Okay so I am a complete chick, chick, chicken. Jodi gave me the perfect opportunity to talk about Poem 10 of Berryman and I froze again. I have to address this or else I will drive myself crazy for not talking about it in class. Let's just call this the bonus edition from class then, shall we.
I find Berryman's Poem 10 so disturbing. If you get a chance please read it again because I feel like it talks about a lynching. Take a look at the picture and also go to the website http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html I feel like you can really get perspective if you at least look at the photo I included and then reread Poem 10. This poem and photo are disturbing. Besides leaving a very bad taste in my head I also began to question why Berryman would include this written image in the book? What is the significance, what is the reason for including it?
My big question though shifted to what other images are in this poetry that I am missing. Once I deciphered this image I started going back and looking for others. I went through them with widget and dictionary.com at my fingertips looking for images missed. Berryman creates a word web that I don't think I can completely explore in just three weeks. I want to know why Berryman is using the 'blackface' idea for the text. What is the significance of this? So many questions, so little time.
My last question, I promise! What is with the fascination with the color blue? Emily's poetry and our discussion in class really got me thinking about the color blue and nature. We find the color blue in the sky and water but where else in nature can we discover the color blue? How often is blue a color that we associate in our environment?
1 comment:
those pictures are so hauntingly awful. i hadn’t noticed that about berryman’s poem 10, but now that you bring it up, i definitely see the lynching in it. i had picked up on the sort of blackface/minstrel dialogue throughout, of course, and i’d been meaning to look up more information about mr. bones—which i just did, and i learned that mr. bones was the name given to a minstrel show performer who played the musical instrument “the bones.” (http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/jackson/minstrel/minstrel.html) but you probably already figured that out, cuz it sounds like you’ve been going through the dream songs with a fine-toothed comb, which i totally respect and admire. i’m a little jealous of your passion.
in regards to your last question, i could be totally pulling this out of my ass, but i seem to remember learning that purple is the rarest color in nature. i think blue is actually pretty commonly-occurring, even though for some reason it doesn’t seem like it would be. some general things i came up with: fruit, insects, veins, eyes, birds, fish/marine life, gems, flowers... when i first started brainstorming, every blue thing i could think of started with the letter “b” (blueberries, butterflies, beetles, blood, etc.)—and i think that could make a pretty awesome poem, if you took strictly naturally-occurring things which are blue and whose names start with the letter “b”—i don’t mean like a list poem, but, something else...i guess i don’t know exactly what i mean. it could also be a pretty cool collaborative poem project, like have one person kick off the poem with a stanza about beetles, then the next person add one about butterflies, and so on.
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