Monday, March 12, 2007

response to poetry and graphic section of humor me

I liked the poem “a crash of rhinos” by Paisley Rekdal. I think it dealt with the concept of sex and desolation in an interesting way. By relating human relationships to animal interactions, Rekdal creates a world where humans are on a hopeless quest for happiness and helpless to determine their fates. Everyone is lonely and lost, futilely searching for meaning in relationships that inherently have no meaning and seeking out bodily satisfaction that is unable to fulfill their spiritual needs. I like the way the poem addresses the reader throughout the poem with lines like “this is how you got here”, making the reader the main character of the poem.

I thought the cartoon with the police staking out a black panther exhibit at the zoo was funny because it was ridiculous. The graphic story at the end of the graphic section was strange. It told all these things that the author did to feel empowered as a woman and to not be shameful of her period. I was a little confused as to the point of the story though. The speaker’s empowerment is a bit ridiculous and is unable to completely free her and in fact it inhibits her in some ways. For example she writes “I walked around my apartment carrying a spider plant between my legs, and singing made up songs about Germaine Greer to classical music written by extremely dead men”. It is clear that she in unable to free herself of the constraints of her (male) society by refusing to buy tampons. The end of the story emphasizes this because she says she is spending the money she saved on therapy bills and she in unable to find lasting peace or happiness.

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