"The Difference" and "Trouble in Mind":
- Both of these poems explore in different ways race, ethnicity, and nationality. How do you see the poets grappling w/ issues of difference here?
"Smalltown Lift":
- How is onomatopoeia used in the poem?
- Who do the pronouns ("he" "they") refer to?
- What do the italics do?
- This is what we call a prose poem. How would the poem be different if we broke it up into lines like the other poems we've read so far?
- What makes this a poem and not a short story?
"Porn":
No question I could ask here can improve on the conversation already begun by Amanda on Friday. If you want to talk about that poem, scroll down and join.
I love "Smalltown Lift." Here's a question: Is the speaker gay or straight or does it matter?
ReplyDelete"Smalltown Lift":
ReplyDelete"He" and "they" may be referring to his friends or his parents. The italics emphasize the word or sentence. This is a poem because the style is slightly different from a short story. If it was read as a short story, it wouldn't sound right. If it is read like a poem it would sound better. It goes with the flow if it's read like a poem.Short stories might be a little bit longer and usually sounds like a story. Poems and stories are read differently.
To be frank with all of you, I find myself dumbfounded at times like these. I find it amusing that poems like these can be considered poems. I don't mean to say that they're stupid, as I have too much respect to say such distasteful words. Their world is something that can only be understood if one lived it while having the exact developing mindset of the author who experienced it. For that, I will not degrade such works of literature in such a manner. For the sake of letting people understand how confused I am and even relate to it. Me trying to understand these two poems, especially "Trouble in Mind", is like a homeless man seeing Picasso's paintings in the art gallery of the Museum of Modern Art. Though the difference being that I know that they aren't JUST writings, they carry importance.
ReplyDeleteIn response to the question, I'll try to answer at a later time due to the abundance of information in the class discussion that changed a lot of my views, I want to spend more time on the poems as I somehow completely missed the fact that I was supposed to read "Smalltown Lift" and "Porn" as well. Over the duration of the class, I wasn't able to express my ideas in full clear details as I wanted, due to my physical limitations in regards to speaking with others. There were some concepts from "Porn" that got me either intrigued or downright horrified. In short, I think I was able to think up of numerous interpretations after reading some poems.
I have broken up Blanchfield's "Smalltown Lift" to see how it would go. What I notice upon doing so is that it reads like a story does- thereby pointing to something I never really noticed. It is that with the exception of line breaks (and other spacing techniques), poems and prose do not work the same way. That's to say that if I break up a poem, like how I did with "Smalltown", this change in structure reads in a way that it seems meant to fall back 'into place' of its former bulky paragraph. From line to line, in fact, it reads like one sentence from another of a story, and also like it could more transitions from line to line in order for a flow to really be established. The structuring of "Smalltown" is also needed as it isn't composed of several 'main' ideas the way a poem is- this would overwhelm the compact structure that is a paragraph. "Smalltown" needs to be in that form in order for it to be complete.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to taking about different race, ethnicity and nationality, it can be difficult to present certain concept because we may scare of what critics might say since it is sensitive, and people could feel a whole wide range of emotions when you talk about certain topics. If I had to write about another culture, it will be difficult for me. I will have to construct my ideas in such a way that I am not bias or so forth. And I think that that is how these poet have presented their piece.
ReplyDeleteIn “The Difference”, I feel like he is making a comparison about these different countries and its economy, which leads back to the title of the poem. All these countries have different production and source by which they make their economy thrive and it it recognized by other.
In “The trouble mind”, it gave me an impression of how people can make jokes about us and all we can do is get mad and sit in a corner quietly because we may not be of their kind. Our skin colors play a major role on how people look at us and treat us.
There can be different interpretations as well. This is just how I personally felt and I may be wrong too.
When I first read Smalltown Lift my impression was a date was occurring. Even though two individuals weren't pointed out bluntly, I still assumed it was with two people. The word, "they" did make me think it could've been three people or a double date, but that idea was scrapped with the last long sentence implying the "he" individual wrapped his arm around the other. As for whether or not the narrator is gay or straight, I don't think it matters. It never specifies the other persons gender so its really up to the reader. However I fully agree with how Stacy described in class that there was a "feminine" energy or aura to the second speaker whose words were italicized. I personally felt it was a boy and a girl. The onomatopoeia was used to describe the clicks from the photo booth. I don't think they held too much relevancy to the poem though. The poems strength seems to lie in how there appears to be a conversation happening. When split up, it seems as though the italicized words respond to the normal writing. For example the 'he' says, "In here we have to tell each other one true thing." The italics responded with, "You first."
ReplyDeleteI would like to think this is more of a short story than a poem. I feel as though a great deal of creative writing comes of as poetry when its constructed differently than the norm. This piece's uniqueness in its structure describing two individuals speaking and the lack of knowledge about who they are, rubs of an insightful touch. Poetry to me can be organized in any manner and its called a poem, but when this short story does the same in a fairly 'light' way, I think the results are story worthy.