bullets were smelling one his old t-shirts which could’ve been referring to the his past. Also, in a lot of cases there have been protestors that used phrase like “guilty by birth” and “hands up, don’t shoot”. It gives a sense of punishment as if the bullets just assume that he deserves it. If I were to imagine a bullet eating it would rip right through your flesh and leaving an exit womb or maybe not even, hitting a major artery. Bullets are used to kill. So if a bullet was to eat until it’s jaws were tired that what I would imagine. The meal being over is obviously a connection to death. What is the meal though? In this case I think it’s Fransisco. Why is this considered a nightmare? Cause I’m most cases a black man biggest fear is to be gunned down. Who pulled the trigger we may never know but this is my analysis. The photo I chose for this poem is below and I chose it because growing up I watch several movies like this. They both have very similar connection. Especially because of the narration and storyline of the movie.

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[unlikekrystal]

C h e a t

For this week’s post, I’m reviewing Rachel’s poet, Chelsea Dingham! (Sorry Ocean :()

Poetry from another poet you’re not as familiar with is one of the most difficult subjects to review as they in the most cases by their very definition are personal, spelling out, thoughts and emotions to reader their trying to compel. I don’t know what drew Rachel to Dingham, but on my perspective, the dark themes and melancholy despite having a simple naturalistic cover page made me do a few double takes.

The collection of poetry is raw and the poems herein tare at your very soul, some of these poems deal with the death, including the loss of children. It deals with molestation, suicides, hits and runs, this short collection of poetry is not short on its impact.

The books in this collection by Chelsea Dingman alternates from her childhood and adulthood paralleling her life as a child to that of her children, it speaks not only of sorrow and loss, but of determination and overcoming.

Her line breaks do not necessarily follow her sentences, a characteristic of her art that separates her from other artists. Her themes, her narrative, even the way she chooses to show her story make her unique and irreplaceable. Dingman and her work made me realize, once again, how much I love free verse poetry. I actually believe it’s harder to write than regular poetry (the one that actually rhymes), and I find it much more satisfying. Its inner rhythms and pacing can be manipulated into making you feel angry, sad, even happy, nostalgic or euphoric. It has a certain strength and power within it that I admire, and I found Dingman’s work to be a prime example of modern free verse poetry.

I picked this picture to further illustrate the theme of death Dingham displays in a lot of her works.

[heblamesme]

I find this style of poetry satisfying as well. I really like the way you made your connections. There’s nothing I feel I should say. Spot on! ❤️

[unlikekrystal]

“Immigrant Haibun” Ocean Vuong

Ocean Vuong – Immigrant Haibun

The road which leads me to you is safe / even when it runs into oceans. / Edmond Jabes / * / Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath

https://www.google.com/amp/s/genius.com/amp/Ocean-vuong-immigrant-haibun-annotated

Continuing through the book, I began to take notice of the form, word choice, themes in each poem. I began to anticipate surprise. There are so many turns in this book; surprise is one of the only things that can be anticipated. One of the first big jolts that I encountered from Night Sky With Exit Wounds (formally) was the poem “Immigrant Haibun.” The poet extends his lines across the page and writes in big prose blocks. It was not a form that I first expected. Here is an excerpt of Ocean playing with prose in “Immigrant Haibun”:

“Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us. If you must know anything,/know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking//ship becomes a life raft— no matter how soft her skin…”

As a poet, Ocean shifts into prose and out of prose. He writes in couplets and creates his own forms. The form of the poems are so constantly and originally inventive. Ocean even created his own rules for the section breaks in this book too. In the lines above, and throughout the book, is full of intelligence and versatility. Vuong’s poems, written with intelligence and tenderness, offer new spaces for becoming, where the self questions its borders, remakes itself at the threshold of language.

I thought this picture related to Vuong’s poem because I noticed a theme in water and nature and every time he mentioned the ocean—or something water related, it’s described as violent or angry. So I thought it was the good idea to reanimate that reiteration of the sea.

[unlikekrystal]

“The Gift” - Ocean Vuong

My favorite poems of Vuong’s that explores the body occur near the end of the collection. Parts of the body—tongues, teeth, eyes, feet, knees, backs, heads, hands, blood—all get frequent mention in Vuong’s poems. The language of the body becomes the body of the poem. Vuong weaves together his concerns with bodies, beauty, and language here, in “The Gift”

“a b c a b c a b c

She doesn’t know what comes after.

So we begin again:

a b c a b c a b c

But I can see the fourth letter:

a strand of black hair – unraveled

from the alphabet

& written

on her cheek.

