Eng 42 Poetry

  Since any of the poets we have been reading the last two weeks (including Baraka and Cortez, as well as this week's writers) often perform their poems, and since the urge toward oral performance often partly shapes the poems' forms (use of a public address rhetorical mode in Cortez's "There It Is," from last week selections, for eg)--or, we might say, an urge toward performance is embedded in the poems' forms and structures--since, that is, the poems exist both on the page and off the page in live performances--it could be insightful, as part of your analyses, to consider some of the performance versions of these poems. Check YouTube for videos...also PennSound for sound recordings... Harjo : "she Had Some Horses" Certainly, the horses can be seen to represent her personal life, but also the cultural history of a people (Native American), and human nature generally, so you 'd want to notice how the horses symbolize human desire, fear, spiritual...

  "The Red Bandana" Consider the ambiguity of the red bandanna as a symbol; it helps characterize the speaker's sense of herself, as distinguished from the male addressee (the red takes on different meanings in these contexts) and also helps characterize their relationship (the nexus/pattern--red bandanna, bull fight, blood sport,etc, you are noticing --what other images fall into this pattern and how, specifically, do they characterize the addressee and the relationship between him and the speaker? The imagery of stanza 5 takes us beyond that relationship). Note the image contrasts, and difference in tone/attitude, in the speaker's descriptions of herself and the addressee, and how that tempers the final stanza "The Hitchhikers" Stanzas 2 and 3 provide the personal/emotional foregrounding for the what the hitchhikers--it's really their heads that is the focus--and the berries "mean"; what role they play in the speaker's psychology. The ima...