The Romance of Happy Workers

Anne Boyer uses a lot of really interesting wordsmith techniques in her writing. One of my favorites is her use of “I” in the third person, discussing the “I” as a separate entity from herself. In her poem “Ode I”, she says “When the ink dries, can I fly away? I has mistaken herself for a/nightingale again.” I thought this to be exquisitely clever. These sentences comprise a two-line stanza, and halfway through you think the narrator is speaking about herself, wondering if she herself can fly away. When the next sentence begins, it requires somewhat of a double take to understand she has changed to using “I” not as the narrator speaking of herself, but as the narrator speaking of a separate “her”. “I” effectively becomes “her”. Does this mean the speaker changes to a more objective perspective on her own life and is merely referring to herself in the third person to emphasize that distance? Or does this mean that the speaker is treating the notion of self as a completely separate entity from herself? The ambiguity adds a sense of tragedy, an air of not knowing oneself.The stanza suggests that the speaker does not know if the “I” (herself or some other self) could successfully rise from a finished poem. Much of this poem itself contains references to writing, poetry, and birds, and this line encompasses all three of these elements. This stanza is a great example of the distortion Boyer creates with the typical relationship with the pronoun “I”.Another poem I really enjoyed was “A Reader for Those Who Do Not Live in Cities”. She says that all lines are “stolen from Carl Sandburg and Bertolt Brecht”, which I trust is true but I can’t affirm myself because I am not familiar with their works (I found this a lot in her poems – literary references and tricks that would be so much more enlightening if I was more well-read). I The poem consists of ten sections, with each alternating between lines and phrases that are in either italicized or normal font. I assume the font difference is to signify that each type of writing can be attributed to either Sandburg or Brecht. What’s so interesting is that the content from each writer is so contrasting, but Boyer weaves them together in a way that has wonderfully coherent moments. “Kill your hogs wit ha knife slit under the ear./What, still jabbering?/Hack them with cleavers”. These lines might not sound so wonderful as they are about killing animals, but I really like the sandwich with the non-italicized line in between. It almost seems like someone is giving butchering instructions on how to kill a pig, then they are told the first method didn’t work because the pigs are still creating noise (“jabbering”) so the instructor then says fine, “Hack them with cleavers”. It could also be said that italicized words carry a certain emphasis over non-italicized words, which puts even more weight onto the gory aspects of this poem. Overall her literary aesthetic is particularly fascinating to me, and I feel like I should reread her poems ten years from now after I’ve really the works that she constantly references.

As far as poetry books go, I actually was intrigued to finish this one. The vast topics touched on in each piece, although the most common theme I noticed was sex, made me want to see where Anne Boyer would take the reader next. Many of the poems focused on themes of sex and overall anger, which had a unique result when written in such an airy and spaced out poem. As with many of the books we've read, I did again have difficulty finding the meaning and 'point' of a lot of the pieces. However, I liked the imagery Anne Boyer uses because I was actually able to grasp on to something. With this imagery, I was able to at least make connections within the poem and connections to my own experience. I am a very visual thinker. While i have actually described other 'abstract' poetry as 'nonsense,' I was able to get a much better feel for this book. As a young adult woman, I could relate to much of the anger and sexual tensions in this book. Lines like "I let him make a bed in my ear" (Boyer 13) were very palpable to me. Thought I do often miss the point in poetry books, I saw a lot of instances of the struggle between good and evil, both literally and metaphorically. In "Cloven by Cloven," Boyer writes "the mediocre hope to sanctify the vulgar with prayer" (Boyer 33) which to me is a reflection on a lot of what is wrong with the world. Prayer will not turn the bad to good, and will not make the good any better. In "Ode O," Boyer repeats the phrase "etah I," or I hate spelled backwards. This was beautiful to me because people are always encouraged to not use the word hate because it is seen as harsh and stern. But spelled backward, it reads as if it is another foreign language, no longer harsh. I would assume poets are careful about using words like hate, so as not to alienate the reader by mistake. Boyer gives beautiful things a dark turn, which I admire. "Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds to rise like bombs" (Boyer 57). These contrasts are always fascinating to me.