Even now the nail salon

will not leave her: isopropyl acetate,

ethyl acetate, chloride, sodium lauryl

sulfate & sweat fuming

through her pink

I NY t-shirt.

a b c a b c a – the pencil snaps.

The b bursting its belly

as dark dust blows

through a blue-lined sky.

Don’t move, she says, as she picks

a wing bone of graphite

from the yellow carcass, slides it back

between my fi ngers.

Again. & again

I see it: the strand of hair lifting

from her face … how it fell

onto the page – & lived

with no sound. Like a word.

I still hear it.”

In this poem, the narrator is at a nail salon, teaching a mother how to write in English. I love the juxtaposition between the narrator’s and the mother’s grasp of the English language; the tenderness and the pain between them in this poem.

The body is language, language the body, and both are trying to learn, to make the unfamiliar more familiar, to navigate newness for survival.

For Vuong, language and the body are the sites for making, and language itself and the body itself are both beyond the subjects of poems, they are poems themselves. “The Gift” is only one example of how Ocean plays with language in the book—alliteration, assonance, slight rhyme. Ocean has a range of poetic techniques that he is able to deploy to heighten the music of his poems.

I honestly picked this song because it tackles the whole essence of what I take from Vuong’s poems. The breakdown of the body and the meaning he places behind them made me hear this song in this poem and some of his other works as well.

[heblamesme]

Cheating: Poetry Blog 3

This poem here is from the poetry book called “Waiting For The Light” by Alicia Suskin Ostriker. The format of the poem was the first thing that caught my eye. Each stanza has its own position, and also each stanza has its own subject in a way. When I looked at the title of poem I assumed that poem would be about four men around a card table playing games, but that was only the first stanza. The rest of the poem is about different people but it’s still going on the same place. Which is Columbus and 97th which I interpreted as street names. I came to that conclusion when she said “Priest waiting to cross checks his wristwatch, maybe late for suicide watch”. This poem made a decent amount of sense until I reached the fifth stanza because it begins to say “you” and the text after that word seems irrelevant. For instance, when she says “your mothers packed dresses and trusted...”, like trusted what? She doesn’t finish her sentences. She goes on to try and connect each stanza together by saying “we all whip through it like blowing newspaper so many unread stories”. I follow the idea of that especially because she mentions several different people in the same place doing completely different things with completely different agendas. But overall this poem makes no sense to me and it’s frustrating because unlike my author Ostriker makes you interpret everything about her poems. Francisco says things bluntly and you get them and even is he uses metaphors that are difficult to understand, reading through several times helps you get what he’s saying. He never leaves you confused he always leaves you with a feeling of emotion whether it’s sad, happy, or shocked but never confused. Not matter how many times I read this it still doesn’t makes sense to me. She doesn’t use a lot of metaphors which seems to be the problem because everything she saying is short-ended like she doesn’t really wanna explain anything. I don’t really like this poet. She’s turning me off, I think I’m gonna stay faithful to Fransico because this ain’t it. This poem reminds me of this GIF cause I’m lost

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[heblamesme]

This poem is very direct. The title doesn’t need much interpretation because it is what it says. As I read the first stanza of the poem I immediately thought about “Mirrors” by Slyvia Plath. In the the poem, she refers to the mirror as a “little god” and in this poem Francisco refers to his depression as a jealous god. These techinques are identified as metaphors. His use of metaphors is great throughout the poem. This poem gave me a diary type vibe because he uses “I want to say” serval times as a transition to connect the poem entirely. This goes back to the title. When people ask him how he’s doing he wants to say these things which are the truth but instead he tell them lies which is admited at the end of the poem. His breaks within in the text make your mind wonder whether it’s there to create rhythm or not. Also, He lacks usage of commas which also bring up the thought of rhythm. Fransico makes note that “sadness is the only clean shirt he has left” and that his washing machine has been broken for some months, giving us a more clear perspective of his feelings and the duration of them. He is not himself and he’s struggling to get up everyday. He doesn’t want anyone to know so he pretends he’s okay. Which is basically the message of this photo:

He acts as is he is a pumpkin and carves this image of himself so that others can believe it’s true/real. Which makes me think how opposite both poems are because the woman in mirrors has literally brainwashed herself to think her reflection is who she is and he is forcing others to see a different image although he know what the real image of himself looks like. I’ve have put fake smiles on my face plenty of times because the things that I was going through weren’t easy to talk about and I felt no one would understand or bottom line that I just didn’t want anyone to know my business. Sometimes the things we decided to do can either make or break us. It’s not good to pretend like everything is okay all the time but also it’s not good to persuade our selves to think the worst because we’re insecure.

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