Richard's Response To Armantrout

Levis' poetry was difficult to read, but it at least had a definite point to it. Every poem had a definite structure, telling a short tale while having a specific idea behind it that a person could interpret if a person was paying attention and took the time to read it slowly.

Armantrout, on the other hand...

Almost none of her poems have any structure to them. Instead, the poems possess a very loose theme and it leaves the reader to come up with the meaning of the poem for themselves. But a few themes that do seem to follow the reader throughout the book, regardless of what conclusions are drawn from each individual poem is the fact that Armantrout seems to have a dislike for modernity or modern practices. The poem, "Outer" actually spells this out a little clearer than other poems because it is one of the very few poems that actually possess a paragraph that is easy to read and reads like a piece of narrative: "I'm the one who can't know if the scraggly old woman putting a gallon of vodka in her shopping cart feels guilty, defiant, or even glamorous as she does so." That sort of statement seems to suggest an underlying hostility towards modern conveniences and the people who live in it wholeheartedly, embracing the needs and wants of a society based in materialism.

An earlier line in the poem (the first line, in fact) while not stated as clearly as the paragraph, is still pretty focused on the dislike of the modern world: "Dolls as celebrities (Barbie) Celebrities as Dolls." Not only does Armantrout take the time to name a specific face of American culture, but also points out just how stiff and plastic celebrities can be, yet we worship them and look up to them as heroes.

As difficult as Armantrout can be to read, she at least lays out her love for the natural and the simple... after all, her poetry is very simply written, but manages to get the reader to think far beyond the words on the page and come up with our own imaginative response to just what the heck we're reading.

Richard's Response to Notley

So... "Descent of Alette." What is there to say about it that we've not covered already?

Well, one of the things that really fascinated me about it (after I managed to actually start understanding what I was looking at) was the fact that there seems to be a subtle theme of old and new, or antiquity and modernity. I'm actually kind of surprised that no one seemed to bring this up. We see that the deeper Alette descends, the less modern her surroundings become. We are shown that she starts in a subway, one of the biggest modern conveniences we have. Up above that is a modern city, though we don't go there until the end.

As Alette travels down deeper, she leaves modernity behind and we end up in a more natural, more antique world, where older ideas seem to prevail. It has a much more fantastical feel to it. The whole thing does have a fantasy feel, but the settings deep within the earth such as the caverns, rivers, beaches, and forests, feel much more reminiscent of a classic fantasy novel. At the heart of antiquity, the heart of the forest, is the house of the tyrant, who we established is the embodiment of the oppressive institution, set in a very old, outdated way of thinking that not only harms women, but also men, if the man who gives Alette his heart is to be believed (which he is).

What's strange is the fact that, even after he is dead, his body apparently made of cloth, Alette reveals that the city up above is actually his skeleton, giving credence to the idea that even though humans have come a very long way since our beginnings, modernity still holds some of these antique ideas, even if it is subconsciously, and only through our own conscious efforts and powers can we cast aside the remnants of the tyrant.

As a side note, it surprised me that no one noticed that Alette herself becomes an owl (or as she puts it, takes on an 'owl form') during her fight against the Tyrant. I don't know about anyone else, but the owl has always been a symbol of wisdom and intelligence to me. The fact that she takes on this form, and that her father was also in this form, gives me the idea that knowledge was the thing that defeated the tyrant. After all, intelligence and information is the best way to combat ideas, is it not?

Richard's Response To Williams

Mr. Williams is... a delightful contradiction. I've never encountered a poem like this before in my life, and I seriously hope that there's more poetry around like this because, despite how hard it can be to write my mind around some of the longer monologues, it's a very enjoyable, stimulating, thoughtful poem, containing several elements from different forms of poetry. The poem's shifts from flowing, dramatic, Mark Twain-length sentences, ("The fight is on: these men who have had the governing of the move through all the repetitious years resent the new order.") to short, jagged, broken lines reminiscent of William Shatner's acting (Petals radiant with the transpiercing light / contending / above") is jarring, but refreshing. It's refreshing, and keeps a reader wondering what happens next. Even stranger is that the sections seem to change within themselves every now and then, even changing its typeset. For example, the final line in the second paragraph in CHAPTER IV sudden switches to all capitals for the second half of the sentence: "Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING!"

And that rather eloquent, poignant sentence is immediately followed by a mere two word paragraph: "Good God!" which is followed by yet another long, eloquent, flowing monologue, saying "Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceded in the dead ages gone by."

The best thing I can say about this poem is that it encompasses a little bit of everything and by doing so states that it doesn't need to conform to a single binary... it's more fun to have them all!