Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

TWO EGG, FLORIDA

by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I want to go back to this town so rich in poultry,
poor in everything else. The women send their kids
to the general store to trade two eggs for a kerchief
full of sugar. Everyone in town gets by with two eggs

worth of sugar—a dentist's dream. They add sugar
to everything: bread, milk, even water, chilled,
for a special summertime treat. In the deep-dark world
of water, there are fish who feast on whale dust.

I say dust, because all the fat and wide bones are no more.
And imagine how deep that is — deep enough where
the only sign left of the mighty animal is a vague powder
falling onto the back of a hermit eel. Beware the jalpari,

the water spirit who drowns young men whenever she wants
company in her watery home. She aches to return to land, where
rockshell and weeds dry out, eventually. Only gifts of spider lily
and sedge left at the edge of the sea placate her. How lonely

would you feel in a place like that — so much pressure,
so much darkness. I'm pulled to the sea floor. My loneliness
is eaten. How poor is the hen that gave one egg at a time?
How do you tell your son to string her neck with twine?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil (1974-present) is an associate Professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia.  She has authored 3 poetry collections: Miracle Fruit (2003), At the Drive-In Volcano (2007) and Lucky Fish (2011).  She has received many awards such as the Balcones Prize, ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award and the Tupelo Press Prize.  She was born in Chicago, Illinois and received her B.A. and M.F.A. in poetry from the Ohio State University.

Of Politics & Art - Blog Post 5

Of Politics & Art

Norman Dubie

Here, on the farthest point of the peninsula
The winter storm
Off the Atlantic shook the schoolhouse.
Mrs. Whitimore, dying
Of tuberculosis, said it would be after dark
Before the snowplow and bus would reach us.

She read to us from Melville.

How in an almost calamitous moment
Of sea hunting
Some men in an open boat suddenly found themselves
At the still and protected center
Of a great herd of whales
Where all the females floated on their sides
While their young nursed there. The cold frightened whalers
Just stared into what they allowed
Was the ecstatic lapidary pond of a nursing cow's
One visible eyeball.
And they were at peace with themselves.

Today I listened to a woman say
That Melville might
Be taught in the next decade. Another woman asked, "And why not?"
The first responded, "Because there are
No women in his one novel."

And Mrs. Whitimore was now reading from the Psalms.
Coughing into her handkerchief. Snow above the windows.
There was a blue light on her face, breasts, and arms.
Sometimes a whole civilization can be dying
Peacefully in one young woman, in a small heated room
With thirty children
Rapt, confident and listening to the pure
God-rendering voice of a storm.

The point of view in this poem comes from a person in a schoolhouse during a winter storm listening to an older woman read them a story from Melville in order to keep their minds off of the storm.  What is excluded is who the person is because they are just observing what is going on around them.  However, I do believe this is the eyes of a child because usually one listens to stories read aloud when they are children and it also mentions that there are thirty children in the schoolhouse and the speaker is probably one of those children.  The speaker focuses on Mrs. Whitimore and then the next stanza goes to the imagination of the the speaker and how they interpret the story from Melville.  Then it goes to some other women in the room talking and then back to Mrs. Whitimore.  Because there is a winter storm on the peninsula, I believe they are in Eastern Canada such as Newfoundland or Western Europe.  I think the author uses this perspective because children actually notice the little things around them a lot more than older people do and I think they have a detailed picture of settings and environments than any other age group.  The author can use this perspective to really go into detail on the very subtle things on why they are the way they are around the room and in the storm.

I do not consider this poem to be an elegy because although it talks about Mrs. Whitimore dying of tuberculosis, it does not mourn over her death (we don't even know if she did die).  It more talks about the feelings the speaker has in the snow storm and from the story from Melville.  

I also like the enjambment in some of the important lines in the poem: "Mrs. Whitimore, dying" is an important line because it sets to tone of what a dying person feels like during a crisis situation.  There are a lot of three word enjambment lines in this poem such as "Of sea hunting", "One visible eyeball" and "With thirty children".  This makes the reader know that these lines are important and have a reason to why they were added into the poem in the first place.

