I have to use my poetry analysis and use a source and link back to the text
Rivas David Rivas ENG 102 April 21, 2020 Professor Larsson Poetry helps to show the emotions they are reflected in the form of poems. Patricia Smith uses emotions to show issues in her poems. In her poem “Blood Dazzlers” she speaks about the disaster caused by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. She closely observed the hurricane at personal level and because of her sensitive attachment to the common people living in there. She wrote a collection of poems to present the picture of the disaster area. Therefore; is a complete story of human beings suffering from physical and spiritual losses; the expressions of the poem are related to the question of survival for locals as well as they pertain to depict that nature is always greater than any other force in the world. At first, Blood Dazzler is composed to show the methods of maintaining coordination between people. It is the critical phase of life that brings people of all races together. For example, in Won’t Be But A Minute, she ironically remarks that white people do not bother to warn blacks about any danger. However, the seriousness of Katrina can be understood by their reactions to it. The white people are too afraid to sustain their emotions, resulting in of general warning spread in the whole area so that as many lives as possible can be saved. A sense of cooperation develops in them during this natural disaster. It brings people closer than they expect to be in normal situations. Smith tries to present the fact that even racial biases no longer exist in this critical situation people assist each other in the process of surviving through hard times. Secondly, in “Won’t Be But A Minute”, Patricia Smith analyzes the question of survival. Luther B. their pet dog is left alone in the house because the storm is about to hit the area. The severity of the storm is so high that it forces the family members to think whom to save and whom to be left behind. Smith recalls the moments when Luther used to love to be tied to the cypress tree nearby the house. He loved to spend his time there but as of now, it is practically to tie him up there and spend quality time with him. Luther will be set free during this storm hitting the area and he will have bowels of water available at home. She compares two ideas at this middle point in the poem, the first one relates to the love and care that the family cherishes with dog and second one is to leave him behind to ‘take care’ of the house. The meaning behind this leaving is to choose between the near and dear ones, it is the time to opt out less important creatures and dog is certainly one of them. It is important to save the family members and they are prioritized over the dog. Another meaning appears to be related to the survival instincts of the animals, dogs are better equipped with survival qualities than human beings and Luther is able enough to survive on his own. It might not be possible for any other family member to survive alone in hard times of Katrina, if he or she is left behind. Therefore, expression here also relates to the theory of survival of the fittest. To conclude, “Blood Dazzler” highlights the themes of social cooperation during natural disasters. Also, the poems like “Won’t Be But A Minute” show how human beings are forced to make choices when they have to choose between their loved ones. The process of survival is difficult in natural disasters like Katrina and only the best can go through the hard times. She presents the fact that Katrina as a human story, not just a weather storm. Animals are trusted to the weather and lost all the time, Luther B just happened to live in New Orleans and he becomes an perfect example of this. Work Cited Smith, Patricia. Collections from Blood Dazzler. Amazon Books. 2018. Print. WRB 23.1 (Idea 1) 20 Women’s Review of Books Vol. 26, No. 4, July/August 2009 n two recent collections of poetry, Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith and Voices by Lucille Clifton, poets wear masks to speak on behalf of those who are often ignored. Although their formal styles are quite different, both Smith and Clifton employ a poetic form known as the persona poem or dramatic monologue to explore what Adrienne Rich called “the processes by which imposed silence, muteness, speechlessness have broken into language” (What Is Found There, 1994). Neither poet restricts herself to her own gender, race, or even species in the personas she adopts, bringing to life a wrathful hurricane, an abandoned dog, and common advertising icons, among others, in pursuit of deep truths. Together, these collections of voices become choruses of experience, allowing for greater understanding of those struggling to break free of silence. When Smith was asked in the January/February 2009 issue of Poets & Writers magazine what prompted her, a poet from New York, to write a book about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, she responded with the story that became her impetus: During Katrina, the story that kept nudging at me, the one that grew increasingly insistent until I had no choice but to