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 hu
icane Katrina in New Orleans. She closely observed the hu
icane 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
ings 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
ings 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 nea
y 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 XXXXXXXXXXPrint.
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 Dazzle
y 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
oken into
language” (What Is Found There, XXXXXXXXXXNeither poet
estricts herself to her own gender, race, or even
species in the personas she adopts,
inging to life a
wrathful hu
icane, an abandoned dog, and
common advertising icons, among others, in
pursuit of deep truths. Together, these collections of
voices become choruses of experience, allowing fo
greater understanding of those struggling to
eak
free of silence.
When Smith was asked in the January/Fe
uary
2009 issue of Poets & Writers magazine what
prompted her, a poet from New York, to write a book
about Hu
icane Katrina and its aftermath, she
esponded 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
ewind the clock, give those elders a bit of thei
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 thei
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, Ba
ara 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,” Hu
icane Katrina itself responds to
ecoming organized enough to be named by the
National Hu
icane 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
andom weather event into a vengeful goddess. As
this passage suggests, Hu
icane Katrina has he
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 na
ative 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
ho
ific 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 te
or 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
esidents 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
esidents describe overhearing the decision to
abandon them:
We are stunned on our sca
ed 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 fo
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: thei
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 late
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 Dazzle
By Patricia Smith
Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 2008,
77 pp., $16.00, pape
ack
I
Reviewed by Ginny Kaczmarek
Voices
By Lucille Clifton
Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2008,
63 pp., $16.00, pape
ack
21
and again, to the artful manner with which Smith
conveys the ho
or, heart
eak