The largest, most fragmented poem called Tocqueville was the poem that we spent most of our focus on in class this week. This poem is very long and really hard to decode. There are lots of fragments and seemingly many narrators. When we discussed this aspect in class, another student mentioned how the fragments and different narrators may be showing how the media and what you hear on the news about big events is often also a set of fragments. You don't always hear the entire story, and you don't often get a completely unbiased approach to the the story either. I think this is a really good way of looking at this poem, especially with all the themes that are present in regards to terrorism, 9/11, and people from the Middle East. The media is also often used as a point of entrance for a conflict of interest. It is there to persuade you to think a certain way based on how something is being portrayed. I think this point can really be illustrated in a particular section on the top of page 28 of Tocqueville. It begins with "It just doesn't look like racism. What do you call it then?" and goes on into another longer section that talks about how fear rationalizes violence. I won't quote it here because it's quite a large section. This section shows that whatever conflict that arises, you can use fear of the "other" group to instill violence. This really connects in to the events that happened at 9/11. There are many reports of gaps in the things that the media told us about exactly what went on at that time, so it leads me to believe that no one has the full story of those events. This idea of using fear to instill violence is how I see the US using the events of 9/11 to push fighting deeper into war and giving in to a loss of privacy. Is it a coincidence perhaps that the Patriot Act was passed right around the same time the events of 9/11 unfolded? Many things are fishy, and I can tell that the narrator can see this as plain as day. The whole of this poem to me is a discussion of the narrator's disgust with our politics and ideals of society. He pokes fun at racism too, stating in another section on page 34: "You talk about them as if they are a different species. It's not that they're different. It's not even their need to normalize their difference. It's that they are trying to paint the world the color they want to see. They're actively doing that, trying to bring on the second coming. It's a long history of projection. Think of Kinsey." The part about 'trying to paint the world the color they want to see' really illustrates his thoughts about race and racism. Even today, as progressive as we think our society is, racism is still very VERY at large. I think this passage in the poem is trying to say that the type of racism that exists today is a want for sameness and a lack of different cultural practices. Our society wants us to be one way and reject the rest. All of this is so difficult to discuss because there are so many issues with race that we see on a daily basis. Race is something we have constructed, it is an act of nurture and how we have decided to treat one another. To me, people are people, and there are bad people of every kind. Evil has many faces, and power has a funny way of bringing out the evil in people. Mattawa's poetry, and Tocqueville as a whole really shows how race has caused such a dent in how we treat other people and place judgement just based on looks.
I also would like to talk a little bit about one of the imitation poems I wrote out of Tocqueville's book. The poem I chose to imitate is called "Trees" on page 48. I don't know exactly why I chose this poem, especially because it was a little harder for me to decide what exactly it was about. I liked a lot of the imagery it used, as well as some of the things that I found meaning from it. In whole, I gathered from this poem that trees are everywhere. Literally everywhere. They hold more than just leaves and branches. They are eyes and ears of the passing years and can see through the biases that we place on everything. That's kinda what I got out of this poem, and how I chose to shape my imitation. I talked a lot about how trees shape your life. They are essential to your survival yet placed under such little importance. We destroy them like they can be thrown away. I talk a lot about these themes throughout my poem. I also hinted at our lack of racial equality a little bit in the last couple lines of the poem: "I can call them the names they want to be called. I don’t want to group them by their texture or color or scent. They have stories like the rest of us." I feel really strongly about these lines. To me they sum the poem up nicely and it was really useful using trees in comparison to people on that scope.
This week was really powerful for me. I liked talking about all of these sensitive subjects and letting others see my poetry. That is something I often times have a hard time doing, because accepting criticism is something that isn't easy. I find also that it's hard to get criticism for something you may have meant to bring meaning to that can't be seen by your peers. A lot of my poems have intentional breaks or an uneven pace, and so I think it confuses people sometimes. I do this sometimes to capture the uneven thought process of the human brain. We don't think in full sentences all the time, and a lot of my poems are simply thought processes. The beauty of poetry is that it's in the eye of the beholder. If you don't understand my poetry, it's okay, because I do. To put a summary on all of this, we are making good progress decoding and deciphering Tocqueville and I am refining and improving my poetry and writing skills every day.
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