Fragmentation and "Flying Trout While Drunk" and "Minor Miracle"

 

          Lynn Emanual's poem "Flying Trout While Drunk" was particularly resonant.  Her poem consists of fragmented images: "wrist deep in red water", "She is a beautiful, unlucky woman", "Buttons ticking like seeds spit on  a plate".  These all create an image of chaos, contained within the poem.   This fragmentation compliments the rhythm of the work as well as it is at once disjointed but, via the use of selective word choice, very vivid.   I also liked the lack of quotation marks when speech enters the poem.   It gets folded into the wider narrative and this narrative, composed of images, seems to subsume even the mother's own voice.
         The subject matter of the poem is very artfully portrayed through these techniques.  The narrator's childhood memories are related as snapshots that provide the reader with an idea of the hectic and unstructured upbringing the narrator alludes to.   The combination of her mother's love for this man and her drinking allows the reader to connect these behaviors.  This implication is that they are thematically related as both are symptoms of the disease that the mother has, and perhaps the daughter shares.  That the daughter's own behavior is included but not the focus of the poem captures the way that the family narrative (the origin myth) is created, and emphasizes the eclipsing power of the mother's illness.

***Last week's Reflection***

Marilyn Nelson's poem "Minor Miracle" is very restrained in its description, which allows for the actions and events to become more poignant.  By keeping the prose and word choice stark, the focus shifts from the images created by the poem to the action upon which the poem's climax hinges.  I thought that phrases such as "knock-on wood memory" and "The afternoon froze" create aural images very well as one introduces action and the other creates an implicit image of life halting in fear.  
    I was struck by how the inclusion of minor details such as "homemade finger tattoos" was able to convey so many implications and assumptions about the character without actually telling the reader.   The way that the observations are listed felt defensive to me.  The reader can tell that she was regarding the racist man as a potential threat and this can be felt in the short, but focused, inclusion of detail.   I also really liked that the emotions of the other characters were apparent without being spelled-out.  It allows for the reader to experience their own reactions, though through the perspective of the narrator, unfiltered.