Thursday, March 17, 2011
Facing it by Yusef Komunyakaa
I found this poem to be extremely insightful and interesting. It gives the reader a first hand look inside the mind of what seems to be a Vietnam War veteran who is suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. This style of poetry that Yusef Komunyakaa uses in his poem "Facing it" is very close to that of my own. He is very direct and does not get sidetracked with any crazy diction or similes. He is abstract in his writing but also makes sure to provide enough information so that the reader does not get confused by the complexity of the storyline. The poem is not very long but it packs a large punch and certain lines like 3 and 4 really are able to drag the reader in to the emotional aspect of the piece. Referencing the narrator not wanting to cry is a common thought among soldiers while at the same time they are still human and with that insight it is not forgotten. Lines 25-28 refer to how someone sees that narrator and looks through them and then it jumps to him remembering a man with one arm. It was especially meaningful to me the way that the author chose to end the poem. Humans are aware it is our nature to have a thought process which could contain a hundred thoughts in a matter of seconds and that is exactly what were are being shown in this piece. But throughout all the negative scenes the author describes, using imagery that is almost to vague or weird to actually imagine, he finishes it all off with a woman brushing a boys hair. I found this to be very sweet and i appreciate the fact that the author chose not to focus solely on all the horrors of war but instead was able to incorporate a much nicer image to lighten the mood of the very serious and touching poem.
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Well, I wouldn't describe the imagery here as abstract aor vague--it is actually quite precise and concrete--though this could just be a semantic issue--ie., you may have meant that the imagery is not sinmply straight-forward narrative, and that the poem's image structure is more associative, though there is an actual situation--the speaker's "facing" a memorial--underpinning it.
ReplyDeleteIn the larger context of the poems conflicts, the closing inmage may not necessarily lighten the mood--though it does offer some hope--though this image too is ambiguous--look closely--the woman's gesture seems to "erase" the names though it of course can't; still, it is a gesture of simple nuturing, os survival, in the "face" of all that has come before... see other current blogs ( (Jackson, Falcone, Amanda, Alexandria, etc.) and previous on this poem.