Wednesday, February 7, 2007

That Light One FInds in Baby Pictures by Jay Hopler

THAT LIGHT ONE FINDS IN BABY PICTURES
1/ Being born is a shame—
But it’s not so bad, as journeys go. It’s not the worst one
We will ever have to make. It’s almost noon
And the light now clouded in the courtyard is
Like that light one finds in baby pictures: old
And pale and hurt—
2/When all roads are low and lead to the same
Place, we call it Fate and tell ourselves how
We were born to make the journey.
Who’sTo say we weren’t?
3/ The clouded light has changed to rain.
The picture—. No, the baby’s blurry.
4/That’s me—, the child playing in the sand with a pail
And shovel; in the background, my mother’s shadow
Is crawling across a soot-blackened collapse of brick
And timber, what might have been a bathhouse once.
The tide is coming in—. Someone has written HELL
On its last standing wall.


Since I have not blogged on my own poem, I will use Jay Hopler’s poem. It definitely striked me as simple at the beginning with words such as “baby pictures and light”. However, progressively it became more difficult to connect all the pieces/stanzas and find the common connection between them-just like in the poem 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Especially, what made me select this poem was the ending with the wall written with HELL grafittied on it. Now, that made me realize that under its simple lines , there must be something the poet was trying to get to. Unconsciously, my first reaction was that this poem did not only involve the simple objects of pictures and light, but rather something more solid, that I could not grasp, is working its way through the poem. I did notice that a lot of cliché was used such as, “being born..journey” The connection of life as a journey has been overdone over and over again. Also “baby pictures are alwsy described as old, sad, reminiscing, pale,etc,etc,etc,etc.”:everyone knows this connection . This reminded of Richard Siken’s Crush because he also used something common as “film” in order to show his conflict. Perhaps, Hopler is also using this strategy in order to describe another underlying meaning that I have missed. I see the similarities of Siken’s and Steven’s poem in which they grab a common ordinary overused object and mold the reader’s mind to view it in a different value. I capture something diffrent of baby pictures- I mean I have never connected pictures with Hell and graffiti – but it defiantly makes me see more introspectively of baby pictures. I also noticed how the third stanza id more indented than the others and it is also peculiar that this is the stanza I have more trouble on understanding than the others. Its odd structure adds to its odd word arrangement. “The baby” and “fate” is italicized and “HELL” is bold….what is the connection??? This reminds me of predestination but that could be or could be not the case here.

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