Poetry Response #4..5? AAA Vacation Guide

Hilbert’s sonnet “AAA Vacation Guide” is set up in pentamic rhythm with a rhyme scheme of abcabc defdef gg, but either done intentionally or not, the rhyme doesn’t stand out. When I read it, by the time I got to the fourth line, I had forgotten the last syllable of the first line—it had been mixed in with thirty others—and if it rhymed, well I really could not recall what it should have rhyme with anyway. I was already frustrated that the first two lines didn’t rhyme, then that the scheme was not every other line, and by the time I had gotten to the third I had given up hope. When I finally recognized the pattern (3 lines later), the words had switched and the rhymes no longer followed the outline I had grown used to. Hilbert uses this confusion to juxtapose the cliched city-and-season pairs: the ideal match (Paris in spring, New York in Autumn) with the awkward combination (Scranton in summer). His diction evokes a tone of pity for the small towns “no one wants to visit, only to leave.” The lines in the second half of the sonnet are grammatically correct sentences, but they lack the “glamour and appeal” of the fluffy, pretentious cities like New York, Paris, London, or Tokyo, and Hilbert holds a basic understanding that no other town holds a candle to them. Also, the lines don’t appear to have a set rhythm or rhyme scheme—it’s as if they are being said the way any person would mention them in relaxed conversation. Paris and New York are mentioned poetically in the first line with a season famously associated with each while the rest of the poem uses casual diction to convey that the towns are not and never will be as remarkably memorable. Hilbert uses the confusion of the “AAA Vacation Guide” sonnet’s layout to better exemplify the ordinariness of normal cities that the everyday man lives in.

No Exit glog

http://shayemac.glogster.com/false-2261/

Response #3: Captivity

Mary has been captured. Her home, her family, her town and her friends are burning to their demise and she is dragged away by her hair, pulled through icy waters and muddy swamps. Captured, really, or saved? She recognizes him; maybe he visited her before her town was destroyed; maybe he was a suitor; maybe he has hurt her before, roughing her u for his pleasure. But is he really a bad guy if he’s dragging her away from death? His language was “not human,” so not Russian, or Spanish, or Chinese. Is he an alien, does she mean? More likely he communicates nonverbally and his actions show his inhumane tendencies—he’s probably the kind of guy who works in the slaughterhouse, chuckling as cows moo for their lives. When she is safely on her feet she recalls “we must march.” Their guns jabbing their backs, urging them forward on the frozen ground, maybe shoeless, maybe not. Her baby, crying for food and love, could not be quenched. Instead, he was fed from acorns, taken away from his mother to be raised is a mob with the rest, lacking the specialized attention only a mother has the patience to give. After all he had taken away, how could she trust him? “I told myself that I would starve before I took food from his hands” she threatens. But who would it hurt other than her wailing son? “I did not starve.” Her captor took care of her, hunting for her, giving her the meat of an unborn fawn while he ate her dead mother (see, a slaughterhouse worker). He freed her from the chains around the tree, marking her as a prisoner. Suddenly, the birds screech, shadows of disappointed angels swarm the landscape around her, enacting God’s wrath. She could have stayed a slave, but instead this man, her…husband is he now?... has disillusioned her and muddied her morals. He controls the men around him, the autocrat of the assembled gang, and her baby is now “fed of the first wheat.” She dwells in a home of imported luxuries, blessed to lay her head on a pillow every night. Mary sees her betrayal, an outsider of a circle to which she once belonged. Her husband’s fame tore her from the ones who shared her same journey—the ones forced to move on and forge a new life. Even in colonial New England, money and fame couldn’t buy a woman’s happiness.

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Response to "Hazel Tells Laverne"

Hazel I’ll assume is the green toad with muddy spots and Laverne the secret princess. Laverne may have jumped at his “ribbit” greeting, looking at Hazel through wary eyes, condemning him as a sewer frog—and though I use the toilet to kill spiders and centipedes and beetles through death by drowning, Laverne expects the sewage pipes to deposit Hazel back into the underground waste unharmed. She’s either uneducated or black, which, sorry, was my immediate impression. She doesn’t talk like she went through a semester of grammar school, reverting back instead to the vocabulary she grew up around out in the boondocks with her extended family. “So help me, God” is suddenly one quick phrase, uttered mechanically when something catches one of them off guard, such as a talking animal.
With this background, no wonder Laverne is astonished at the indirect invitation to the ball. The poor girl was probably raised like the rest of us, only attending one in her daydreams while she completed her Cinderella-esque chores. “Someday, my prince will come,” but Lord, please, not as a frog. Who knows what kinds of germs grow in that layer of slime? Not to mention, what if he tries to kiss her back? Of course he’s a pervert! Any time there’s a talking frog the only thing they ever want out of us women is a kiss, which they think is such a small trade for an entire kingdom. Laverne sends her encounter as a warning to housecleaners, college attendees, and hopeful girls everywhere, speaking against the motives of the frog community. So when he’s gone and her disgust is dwindling, she can’t help but bask in the dream of what could have happened, probably thinking of how proud her mother would be, and how her rule over the kingdom would form a legacy.