A Doll House

This play is about a wife that gets herself in a bit of problem, while she was trying to make her husband happy. At first I was on the wife's side because her husband, I felt at the time, was blowing everything out of proportion. Yet, once the play went on, it came apparent that her husband would be getting Black Mailed for what his wife had done. In the end, the man that was going to Black Mail the husband realized it wasn't right to punish the wife, and everything seemed fine. The wife ended up leaving her husband because she said that it made her realize that she had been living with a stranger and that she had conceived three children with.

The Mill

This poem was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning. It's about a couple owns a mill and suddenly, it gives no reason, but they cannot use the mill has their lively hood anymore. "There are no millers any more," her husband told her before he hanged himself. The author tells us that she goes to the mill, smelling the fragrance of the once working mill, and then drowns herself when she looks at her husband dead in the black water. I wasn't a fan of this story. I think it was too dark for me, though it taught me how to look for hidden hints in other poems.

The Lady in the Pink Mustang

This poem was very entertaining and kept me seating on the edge of my seat. What I got from this poem was that the Lady in the Pink Mustang was either a hooker that worked from her car, or a stripper. This line would support my hooker that works from her car theory, "Yes. Move Over. Now. or How Much. Her price shrinks into the dark." Yet the following line makes me second guess myself and goes with my other opinion, "Painting her nipples silver for a show, she is thinking." The author also writes that she travels and lives out of her car, so is she a traveling stripper, or a traveling hooker? You be the judge!

Today was a day like TB

This poem was a fun read because I haven't read to many things relating to the Indian merchandising issue. The author talks about how everyone owns something that an Indian made and probably the only reason they have it because they might have had an ancestor that was Indian.""Maybe they have an old Indian grandma back in time to excuse themselves." Chrystos apparently feels very strong about the Indian merchandising issue. "How many Indians do you have working there? How much money are you sending the Haida people to use their sacred Raven design?" The issue is that people are paying Indians very little money to make crafts and etc. and then they sell the merchandise for much, much more than they pay the workers. This work of literature should be required to read in schools around the country, as well as the world; I recommend this poem to everyone!

My Papa's Waltz

This was probably my favorite of all the poetry we read. My Papa's Waltz could be taken two, totally different, ways. When the author writes, "The hand that held my wrist was battered on one knuckle; at every step you missed my right ear scraped a buckle." In my mind, the child is being physically abused, but in others' eyes, the father is just coming home drunk and playing with the child and putting him to bed. In this part of the poem the child says that he is clinging to his father shirt, "You beat time on my head with a palm caked hard by dirt, then waltzed me off to bed still clinging to your shirt." Even though the father is drunk and swinging the child into things, he's still clinging on to dear life. Though this poem can be confusing and hard to decide what the author is actually trying to tell us, it is a very humorous story and is really fun to read!

 

The Secretary Chant

My hips are a desk.

From my ears hang

chains of clips.

Rubber bands form my hair.

My beasts are wells of mimeograph ink.

My feet bear casters.

Buzz. Click.

My head is a badly organized file.

My head a switchboard

where crossed lines crackle.

Press my fingers

and in my eyes appear

credit and debit.

Zing. Tinkle.

My navel is a reject button.

From my mouth issue canceleed reams.

Swollen, heavy, rectangular

I am bout to be delivered

of a baby

Xerox machine.

Fine me under W

because I wounce

was

a woman.

What I loved about this "Work" poem, and the reason I chose it, was the way the author added the sound effect words to spice the story up!  "Buzz. Click./ Zing. Tinkle". In my opinion, this poem is talking about a woman that has become so wrapped up in her work, that she has become depressed, and may not know who she is as a person/ individual anymore. She talks about how every inch of her body is made of things that you would find in a office. Her hips are a desk, her head is like a switchboard, and ect. The narrator even mentions how her beasts are wells of mimeograph. This woman reminds me of the rolling 20's when women started working and trying to prove that they could work just as hard as the men did; hence my photo above.