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.