Reading Response
Yusef Komunyakaa My Father’s Love Letters
On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams"
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter's apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he'd look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.
The specificity in this poem reads off the charts! Komunyakaa maintains his specificity at around an 8 to 8.75 on the ladder of specificity. I chose to use a percentage because his descriptions are so colorful and concrete that he creates fractals, this new kind of art. Reading the poem I was with the boy writing his fathers letters, tortured by the activity. The poem is very small in its thinking, literally, the whole piece is describing putting words on a page, but sometimes that can mean so much more. I also really liked Komunyakaa’s flow, reading it aloud to myself I felt all the words coming off very smooth. Reading this poem multiple times I became caught up in how he ends the poem: ‘laboring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say.’ One self-induced blockade I have with writing poems and prose finding an ending. I can start off with something good but the nitty -gritty gets me, and it is one thing I am trying to work on. Moreover, with Hugo’s framework/principles fresh in my mind I evaluated Komunyakaa’s poetry. Lines 12-15 use monosyllabic words like: old, nails, coiled, that give this much more menacing cover to his father. Also I don’t think that Komunyakaa tries to explain why his father writes the letters, which falls into the unexplainable aspect Hugo writes about.
Try this fix for endings: look back over the final lines and see if there's another way to end sooner. Often, we write past the ending in early drafts--just as we often take some lines to find the beginning. The idea here is never to be wedded to what's on the page. Always be open to alternative endings, beginnings.
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