Subverting Expectations: A Means to Truth
An Introduction to My Theme
In poetry, anticipation and surprise provide two of the great pleasures of the genre. The creative challenges of set forms, like the sonnet, push poets to think creatively about their subjects while allowing the audience to anticipate turns and reversals. We know the reversals are coming, yet when the poet can still subvert our expectations, it delights, surprises, or even triggers poignant emotional responses. For example, sing-song meters can help us anticipate tone or build tension, but also lull us to sleep. Variations in the pattern wake us up. In free verse poetry, poets can catch us off-guard. Each of the poems I've analyzed hinge on a subversion of expectation, whether the poet takes an ironic turn or breaks the form. In my original poetry, I've focused on subversions, some subtle and some obvious, to delight, create intellectual interest, or provide the space for an emotional response. (147 words)
Sonnets have the reputation of expressing ultimate, true love-- the kind of love so intense that the poet must celebrate it in fourteen lines. Petrarch, often called the father of the sonnet, certainly contributes to this tradition, penning over 300 sonnets to his Laura. Shakespeare, another giant of the sonnet form, demonstrates Petrarch's influence, giving us beautiful sonnets about enduring love and the poet's attempt to immortalize his beloved in "black ink" (Sonnet 65). Shakespeare, however, markedly differs from Petrarch-- where Petrarch is tortured, Shakespeare reveals a much more complex and varied attitude toward love, often satirizing the tendency towards the overwrought language used in poems of his day. In this way, Shakespeare subverts the reader's expectations about how sonnets express love. In Sonnet 130, he begins by directly contradicting a popular metaphor for women's eyes, saying that his "mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" they don't burn brighter than any other star, nor do they dazzle him when he looks at her. He continues in each of the three quatrains to deconstruct the notion of an ideal beloved-- she lacks conventional beauty (1-3), has wiry hair (4) and bad breath (8), and is in no way divine (11-12). Yet, masterfully, in the couplet, he subverts all of this assumed negativity of the preceding twelve lines by affirming that these things make her exactly perfect for him and the one true love of his life (13-14). By subverting trite language of affected and hyperbolic adoration, he crafts a sonnet that is most tender and most sincere. (257 words)
Dorothy Parker's poem "Resumé" also subverts the expectations of the reader by making light of a serious topic. In her poem, she begins by listing the discomfort caused by various tools of suicide-- rivers are damp, gasses are smelly. When she concludes her poem with "you might as well live" (8), she sounds flippant, but rather is commenting on something quite serious. According to Dr. Alex Lickerman in his article "6 Reasons Why People Commit Suicide," the number one reason cited is depression. He says that "the pain of existence often becomes too much for severely depressed people to bear," which is precisely what Parker targets in her poem. Certainly, as a society, we should not joke about suicide. But rather than making suicide a joke, Parker heightens the gravity of the subject with the litote "you might as well live" (8), a figure of speech that uses understatement to render an ironical effect, or emphasizing what she understates. By juxtaposing the discomfort that "razors" (1), "acids" (2), "drugs" (3), "guns" (4) and "nooses" (5) cause with the off-hand construction of this last line, Parker appeals to a cool and detached sense of logic. Like Shakespeare, Parkers uses subversion to make a quite serious point, directing the reader toward a truth underscored by her seeming dismissal of it. (212 words)
Analysis: Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare
Analysis: Resumé by Dorothy Parker
CREATIVE RESPONSE TO POETRY: VIDEO VISUALIZATION
Variation on the Word Sleep
by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's "Variation on the Word Sleep," an image-rich free-verse poem, plays with the ideas of sleep and dreams--sleeping beside a loved one, sleeping "with" something, and entering someone's sleep. Her wordplay brings into question the reader's expectations about assumed associations with "sleep," and subverts expectations by shifting from a romantic tone to an unsettled one. The sleeper is troubled, and the speaker wants to calm them by entering the dreamworld of the loved one in order to understand it. While the poem can certainly be interpreted sexually, the ideas connect with a deeper and more universal complexity of intimate relationships. Feeling distant and disconnected, unable to access the source of the trouble during day-time, conscious hours, the speaker wants to enter into the deepest part of the beloved's mind, to witness their darkest fear, then help lead them out of it. She seeks a truth that cannot be revealed in the harsh light of day.
To visualize the poem, I attempted to show the internal world of the sleeper's dream. I was particularly struck by the image of the cave, the white flower, and the dreamworld quality with its "watery sun and three moons." I decided to use watercolors to evoke the watery, dream-like world Atwood creates. Because I am no artist, I chose to build each part of the visualization separately so I could arrange and manipulate them, avoiding the restrictive demands of whole composition from the start. A friend of mine saw my work and suggested making a stop-motion video, which was a fabulous and fun idea. The video brought out the sound-elements of the poem, as rich as the visual ones and offered me a unique representational opportunity by permitting me to portray multiple images without the dreamscape becoming too crowded.
I then converted the parts to a 2-D representation, culling some of the images I used for the video to create balance. The essential images of the poem are still present-- the watery moon, the cave descent, the boat that brings them back out, the moons, and the white flower. Overall, working with two representations allowed me to see the images of the poem in a more considered way, unmasking, for me, the beauty and complexity of Atwood's poem. (374 words)
