I chose White Lies by Natasha Trethewey as my reference for this week’s discussion. At first, I had a challenging time understanding the meaning of the poem. However, through several readings and breaking down each line I understood what was laid out by the author. The poem touches on identity as a theme and it’s about a girl who struggles to accept herself for who she is. What brought my understanding to completion is this line “Believing her, I swallowed suds / thinking they’d work / from the inside out.” For a good portion of the poem, it seemed like it is about a girl just telling normal white lies that meant little harm. However, underneath that I understood that her mother was punishing her because she was denying her racial identity, trying to assimilate into a culture that was not her own. To which the line comes into play where she really believed that if she were to be clean from the inside then she can be white and purified on the outside- as in her skin tone.
Daily Archives: November 10, 2022
According to the article “How To Read A Poem”, the act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing it to your experience and point of view. The poem I choose to illustrate my response to this week discussion is “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks. After reading the article, I used the talking back to the poem technique where I asked, what does the title suggest? The Mother, suggest some form of being a parent, as I continued to read, I asked, what circumstances gave rise to the poem? The answer was abortions. The first time I read the poem, I imagined a hurt female, that had regret and disappointment in the act that she committed. The line where she states, “I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children”, I felt like she was beating herself up about not giving the children she aborted life. The second time I read the poem, I read it aloud. This time my imagination gave me a woman that feel she did what was best. The line where she states, “believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”, gives a perception of her doing the right thing. My completion became clear in my third reading of the poem when I read the line ” you remember the children you got that you did not get’, with me knowing now what she was talking about, this is a woman thinking about what could’ve been if she kept her children, the love she still has, and the guilt she feels, however there is no regret. I put myself in Gwendolyn position and imagined not having a child by choice. I have a beautiful daughter that I cannot see life without. Pain […]
I enjoyed reading the article “How to Read a Poem” because the author uses many references to life that makes it easier to connect to the challenge of reading a poem. For example when he says that reading a poem might make you “sweat” a little, but that it’s like a sport – it takes practice and in the end, you get better. The poet William Carlos Williams, in acknowledging the challenges of reading poetry, writes that a reader must “complete” what the poet has begun. One example from this week’s readings can be the poem “My Last Duchess” in which you need to “talk back to a poem” as mentioned in the article. The author of the article gives some questions to ask yourself which I think are helpful in order to understand this poem better, such as who is the speaker, and what situation is presented? In this case, the speaker is a Duke, he shows someone the painting of his first wife, the Duchess, and tells him about her and a little about their relationship. The Duke says “She had A heart — how shall I say? — too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere”. She had a big heart and saw good in everything, she was friendly. He also mentioned that she treated others with gratitude and warmth, as treated him.
