Bohince/Obadike

Starting with Paula Bohince:

I did enjoy Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, however I agree with the term "sobering" to describe it. Actually, it was pretty grotesque in parts. Not necessarily employing the same kind of violence that Ben Lerner's book did, but I felt it elicited a very similar emotional reaction. For example, on page 19: "Johnstown" seemed to capture all the essential elements I found within the whole book.

It was consistenly feminine/heavily gendered. She describes a rape, something that is almost always connected to the victimization of a woman (and in this case it is) and the destruction of the feminine spirit/innocence/womanhood. In many of her other pieces I notice the same attempt to destruct the female voice and sexuality. The poem "Pond" also lends itself to this notion of the victimized...for lack of a better word. She starts by saying, Don't be mean to me, which comes off almost childlike, and if not childlike, most certainly womanly in the sense that it's absent of any masculinity at all. She plays into the historical gender roles a lot and yet I did not see any "uprising" or redemption of the female. At times, I thought perhaps Bohince intended for the book to whine a little bit using violent content and imagery (it is successful in this).

Another poem I found very telling was pg. 32 Eating Fish in Pittsburgh. Bohince's commentary on the family and the father/daughter relationship she establishes throughout the book reminds me of Sharon Olds. She unintentionally (or maybe intentionally) digs herself into a role again, but adds nature and the primal tone that nature commands to explain things. For instance: and the rain/the smell of fish oil in my clothes/the bones I kept, as gifts. All very human, very natural images pursuing a kind of nature vs. nurture tone.

As for Mendi Obadike's Armour and Flesh, I'd have to go with Lizzie on this one. I had a hard time with the experience of reading it/ i.e. I felt like maybe it was trying for something it wasn't really achieving. I'm aware of the experimental nature of her and her husband's collaborative work, but maybe because of the lack of supplemental material (ie the photography and videography that I've heard accompanies her poetry), I couldn't get into it. Something about the work seemed flat and unalive, though often I was impressed by the sequencing, for instance "One Black Girlhood" landing in front of "In the Street." Thought this was an interesting choice for the first two poems of the batch because they were so scrappy or something. Gritty? No. Political? I can't pick a word to explain them, but they remind me of vertical prose poems and have plotlines with climaxes. Given the research I'd done on Obadike, I was floored because she is remarked as a renowned artist. I'll be excited to hear how the rest of the class experienced her.