I also want to touch on the tone of the poem.  First of all, these people are in a scary situation.  In a winter storm, stuck inside of school house, power might be going out, food might be an issue and there is a woman dying of tuberculosis in the room.  The crazy thing is, no one is panicking and it sounds like they all are having a comfortable time in the room reading stories.  This is partly because the author uses smooth language but it also because the author chooses not to put those people in that mindset and it is a nice contrast of environments inside and outside.

Cathy Song - Blog Post #4

Cathy Song (1955 - Present)


Cathy Song was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.  She is half Korean (Father) and half Chinese (Mother) and she got her B.A. at Wellesley College and her M.A. at Boston university.  She won the Yale younger Poets Award in 1982 for her first collection of poems, Picture Bride (1983).  She has since published 3 more collections of poems and is currently a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Song's poetry is characterized by the colorful paintings she makes in people's minds through her imagery.  She also receives inspiration from her Korean-Chinese background and from being an Asian American woman.

Picture Bride

She was a year younger
than I,
twenty-three when she left Korea.
Did she simply close
the door of her father's house 
and walk away. And 
was it a long way
through the tailor shops of Pusan
to the wharf where the boat
waited to take her to an island 
whose name she had
only recently learned,
on whose shore
a man waited,
turning her photograph 
to the light when the lanterns 
in the camp outside
Waialua Sugar Mill were lit
and the inside of his room
grew luminous
from the wings of moths
migrating out of the cane stalks?
What things did my grandmother
take with her? and when
she arrived to look
into the face of the stranger
who was her husband,
thirteen years older than she,
did she politely untie
the silk bow of her jacket,
her tent-shaped dress
filling with the dry wind
that blew from the surrounding fields
where the men were burning the cane?


From PICTURE BRIDE (Yale University Press, 1983)

First of all, this poem catches the essence of Cathy Song because this short little story has so much poetic detail in all of the environment, emotion and history.  I can relate to this story in many ways.  My parents migrated here from the Philippines in the late 70s, early 80s and although they have never talked about their feelings toward moving to the United States to me, I could imagine that this poem reflects the emotions they had.  There is a an over all feeling of uncertainty to the poem because there are so many questions laid out and the speaker's grandmother was traveling to unknown territory and was probably at least a little scared.  I do not know if this is actually Song speaking but we can obviously see that her Korean heritage is portrayed in this poem.  When the poem mentioned Pusan, it jumped at me because I was there just this previous Summer and Pusan is an East Coast big city in Korea where there are many beautiful beaches and ports for the Pacific Ocean.  So I can literally picture what the grandmother was going through because I saw the beautiful sunrise and I saw the many different boating ports that she could have left on.  It's not often that I read poems that I have such a connection to so when Cathy Song, an Asian American popped up with a poem that I could relate to, it was very exciting for me and I love the poem.

Aphorism - Blog Post #3

Aphorism - (Definision by Dictionary.com)

noun

a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observation

Poem: Autopsychography by Fernando Pessoa

The poet is a man who feigns

And feigns so thoroughly, at last

He manages to feign as pain

The pain he really feels,

And those who read what once he wrote

Feel clearly, in the pain they read,

Neither of the pains he felt,

Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track

There runs, to keep our reason busy,

The circling clockwork train of ours

That men agree to call a heart.

This poem is an aphorism because it speaks of a general truth in concise and high (optional) diction.  I like aphorisms because they make you think of different notions that require deeper thinking than just regular things you hear on the radio.  In this poem, it basically tells me that a poet writes of things that may be fictitious but they are based on real things and real feelings.  In this occasion, Pessoa focuses on a poet's pain.  And the poet transfers his pain to the poem, and then the poem transfers the pain to the reader.  However, the pain that the reader feels is not the same as the poet's pain because they have two different lives.  The pain for the poet comes from the poet's life and the pain for the reader comes from the reader's life.  It is a pain they do not sense, but it is there.  And then Pessoa attributes that pain to the heart.

I like aphorisms because all of them have an emphatic, powerful and climactic closing line.  That last line is something you think about long after I've read the poem.  in this poem that line is, "That men agree to call a heart."  When I read it, I do agree that the heart is the thing we think about when pain come from a lost love but the problem with that statement is that pain has proven to come from brain.  Even pain from love. Even though pain does not come from the heart, the whole aphoristic poem does make me think about how feelings are transferred and communicated to one another through text.  

