Hmm…

In class we spoke about the structure of this poem and someone made the comment about it being in a zigzag shape like that a person would make to dodge bullets.  I can actually relate to this first hand.  I went to high school about five miles from where the sniper shot someone at the gas station on route 1 in Fredericksburg.  My high school was right off of route 1 and I can remember that we were instructed to zig zag to the bus and anytime we went outside.  This was something that the news was actually recommending to people and it was really scary and surreal.  Also, I find this poem really disturbing.  The imagery is very in your face.  When you read it as two separate poems,  the left side becomes more in your face, “Our son burned/A peeled face boiling with flies./his gangrened leg off/blown away.”  The right side becomes more like that of someone observing a disaster that is happening around them, “A man tearing/with his hands.  A girl with her eyes/screaming.”  I like the right side better because I feel like I can remove myself from the scene and be more of an observant figure whereas Kim draws her reader, too closely in my case, into the action happening in the left side of the poem.

Now that I’ve finally figured out my username/password combo I can blog again!!! Anyhoo…I was thinking about the Generation poem that we discussed in class on Monday and the idea of the unborn world. The line “In the unborn world we heard the years hurtling past, whirring like gears in a giant factory–time time time–” reminds me of the notion of the biological clock. I see an image of these cells hanging out waiting to be born and they hear the ticking of the woman’s biological clock getting her to the point of when she’s ready for children. I was also thinking about the line “We didn’t want to be born we didn’t want.” It comes in the middle of tons of war imagery. For me, I think these unborn children don’t want to be born because while in their unborn world, there may be no chance of a real existence but there is also no chance of experiencing real pain. Once they are born, they are thrown into a “Divided Country” where all they may know is the pain and violence of growing up in the middle of a war. Just a thought…