Daddy.

Somebody really likes bees. Or hates them. I don't really know. but Bees.


The poem I want to look at today isn't about bees. Its about her Daddy.

I was trying to finish up these blogs before class, and read through quickly to find a poem to use and I started reading "Daddy." It intrigued me because I am a daddy's girl and I always will be. Judging from her other poems, I knew it wasn't exactly going to be a happy poem, but I didn't realize just how exhaustingly sad and depressing it was going to be. Yet, I'm so glad I read it.

I actually cried sitting here at Wake Forest Coffee Company. I don't know what to do with this poem. I don't know what to do with Plath. She is so full of emotion and so good at communicating it. The innocence of a child calling for her daddy paired with the awful destruction and sins of the Nazi's, with the early death of her father, with a picture of failed suicide, with a struggle for identity.

So much pain.

I think the word "Daddy" is what did it though. It- being the emotional destruction that came upon me while sipping coffee.
If she had used any other word, "father," or even "dad" I don't think I would have been as destroyed. But she calls him daddy- a term of endearment. a word that carries with it innocence and intimacy.

A term, I, a 23 year old married lady, still calls her daddy.

Do I have to compare it to another poem? My goodness, I can't take any more of the emotion for one day.

At the end of the poem... that stung too.
"daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."


By sheer chance, I clicked on a link to the poems of Lisa Zaran who wrote "Talking to My Father Whose Ashes Sit in a Closet and Listen"

"Death is not the final word. 
Without ears, my father still listens, 
still shrugs his shoulders 
whenever I ask a question he doesn't want to answer. 

I stand at the closet door, my hand on the knob, 
my hip leaning against the frame and ask him 
what does he think about the war in Iraq 
and how does he feel about his oldest daughter 
getting married to a man she met on the Internet. 

Without eyes, my father still looks around. 
He sees what I am trying to do, sees that I 
have grown less passive with his passing, 
understands my need for answers only he can provide. 

I imagine him drawing a breath, sensing 
his lungs once again filling with air, his thoughts ballooning."

Ugh... Seriously. I can't even imagine living my life without my daddy.

Now, her poem, while talking about the death of her father, carries a tone that isn't quite as depressing as Plath's. Although her father is still dead she still talks to him and see him living, unlike Plath who just wants to be dead with her father.

While Plath uses scenes and themes of innocence juxtaposed with cruelty and evil to communicate a VERY expressive emotion, Zaran uses images and the senses to communicate her desire and love for her father,

I know this is an academic blog, but just because this made me remember and think of my daddy, I thought I'd share these:

Yowzers

Robert Lowell has a pretty good grasp on fallen humanity. In his poem. "To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage" he tells a brief story of a wife whose husband hires prostitutes and basically treats her like a piece of dirt. While reading this poem, I felt sad for the wife. I felt like I wanted to castrate the man. He doesn't deserve a wife. I wanted to free the woman, and the man (from needing prostitutes...)

It's quite a gruesome poem as it is. It is dangerous.

"cruising for prostitutes... along on the razors-edge"
"kill his wife...injustice... unjust..."
"gored.. stalls above me like an elephant"

This poem immediately made me think of the novel Jazz it was like it was written for the novel. It was the "soundtrack" of a loving wife whose husband cheated on her, killed (not her) but his lover and carried on in rage and confusion. Violet was left to keep herself alive. Keep her REAL self alive.

When I read this poem, I wanted to help her get out of that wretched "marriage" she was in. I wanted justice for her. The poem, "The Longing" by Nimah Nawwab wrote a beautiful poem about freedom. Her poem is a little more hopeful than Lowell's, but just like the voice in "To Speak of Woe," the speaker of Nawwab's poem's is practically voiceless.

"Freedom.
How her spirit
Haunts,
Hooks,
Entices us all!

Freedom,
Will the time come
For my ideas to roam
Across this vast land’s deserts,
Through the caverns of the Empty Quarter?


For my voice to be sent forth,
Crying out in the stillness of a quiet people,
A voice among the voiceless?

For my thoughts, that hurl around
In a never-ending spiral,
To settle
Mature, grow and flourish
In a barren wasteland of shackled minds?

Will my spirit be set free—
To soar above the undulating palm fronds?
Will my essence and heart be unfettered,
Forever
Freed,
Of man-made Thou Shall Nots?"

Now, Nawwab's poem tends to use more emotion words to express her desires while Lowell uses more of just descriptions of scenes. Both are screaming to be heard and saved. Both want freedom.

It's hard to say which one is more effected. Both are evoked strong emotions and both made me want to scream out for them. But why would my voice be heard any louder than theirs.

