Poetry #5

Twist of Snapping Beans by Lisa Parker.

Tone: There's certainly some stress in the narrator's voice that clues that allows the audience to know that it is quite maddening to the author that she can't express her feelings adequately to her grandmother. That as well as the repetition of the phrase "I wanted to" certainly condone a yearning throughout the piece.

Word Choice: There's a contrast I think in the grammar that she uses when describing her home and when she's describing her school. At home, rustic terms like "fly-eyed mesh" or "splintering slats" are used to convey a certain at ease. At her school, the phrase that stood out was "swig of strychnine"which I had to look up, means a poison. Thus, these differences emphasize the different mindsets of her two lives.

Imagery: The poem utilizes imagery to paint the setting of her grandma and her sitting on the porch, and the nostalgia she feels, and the yearning to communicate (after all she is a first generation college student). It also paints a bold picture of her new life at school, and the imagery is quite unsettling as we know she is, yet we the audience knows she is happy.

Syntax: This poem contains lots of alliteration, repetition of the phrase "I wanted to tell", and corrosive imagery all which convey the speaker's unrest. No real breaks in the lines of the poem, it is formatted to be a stream of consciousness.

Theme: I think the theme of this poem can be interpreted many different ways, but the one I arrived at stems from the leaf (no pun intended) falling on the porch and the Grandma saying, "It's funny how things blow loose like that." I think this was talking about how Parker has blown loose from her family and gone off to school. It was something very different from what everyone else in her life has done, but that doesn't at all make it a bad thing. Rather it is special in its own way. So I don't think the author is necessarily trying to defend her decision to go off to college, rather just to tell it. It is what it is and she is who she is because of it.

I felt a connection to this poem because we're all about to go off to college and move away from the familiar and while I don't share the author's predicament, I can certainly appreciate it. I think this is a poem that builds a bridge between two worlds and I admire that of the author and the way she describes it. It will be interesting to see how we build our own bridges in the next couple of years and makes me consider the emotions I will soon be trying to process...