I have been at a conference where we analyzed the following poem in groups. I was amazed at the difference between us...especially between me and the other 3! What does this poem mean to you? I will let you know what I think after a few have answered. The author is an African-American woman. The punctuation is what I was given, though I don't know if it is accurate. I especially wondered about the one capital letter in the last line.

what i think when i ride the train

maybe my father
made these couplers
his hands were hard
and black and swollen,
the knuckles like lugs
or bolts in a rich man's box.
he broke a bone each year
as if on schedule.
when i read about a wreck,
how the cars buckle
together or hang from the track
in a chain, but never separate,
i think; see,
there's my father,
he was a chipper,
he made the best damn couplers
In the whole white world.

~ Lucille Clifton

I don't even think it's a poem. It's just a piece of prose divided into lines. It's a fine piece of prose (albeit eccentrically punctuated) of course, but it's still prose to me (but we've had this discussion many times before).

I'd be more impressed if the author could re-write it as a limerick, or limericks ;-)

Well, I read it 3 times, and it is pretty short, so it is very open. However, my interpretation was this girl's father worked extra hard to feed the family. Ironically, he hurt himself in the process of making couplers to make other people safer in trains. He's dead now, and this poem describes how she sees him whenever she views a wrecked train. I get the impression that they were never close, whether he worked too much, or for other reasons, but now, after her father is gone, she can take solace in her pride for his good work.

The analysis was well over the length of the poem. I'm not a big fan of short poems, I went to a high school named for Sandburg, and I hate his poetry. Yes, there is fog in Chicago, thank you Carl, you can use simile to make saying it take slightly longer.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I especially wondered about the one capital letter in the last line.

In the whole white world.

~ Lucille Clifton

There is certainly a resentment of white people. I don't understand why she capitalized "In" either, Kalleh.

i think the capitalized letter is a typographical Error.

Lucille Clifton served as Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1979 to 1982. Her achievements also include fellowships and honorary degrees from Fisk University, George Washington University, Trinity College, and other institutions; two grants from the National Endowment of the Arts; and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Clifton is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in Maryland and has a position at Columbia University from 1995 to 1999.

Perhaps the capitalization is a mistake, as I said.

Sean, the other 3 people in my group analyzed it like you did. However, I strongly saw it as Sunflower did, a poem about the Blacks working in a White world...working hard, sacrificing their bodies, doing work to be proud of...for the White people. It was intriguing to me that most of the white people, even in the large group, didn't see it that way. While there was only 1 black physician among the large group, he definitely saw it as racist, as did another nursing dean whose parents were migrant farmers. But most of the others didn't. I found that strange. It screamed out at me.

Richard & Sean, yes, there are those who don't like open poetry like this. Had I just read it once, I might have thought the same. However, having analyzed it in a group made me appreciate it a lot.

quote:

Originally posted by Richard English:
I don't even think it's a poem.

It seems like a poem to me, since it has been written as a poem.

I'm just too good for this world. I usually pick up on subtle racial insults, to the sense that I hear things and comment on how they seem racist, at which point all the people who didn't pick up on the racism think I'm racist because I thought this. I'll now analyze this poem in the other sense, the one I didn't see.

The first is how her fathers hands were "black and swollen, the knuckles like lugs or bolts in a rich man's box", that is, like nuts and bolts, his black hands hold together the world for the rich men. He broke his bones to make sure others didn't, and they never noticed his work. There are rich men who do nothing, and men who are the best in world(at making couplers), and they are nothing compared to the rich men they save, because it is a white world, and there is no place for a black man.

I think both analyses are fine, there is nothing wrong with poetry existing on multiple levels. Still, this poem seems to lack substance. Give me a good Tennyson or Frost any day.

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I think both analyses are fine, there is nothing wrong with poetry existing on multiple levels.

Sean, I didn't mean to imply that my way was any better than anyone else's way. I was just surprised to see how others analyzed it because it had seemed so clear to me! Obviously it wasn't that clear at all.

As for the poem lacking substance, I didn't think so at all. While I surely love Tennyson and Frost and usually don't like poems like this, I thought this was quite powerful. Many in our group (about 75 people in healthcare) thought so, too, with several in tears (not me; I don't do tears in public! ) Again, there is no right or wrong here; it's merely a matter of preferences.

Jerry gives a nice synopsis of Clifton's life, but failed to mention that for which I know her. She wrote many lovely picture books for children, including the still-read series about a boy named Everett Anderson. Her books were some of the first to depict the everyday life of regular black people (that is to say, not slaves, and no one famous, just folks living life and a boy learning about things). I've always enjoyed her writing, but her picture books tend to have text that is too lengthy for today's young children.

Some define poetry by its form. For them, poetry is mainly about meter, prosody, and rhyme, or alliteration or assonance. For others poetry is mainly defined by its content: by its connotative and emotive qualities rather than its denotative and descriptive ones. Of course, there are exceptions. Take rhyme. It is a relatively modern poetic device, unknown to the ancients and a lot of the non-western world. It is interesting that the word poetry in Greek has to do simply with creation, or doing. An aside, breaking a poem up into separate lines, is a relatively modern practice. In the past most poetry was oral, and if written down, all of the piece of paper or clay or what have you was used, edge to edge. It's really only with printing and cheap paper that we get experimentation in visual presentation, which some of us view in its historical context as analogous to meter.

I have a friend who worked as a nurse at a company that makes rail cars. She says that there are many crushing injuries in rail car construction, so Clifton's description is not hyperbole.

My take on it is pride mixed with bitterness. She seems to bemoan her blackness while assuming white indolence. Some have argued that the Civil War was really about whether Southern plantation owners got to keep their slaves or Northern industrialists got them instead.

Whether black or white, blue-collar work can be undesirable, but her father's pride and ability made him do his work well. It's clear that Lucille Clifton never read E. A. Robinson's "Richard Cory."

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Take rhyme. It is a relatively modern poetic device, unknown to the ancients and a lot of the non-western world. It is interesting that the word poetry in Greek has to do simply with creation, or doing.

That is very interesting, zmj, and I absolutely didn't know that. It makes sense, though. Surely poetry doesn't need perfect rhyme or meter to be amazingly deep and emotive. On the other hand, I have seen some perfectly rhymed and metered poems that are superficial and don't say much.

In our group, those who were especially affected by this poem were either parents who saw it as a poem about the parent/child relationship, mainly women in the group. The woman in my group who broke down in tears worried about her role as a mother while she was a busy physician. The other group that became overcome with emotion were those of minority groups who saw the racial implications.

quote:

Originally posted by Caterwauller:
Jerry gives a nice synopsis of Clifton's life, but failed to mention that for which I know her.

This is from the site Jerry posted:

quote:

In 1970 Clifton published two picture verse books for children, The Black BC’s and Some of the Days of Everett Anderson. Everett Anderson, a small boy living in the inner city, became the protagonist of eight of the fourteen works of juvenile fiction she published between 1970 and 1984. One in this series, Everett Anderson’s Goodbye, received the Coretta Scott King Award in 1984. Another of her children's books, Sonora Beautiful (1981), represents a thematic departure for Clifton in that it features a white girl as the main character. Like her poetry, Clifton's short fiction extols the human capacity for love, rejuvenation, and transcendence over weakness and malevolence even as it exposes the myth of the American dream.

From The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright � 1997 by Oxford University Press.

Tinman