Fluorescence 6-19-12

          Today in class we talked about and went over poems from the book "fluorescence" by Jennifer K. Dick. in our group, we managed to discuss three poems: "she feels very small", "Anatomy", and "I Want to Take Back". the first one i want to talk about it "she feels very small". during the first read through, i felt it was a very random poem about a couple having sex, then a flood comes and the woman finds and apple and eats it, then it snows and the women hate each other. when we read and talked about it in our group, we noticed a few things that i hadn't noticed on the first run through. first off, we noticed that the fact that the women in the tunnel are innocent, until she eats the apple, then they are enemies. this could be a biblical reference, or a reference to Eris (Greek goddess of chaos) and her apple of chaos, which reads: "to the fairest". we also noticed that the title was not capitalized whilst other titles were. we assumed that it was because the girl felt so small and insignificant that her story didn't even deserve to be capitalized.

          looking at the poem "Anatomy" we assumed from the white pole and the tight-rope that they were in a circus, with two intersecting ropes for the walkers to walk on. at the end of the poem there was a lot of speak about eyes eyeing things, and we came to the conclusion that one of the tight-rope walkers fell and their eyes were staring up at the living walker. usually when people see a dead body for the first time, the sight that haunts them most is the blank stares that infect the eyes of the dead. the beginning was all very structured, then it drastically switched to:

     "as here, his voice behind my own larynx vibrating

     behind me eyeing the rail, no, between the rails, the wooden

     crossties. eyeing between. my voice eyeing, eyes eyeing me and it

     was there, slowing, our train so that"

we believe the man screamed as he watched his fellow walker fall to his death and then stare up blankly into the sky.

          when reading "I Want to Take Back", i'm not going to lie, it doesn't really roll off the tongue, but it does have a certain flow to it. we talked about the "figure" she was trying to take back, and we concluded that it was the ghost of her lover that she was either trying to get back from the dead, or forget about by moving all the furniture around.