The Angel with the Broken Wing - Blog Post #2

Dana gioia

The Angel with the Broken Wing

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,

The one large statue in this quiet room.

The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut

Faith’s ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.


The docents praise my elegant design

Above the chatter of the gallery.

Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—

The perfect emblem of futility.


Mendoza carved me for a country church.

(His name’s forgotten now except by me.)

I stood beside a gilded altar where

The hopeless offered God their misery.


I heard their women whispering at my feet—

Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.

Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,

And I became the hunger that they fed.


I broke my left wing in the Revolution

(Even a saint can savor irony)

When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.

They hit me once—almost apologetically.


For even the godless feel something in a church,

A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?

A trembling unaccounted by their laws,

An ancient memory they can’t dismiss.


There are so many things I must tell God!

The howling of the dammed can’t reach so high.

But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,

A crippled saint against a painted sky.




The speaker in this persona poem is the Angel statue itself and it explains how it came to be in the museum it is in.  The first impression that I get from this poem is that the statue is greatly designed, it is made by a great artist and that it symbolizes a lot of great things - coming from the word "ardor".  But I also sense that the Angel is angry at many things.  "they shut Faith's ardor in this air-conditioned tomb," lets me know that the Angel does not want to be locked up in that room.  "The perfect emblem of futility," makes me think that the Angel thinks itself is useless and unimportant.  The Angel is the only one who remembers its maker's name.  The Angel is mad that it lost its wing during some revolution (in which I don't know the time of) and that it needs to tell God something but it's stuck on Earth in a museum.  It's helpless.  It reminds me of a sad caged animal in a zoo and the feelings that animal has of wanting to be set free.  Who wouldn't want to be free?  Humans get to be.  Other animals and statues such as this don't and they are rightfully angry.  One last thing I want to talk about is the 5th and 6th paragraphs where the Angel loses its wing and describe the troops reaction, "They hit me once—almost apologetically, For even the godless feel something in a church,  A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?  A trembling unaccounted by their laws,  An ancient memory they can’t dismiss."  This feeling that the church puts on people when they do sin even when they aren't religious somehow appears and is very true.  I've noticed that crime happens everywhere else but the church.  There's a protective feeling about a church and when someone breaks that protection, you just feel that it will be extremely bad for them.

Kevin Stein - Namesake Post

Kevin Stein (1954 - Present)



Kevin Stein is an English professor and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois.  He was named Illinois Poet Laureate in 2003 and is known for his funny, fluid and insightful poetry.

Arts of Joy

Now I have the Great Crested Flycatcher
amidst my Red Delicious, the tree's
spindly arm so freighted with apples
it sags under the bird's bird-weight
then springs at his departure
like the board just after a diver's flung up
and gone.  Weep weep weep, he trills
from the overgrown fence row,
his three notes so laden with gravity
I wonder is this song or his lament,
one wing among the green going going?

And that, my friends, is how reason
insinuates its bone lonely self
among the arts of joy -- the least of which
is knowing when to snip the string
that tethers us, our sky blue why.

The bird's after-image is more than
I can take, really, more than I can ask
of Wednesday's usual desultory coffers,
high noon offering its unspent zenith.
I want to say there's absolutely nothing
like this vision of bird and apples. I want
to say absolutely nothing else gives
of wings and fruit. Then I think of
nights my wife rose flushed above me --
this, the only store I put in absolutes.


I absolutely love this poem because it is beautifully descriptive while at the same time neither overly complex nor absolutely negative.  I feel like there are too many poems out there that bring the distress and agony out of people's lives and although they teach great lessons, they are not always the most enjoyable to read.  Arts of Joy, however, turns that notion around and speaks of an image so delightful, bright and quiet (I like peace and quiet) with words so true that it improves my mood.  This poem describes one of the many reasons why I love living in this world.  All of the naturally beautiful occurrences that happen around me are things that I keep in my mind and so does Kevin Stein.  There is not a complex rhyme scheme and the lines are not in perfect order.  This poem focuses on optimism and I love to see that.  I especially love the last sentence because I can relate to that feeling of when another person has such strong emotions for you that they flush.  It is a feeling of happiness that does not come along very often and it is something that makes life great.  Kevin Stein's eloquence in the description of something so simple, yet so real is one aspect of poetry I like to see and emulate.

