Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds

The questioning rather matter-of-fact tone ("How do they do it...") becomes an acid indictment of people's vanity, selfishness and egocentricity. The speaker sees them as motherless orphans who in turn are like religious zealots who solipsistically worship themselves, as the fountainhead of the god of pleasure. The cold sporting metaphors (ice-skating, marathon running) are meant to capture, and contrast with, the athletic performance of strenuous sex, which she represents with tender humor ("come to the come to the God come to the..."). The representation of orgasmic intensity, which should also (and this is the speaker's point) represent the affectionate bonding between two partners, contrasts sharply with the medico-technical language of heart rate and best time. Instead of treating the lover as an end, some people treat her as a means. This slight gives rise to the speaker's indignation and vitriol.

Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

Written in the raw, panting rhythm of Nuyorican style poets, "Facing It" evokes the speaker's challenge of dealing with his memory of the horror of war. Even once the war has been memorialized, in the attempt to put it behaind us, the poet's perception refuses to allow the wall to just be a wall. He enters into it, trades places with it, becomes it -- flesh and granite become interchangeable -- and consequently he relives the memories that the war memorial is supposed to commemorate. Stream of consciousness completes the metamorphosis, "My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite." Instead of putting the war out of mind, the memorial provides a habitat for memory, and actually calls it forth as a tragic historical marker.

Birches & After Apple-Picking

Frost’s poem “Birches” evokes a Vermont winter landscape in a remote corner of a deciduous forest. The ice storm conjures in the speaker’s mind events from his boyhood when he used to climb up into the top branches of birch trees and swing down on them all the way to the ground. His recollection leads the speaker to meditate on the difficulties in life that might cause him to lose heart; to get through those moments he’d like to be a swinger of birches again. He then meditates on love, and finally on his own death.

The blank verse poem is historically well-suited to sustain a meditation, for the iambic pentameter drives the train of thought forward while the absence of any formal rhyme scheme allows the speaker an almost unlimited degree of freedom to pursue associations and the assonances they suggest. The speaker takes as his starting point the image of birch trees bent low under the weight of the ice, an image which he transforms through his musings on childhood, love, and death.

In Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” we see an apple orchard after harvest time and all the paraphernalia necessary to the task: ladder, barrel, cider press. The speaker is exhausted from the effort and all he wants to do is sleep, or perhaps hibernate, or then again maybe just sleep, for his labor has set him apart from the animal kingdom (woodchuck).

One of Michelangelo’s sonnets comes to mind where all the artist wants to do is sleep. He has been up for days, working, completely immersed in the labor of active creation, and now he is dead tired and wishes to be left in peace. Nothing can rouse him. Frost taps into the topos of the artist exhausted after his creative exertions, hoping only to sleep. That sleep is probably not identical to the brute hibernation of the woodchuck, or by synecdoche of the entire animal kingdom, for his creativity has made the poet more human.

The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop

The speaker in the poem seems to alternate between projecting her human world onto the fish and objectively observing a specimen from the natural world. However distinct these worlds at first may appear to the speaker, they intrude upon each other as she continues her meditation. The four hooks and a leader hooked through the fish's lower jaw are likened by the speaker first to medals of honor, and then they suggest to her a vision of the wispy white beard of an Asian sage. The victory that the speaker alludes to is perhaps the dawning of the awareness of the absence to any strict demarcations between subject and object. Oil spread a rainbow on the water and the speaker is also flooded by rainbow colored light--the speaker does not appear able to put a stop to the vision of the interdependence of all things--which signals an illumination of sorts that prevents the speaker from taking another's life, even if it's only a fish, for in the fish she sees part of herself. Letting the fish go is a sign that she has "killed the will to kill," as the Buddha once taught.

Greetings

Looking forward to the course. My blog address is www.distanceavailsnot.blogspot.com.

Richard