write, was the story about the 34 nursing home residents abandoned and left to die as the water rose to swallow them. In 34 small stanzas, I wanted to rewind the clock, give those elders a bit of their voices back so they’d have a chance to tell us who they were. I write quite often in persona, so I was able to get out of the way and let the drama unfold again, with the voices of those who were lost guiding the story. This poem, “34,” led to the rest of Blood Dazzler. This urge to “give those elders a bit of their voices back” is apparent throughout Blood Dazzler. In vivid, energetic language, Smith paints an intensely compassionate picture of New Orleans and its inhabitants, including human, animal, and even meteorological characters. Each poem has its own rhythm and music, many in casual African American vernacular, and its own formal style, from free verse to tanka to sestina. As the events of the storm unfold, several characters recur, most of them poor, black New Orleanians who were unable to evacuate. However, even former President Bush, his mother, Barbara Bush, and the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Michael Brown, make appearances, much as they did during the crisis: they appear, then disappear, leaving the people on the ground on their own. The poems chronicle the storm, the floods, and the aftermath in loose chronological order. In the poem entitled “11 a.m., Wednesday, August 24, 2005,” Hurricane Katrina itself responds to becoming organized enough to be named by the National Hurricane Center: The difference in a given name. What the calling, the hard K, does to the steel of me, how suddenly and surely it grants me pulse, petulance. Now I can do my own choking. By personifying the storm, Smith transforms a random weather event into a vengeful goddess. As this passage suggests, Hurricane Katrina has her own agenda, and the characters in her path soon meet their inevitable fates. In Smith’s hands, Ninth Ward drag queens and abandoned dogs become heroes in an epic narrative with a sweep as grand as the Odyssey; they are mortals enduring the wrath of the supernatural. Individual human characters, too, participate in the creation of their own mythologies, often with horrific results. In “Dream Lover,” written from the perspective of a rapist among the refugees in the Superdome, the unnamed speaker of the poem describes himself in inhuman terms: “I am raven and cocked, / baptized in standing water, / insatiable, inked specter.” His victims have lost all sense of identity. They “search the faces of strangers. / Never really expecting an answer, they ask each one, / Do you know my name?” This poem conveys the terror of a time that is “not a day as days have been,” during which the basic humanity of attacker and victim alike has been stripped away, leaving behind monsters and ghosts. Even in the most extreme circumstances, a few voices struggle to maintain their integrity. In the aforementioned poem “34,” the nursing home residents rage, pray, whisper, and even joke as the water rises around them, often reflecting and overlapping one another in theme or actual phrasing, as if in a chorus. Chillingly, a few residents describe overhearing the decision to abandon them: We are stunned on our scabbed backs. There is the sound of whispered splashing, and then this: Leave them. In these four short lines, Smith conveys an extremely vulnerable human being’s stunned understanding that she—and her fellow residents— have been left to drown by those responsible for their care. Other voices repeat this refrain later in the poem. The voice in stanza 27 says only, “And this scripture: Leave them,” suggesting a different understanding of where the command originated. The final stanza, the last voice, closes the poem on the same words: The underearth turns its face to us. leave them Each time “leave them” appears, it is attributed slightly differently: as an actual human voice, as part of “scripture,” and as if the “underearth” itself whispers its desire. These shades of meaning suggest that the elders were abandoned not only by their caretakers at the nursing home but also by everything they had believed and trusted: their families, their communities, their religions, even the Earth itself. Who is to blame, the poem demands, when the weakest among us are left to such a fate? (Although the poem does not say so, the owners of the nursing home were later acquitted of any wrongdoing.) Smith’s masks humanize her characters, voices in danger of being forgotten and silenced, even as she elevates them to heroes and villains in her epic tale. As a New Orleanian reading these poems, I was often overwhelmed with my own memories of the pain and trauma my family, friends, and neighbors experienced—and are still experiencing—and needed to set the book down. Yet I returned, again Choruses of Experience Blood Dazzler By Patricia Smith Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008, 77 pp., $16.00, paperback I Reviewed by Ginny Kaczmarek Voices By Lucille Clifton Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2008, 63 pp., $16.00, paperback 21 and again, to the artful manner with which Smith conveys the horror, heartbreak