Piano - D.H. Lawrence

Piano

By D.H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930)

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; 
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see 
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings 
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

1918

I really enjoyed this poem this week because it has so many elements that speak to me.  When first reading it, I love the smooth and comforting tone that this poem brings.  Smooth and comforting are my favorite adjectives to use when actually listening to and/or playing the piano.  Combining the tone with the rhyme scheme and different line lengths, the effect kind of makes me feel like I am literally listening to the piano or my mom singing along with a piano.

The diction of the poem is like a grand piano in that is flows very smoothly with the ambiance and elegance of a grand piano.  The rhyming of the poem is very suiting to the poem because it is rhythmical like playing a song on the piano.  And ther are many hard sounds like "appasionato" or "black" or "tinkling" that remind me of staccato type notes.  Staccato means light separation between notes.  And the words such as "clamour" or  "glamour" or "rememberance" remind me of more legato type notes (longer held notes).

This poem makes me want to go back to the piano.  I used to love playing it until my mother made me practice so much that I eventually lost interest in the songs that I was playing.  I was eventually playing for others and not for myself and that's where I didn't want to be.  It's those moments that on a quiet afternoon, I make something beautiful out of nothing that made days brighter.  And I think this poem captures that brightness.

Design - Robert Frost (1936)

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small. This poem can be found in The Norton Introduction to Poetry on page 297. My intuitive response to this poem is that Frost really paints a picture in my mind of a white spider holding a moth probably in its mouth on a blue and elegant flower and he wants us to think about how beauty and death do not necessarily have to be in different frames of mind.  The quote from The Sounds of Poetry, "the line and the syntactical unit are not necessarily the same" can be applied to this poem in the first stanza.  The quote means that although the first stanza is, in itself, is one sentence, each line of the stanza has a specific meaning and importance to the poem and that is why there is enjambment to the breaks after words like "moth" and "blight".  Another thing I noticed when analyzing this poem was that the largest accents were in the one syllable words at the end of each line.  I enjoyed the fact that there were not many largely accented words in the middle of lines which let me read the lines very quickly and then I could take a pause at the end of the line.  Also, each line had either 10 or 11 syllables and the only lines that did not rhyme were the first line of the first stanza and second line of the second stanza. This design of the poem makes reading very smooth and easy (in a good way) to me.   The first stanza is very classical ekphrasis in that Frost describes the artistic beauty of what is happening between the spider and the moth on the flower.  The second stanza turns to modern ekphrasis because Frost starts asking rhetorical questions to the reader and starts to engage the reader into answering questions on why and how this piece of art in front of him came to be. A reading of the poem can be found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJuEsIRc530.

Grey

A lonely woman

Slender, spaced out

in the luscious grass.

A heavy day

Grey on horizon.

She, crunching into an apple.

In desolation she stands,

drops the apple,

looks at her old dusty barn.

She smiles one last time.

And sprints towards the grey.

Dreams (1926) - Langston Hughes (1902-1967)

Poem of the Week:

Dreams

by Langston Hughes

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For if they go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.



Response:

My first response to this poem is that it sends a belief of Langston Hughes that there is a reason that we dream.  After reading this poem, I think to myself that my creativity and the direction I want to go in life is very much an inspiration of my dreams.  It is hard to imagine that my mind can create so many emotion filled dreams and they all feel like real life.  I have had dreams where I have woken up sweating, panting and trying to catch my breath because I thought my dad and I were being chased by car by people who wanted to kill us.  I'll admit that I had a dream where I kissed my crush at the time in 4th grade.  It might seem trivial but that dream made me so happy that I remember exactly how it felt in the dream to this day.  I have also had dreams in which I visit places of the past of where I have been and those are actually sad dreams because I go around and most of the time those buildings are empty with not a soul around and I wonder where everyone is at.

This poem, like a lot of other poems, is simple genius because there are only two stanzas and two rhymes that explain just how important dreams are.  The way I interpret the two metaphors is that your life will be dull, depressing and lifeless if you do not hold on to your dreams and try to achieve them if it is a goal.  This poem has a very serious but also optimistic tone because it compares a life without dreams to two very harsh images yet at the same time makes light of them both by adding playful rhymes to them and giving the reader something positive to think about.