National Poetry Month + Kurt Vonnegut
jen_in_japan reminded me that April is National Poetry Month. She said that she would be posting several poems throughout the month, many with a certain S/B slant. That made me think of The Book of Light by Lucille Clifton. I was assigned to read several poems from that book in one of my English classes at IU and I was so taken with them that I kept the book instead of selling it back at the end of the semester and read the entire thing.
My favorites were a quartet of poems that were addressed to either Superman or Clark Kent.
Clifton sees Clark and Superman as two very separate entities. Clark appears to be a regular man whom the speaker in the poems once mistook for a hero. She was expecting him to save her, and was ultimately disappointed. Men are only human and she has to be her own hero.
She may be a bit down on the Man of Steel, but keep in mind that she's a black feminist poet. Superman can symbolize the White Man's Hero; he doesn't care about black people. However, I think the speaker still admires the character, especially when he's detached from Clark. I like to think that the speaker in the last poem is a Lois-like figure. She's asking "Why in the hell did you keep this part of yourself from me?"
Right. On to the poems:
if i should
to clark kent
enter the darkest room
in my house and speak
with my own voice, at last,
about its awful furniture,
pulling apart the covering
over the dusty bodies; the randy
father, the husband holding ice
in his hand like a blessing,
the mother bleeding into herself
and the small imploding girl,
i say if i should walk into
that web, who will come flying
after me, leaping tall buildings?
you?
further note to clark
do you know how hard this is for me?
do you know what you're asking?
what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?
final note to clark
they had it wrong,
the old comics.
you are only clark kent
after all. oh,
mild mannered mister,
why did i think you could fix it?
how you must have wondered
to see me taking chances,
dancing on the edge of words,
pointing out the bad guys,
dreaming your x-ray vision
could see the beauty in me.
what did i expect? what
did i hope for? we are who we are,
two faithful readers,
not wonder woman and not superman.
God, I love that poem. I once used it as the end of a presentation I did on female superheroes for one of my women's studies classes.
note, passed to superman
sweet jesus, superman,
if had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel,
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes.
I wasn't even sure it was true at first, because Vonnegut's death was falsely reported once before. It's really true this time.
This a poem from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Vonnegut used it his 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle.
Knowlt Hoheimer
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, "Pro Patria."
What do they mean, anyway?
When I dug out my copy of Cat's Cradle to look up this poem, I thought I would have to spend several minutes flipping through the pages and searching. It turned out that I had already dog-eared the correct page last time I read the book, about six years ago.
My favorites were a quartet of poems that were addressed to either Superman or Clark Kent.
Clifton sees Clark and Superman as two very separate entities. Clark appears to be a regular man whom the speaker in the poems once mistook for a hero. She was expecting him to save her, and was ultimately disappointed. Men are only human and she has to be her own hero.
She may be a bit down on the Man of Steel, but keep in mind that she's a black feminist poet. Superman can symbolize the White Man's Hero; he doesn't care about black people. However, I think the speaker still admires the character, especially when he's detached from Clark. I like to think that the speaker in the last poem is a Lois-like figure. She's asking "Why in the hell did you keep this part of yourself from me?"
Right. On to the poems:
if i should
to clark kent
enter the darkest room
in my house and speak
with my own voice, at last,
about its awful furniture,
pulling apart the covering
over the dusty bodies; the randy
father, the husband holding ice
in his hand like a blessing,
the mother bleeding into herself
and the small imploding girl,
i say if i should walk into
that web, who will come flying
after me, leaping tall buildings?
you?
further note to clark
do you know how hard this is for me?
do you know what you're asking?
what i can promise to be is water,
water plain and direct as Niagara.
unsparing of myself, unsparing of
the cliff i batter, but also unsparing
of you, tourist. the question for me is
how long can i cling to this edge?
the question for you is
what have you ever traveled toward
more than your own safety?
final note to clark
they had it wrong,
the old comics.
you are only clark kent
after all. oh,
mild mannered mister,
why did i think you could fix it?
how you must have wondered
to see me taking chances,
dancing on the edge of words,
pointing out the bad guys,
dreaming your x-ray vision
could see the beauty in me.
what did i expect? what
did i hope for? we are who we are,
two faithful readers,
not wonder woman and not superman.
God, I love that poem. I once used it as the end of a presentation I did on female superheroes for one of my women's studies classes.
note, passed to superman
sweet jesus, superman,
if had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel,
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.
Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. So it goes.
I wasn't even sure it was true at first, because Vonnegut's death was falsely reported once before. It's really true this time.
This a poem from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. Vonnegut used it his 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle.
Knowlt Hoheimer
I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the county jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, "Pro Patria."
What do they mean, anyway?
When I dug out my copy of Cat's Cradle to look up this poem, I thought I would have to spend several minutes flipping through the pages and searching. It turned out that I had already dog-eared the correct page last time I read the book, about six years ago.