It wouldn't be. 

I like this word "Redolence"

I had never heard this word before, "Redolence" I had to look it up. I like this word, very much so.

I read a poem by Michael Burch with the title, "Redolence" so I looked up the word.

There ya have it. 

So after I read the definition and read the poem I thought about William Carlos Williams' poem "The Great Figure" because it is sort of imagist. Williams simply describes with emotion a firetruck with sirens blaring moving through the streets of a dark city. But it was more than that. It brought back the feeling of me seeing a firetruck, and the anxiousness I feel. The poem made me see the truck #5 with all its glory moving through the town, attending to the person or family who called 9-1-1. I don't want to over examine the poem, but his simplicity is what makes this poem so effective. There is no b.s. There just is a great figure:

"Among the rain

and lights

I saw the figure 5

in gold

on a red

firetruck

moving

tense

unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls

and wheels rumbling

through the dark city."

In relation to that is Burch's poem "Redolence." Except, Burch uses similar conventions of sight, but also adds the sense of smell (hints the name). His poem is beautiful:

"Now darkness ponds upon the violet hills;
cicadas sing; the tall elms gently sway;
and night bends near, a deepening shade of gray;
the bass concerto of a bullfrog fills
what silence there once was; globed searchlights play.

Green hanging ferns adorn dark window sills,
all drooping fronds, awaiting morning’s flares;
mosquitoes whine; the lissome moth again
flits like a veiled oud-dancer, and endures
the fumblings of night’s enervate gray rain.

And now the pact of night is made complete;
the air is fresh and cool, washed of the grime
of the city’s ashen breath; and, for a time,
the fragrance of her clings, obscure and sweet."

The sights, the smells. It's like I am there, standing with him and looking out and seeing everything. Now,  Burch uses a few more descriptive words than Williams does, which makes me think of it less an imagist poetry, however there is definitely a clear image and emotion created. I am at peace looking upon the violet hills, listening to cicadas and bullfrogs and watching the trees sway in the wind. I am at peace seeing night creatures dance. I am at peace in the fresh, cool, air, smelling the sweetness of the city. 

Peace vs. Anxious. but both desirous emotions that I loved feeling when reading. And created in a similar way- through simple imagery. I can almost smell the sweet city. 

Maybe I will, maybe I will go out upon the city in the evening and listen, and see, and smell. And maybe I will see a firetruck moving/tense/unheeded 

through the dark city.

Keeping us alive by throwing stones.

A poem within a poem, a poem about a poem, a poem of a poem that became a poem...

I don't even know anymore. Words, they just run.

But honestly, Muriel Rukeyser's poem "Poem White Page/ White Page Poem" seems like it is about what its like to put words of a poem on a white page.

"Poem    white page       white page      poem
something is streaming out of a body in waves
something is beginning from the fingertips
they are starting to declare for my whole life
all the despair and the making music
something like wave after wave
that breaks on a beach
something like bringing the entire life
to this moment
the small waves bringing themselves to white paper
something like light stands up and is alive."

The first time I read this poem, I didn't think much of it. To be honest, I had already picked this one for my blog because it was short. (Honesty is the best policy). But then I read the poem again and I began to take note of the power-words (as I will call them). Words that embody a sense of awe, power, or strength-- words like Wave, ocean, declare, "whole life", "entire life," "alive".  Once I saw those words, and I read it again, I read it again, and I read it again, each time with more vehemence. He made something so simple sounding, putting words on a page, sound like an epic. It IS difficult to share your life on page, but impossible to keep to yourself. I could only image what he went through, being a Jew in the second world war. It must have been brutal, terrible, evil, monstrous.... I could go on. But something about poetry keeps him alive, it keeps US alive.

In searching for something to compare and contrast, I found another Jewish poet who happened to write about poems. The title of his poem is, "Temporary Poem of My Time" by Yehuda Amichai. Both poems use repetition of phrases to increase the power and voice of the poem. Since both poets were Jews and drastically affected by the holocaust, I can only imagine that they desperately needed to have a voice--a loud, clear, powerful, voice. Amichia's poem used the imagery of a stone and of throwing those stones. Yet, at the end of the poem his last stanza moves from throwing stones to throwing "nothing"

"Please throw little stones,
Throw snail fossils, throw gravel,
Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,
Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods,
Throw limestone, throw clay,
Throw sand of the seashore,
Throw dust of the desert, throw rust,
Throw soil, throw wind,
Throw air, throw nothing
Until your hands are weary
And the war is weary
And even peace will be weary and will be."