Week 7, Reading Response 1

I couldn't sleep, so I kept flipping through Katie Chaple's "Pretty Little Rooms." I stumbled upon "The Art of Not Thinking" (p.51) and... Don't think I'll have an easier time sleeping tonight, to say the least.

The poem's imagery isn't very scary or unsettling individually, it's fairly mild, but the combination is very effective. The dialog the poem holds with the reader is like the monologue a closet daemon holds with its frightened child-prey. Unsettling, like a forgotten childhood memory.

There were some very interesting images, like "the taut breasts," "the flicker of mirrors," "unspooling bucket." Not because there's anything fresh about them, but because they all contribute to this feeling of tension, of foreboding. I'm really trying to come up with criticism or more thoughtful commentary, but I think this might just be my favourite poem in the book thus far, it's managed to make me anxious.

I would love to reproduce the seamlesness with which the piece meanders through the scene, from the outside to the room to the person to the outside, all in one fluid motion. It also manages to use very simple vocabulary to great effect-something I still have trouble with, liking 20-dollar words more than 20-cent ones. The poem has a total of three words with more than two syllables: "alphabet," "surrender," and "unspooling." That can be hard for me.

I also want to try this kind of dialog, half-order half-description, I think it's a very interesting resource.

Week 5, Reading Response 1

Nails

are held in the mouth
of a gun and splinter pines
or stab flashing, metal superior
in its point. They get hit
or pounded to hold up
collector plates or families.
Our house's nails recognize
one another in their sharpness,
know the weight they carry—
they will outlast us,
and the timbers above us,
those little pikes cleaving
one to another as you
sleep on your side,
and I lie awake in our bed
while what is between us
gathers, galvanizes
into something I can strike.

(Nails, a poem from "Pretty Little Rooms", by Katie Chaple)

The imagery in this poem is very vivid, which is what caught my attention as I was reading the first few lines of all the poems in the book; you can almost hear the creak of a house's foundation as you read it. I like the transition between settings, and how they're all images of town life (a wooden house, church, family, ...).

The use of strong verbs (stab, hit, pound, cleave, strike) reinforce the feeling of... frustration, I would say, that overall the poem gives me. The poem doesn't shy away from multi-syllabic words but, like we see over and over again, they are used very carefully so as to not mellow down the poem too much. I want to get that balance down, as I still tend to favour latinate words a bit too much (after all, they're my main vocabulary, coming from a romance-speaking household).

The poem clearly shows the triggering subject/generated object dynamic, and exemplifies a very proper use of it, with the hammering of nails leading to relationship tension. I like how the poem is a discourse at the main voice's partner, with numerous "our" and "us", which left me feeling almost like an intruder in some private blurb I was not meant to read.

Week 2, Reading Response 1

Although I am not yet done with David Madden's "Abducted By Circumstance", I think I have gotten enough of a feeling for the book's style to briefly comment on a few things.

The way the characters are crafted, both blurry and hyper-focused at once, is quite new to me. I am used to a baseline of detail, with some areas coming into greater focus, and others left shady. I really like how it turns out, and how much room it leaves for expanding on any character as desired. Definitely want to try mimicking it.

One aspect I'm not too happy with is the depth of description on the backdrop. I suppose I would get much more out of the book if I knew the place where it's happening, because as-is it feels very distant, and it's hard to put my eye in there. Perhaps this is part of the book's atmosphere, I'm not sure if it has overall contributed or detracted to its mood.

The stream-of-conciousness style that the book is written in makes it a bit dense to follow. It isn't the first book I've read that did this, but so far it has been the hardest. It has been a rewarding read, though.