Choose one or mor
1. Is this a poem? What to make of the first line: "Here, the sentence will be respected?"
2. Relate the poem to the book cover below
3. If you have studied Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in Leaves of Grass, can you establish any connection between the ending of "38" and these lines from section 52 of Whitman's poem?
“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love.
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles” (1338-39).
On page 93 of the book Poems by Layli Long Soldier, the quote "So, we could also say, language and word choice are crucial to the poem's work. / Things are circling back again" could belong to the beginning of the "text." Here, the writer establishes two major forces in how to engage with a poem but, at the same time, introduces its own natural course (an organic one) playing with meaning, shape and weight, which leads us back to the beginning:
ReplyDelete"Here this sentence will be respected." On page 89 of the book, the use of language is more than a motive for the writer to write; it is a careful piece of meaningful announcements about what the "text" is, will become, and what the "text" carries -a true poem that testifyes the deviation of a tribe from its own living and a tribute to its legacy.
Following the first sentence, every word is written in the right place, at the right time (the writer delivers her own voice, expressing herself before context and matter, and invites us to know the real meaning of words. She also takes us into the Sioux language, not letting its legacy fall into place).
"Everything is in the language we use," on page 51, illustrates this path taken by the author.
At the end of the poem, on page 93: "When Myrick's body was found / his mouth was stuffed with grass" (...) "Sometimes, when in a circle, if I wish to exist, I must leap. / And let the body swing. / From the platform. / Out / to the grasses." Layli Long Soldier presents us with a different type of writing, writing with spaces before words, deconstructing our idea of the poem, letting the sentences be respected for themselves and their own diversity - creating a kind of movement relating to grass, memory, and the cover of the book.
Maria Carlota
Theme 1: "The sentence will be respected" refers to the agreed-upon rules that defines English syntactic structures. The respect here is purely syntactic based on the fact that there will be no creative liberties to go around agrammaticalities or to make it overly complex to the natural word order (SVO).
ReplyDeleteTo answer the question if this is a poem: according to the author, it is a poem and the author herself is a poet. To the naked eye the poem lacks what is expected of it: some stanza structure, accompanied by some metric – either stable or unstable – and containing some kind of rhyme (even though rhyme is not necessary in a poem).
Christine Morris said in a blog post in 2021 that writing poetry requires certain conditions to be in place. Only a poet writes poetry and to have such a name applied to oneself requires external validation; society has to agree that one is a poet, it is a social condition, not a factual one; a poet is not like a doctor; it is not validated through an education degree.
The poem itself, according to Morris and many others in the field, captures a moment in time, whether it be longer or shorter, captures an emotion, a feeling, a personality, or a person. A poem is almost shapeshifted to the poet's own volition.
To conclude, yes, it is a poem; maybe not with the expected shape, nor the expected complexity, it touches an evolved form of stream of consciousness, in my opinion, but with a higher regard for grammar, cohesion, and coherence. We are, indeed, inside a mind, but a very organized one; the thoughts are presented carefully and maybe polished beforehand. Of course, it is not stream of consciousness in classic terms, but I can argue by the way the author writes that some chaos is present; some attempt to constantly show thoughts that could be hidden, that are part of the private creative process, thus confirming a stream of constant thoughts that invades the poem and connects it with the mind of the narrator.
Source: https://medium.com/@cmorris1/what-is-a-poem-bb26c68baa0e
2. Relate the poem to the book cover below
ReplyDeleteThe first three verses of WHEREAS state "Now/make room/for grassesgrassesgrasses". There are several connections to the themes of the poetry collection, the clearest one being its cover and the poem "38".
WHEREAS establishes an authoritative, appealing, but still blurry surface, allowing Layli Long Soldier’s work to interrogate the Native American experience in both her eyes and the oppressors', blending it with a love letter to language and respect. Language in the mouth carries texture and sound, the sound and feel of the word “grasses” repeated without spaces is both hard to read at first and hard to say out loud. The implications of "grasses" also refers to a story that is told in the poem “38”, the longest of the collection, about Andrew Myrick, a trader who famously stated, after the 1858 US government reduction of Dakota land and in response to the fact that Dakota people were starving, unable to hunt and with no money, for they were never paid for the land stolen “If they are hungry, let them eat grass” and then:
When Myrick’s body was found,
his mouth was stuffed with grass.
I am inclined to call this act by the Dakota warriors a poem.
The cover presents a pragmatic design, centered on the single word "whereas", a term that immediately evokes the distancing and the impersonal tone of legal proclamations and government apologies.
The cover's visual also mirrors the state’s tendency to flatten and underestimate lived experiences, turning them into formal clauses, creating a façade of order and neutrality.
Poem “38” disrupts that façade by exposing the emotional and linguistic fractures that English conceals; through its fragmented syntax, hesitations, and self-interrogations, the poem resists the smoothness and certainty implied by the cover, showing not only vulnerability, but also a contained sadness and anger.
In this way, poem “38” becomes the cover's counter-voice, that destabilizes the authority projected by the same, revealing the tension between the state’s impersonal rhetoric and the poet’s embodied, resistant response.
Together, the cover and poem "38" stage a confrontation between imposed language and lived reality, making visible the gaps, silences, and struggles that bureaucratic speech attempts to contain.