Prose on Poetry: Patricia Smith

Showing posts with label Patricia Smith. Show all posts

Monday, October 18, 2010

Responding to Smith - McKenzie

Fiery, bold and poignant are but a few words that can be used to describe the compiled works of Patricia Smith in Blood Dazzler. Through her beautiful verses we are provided with images of New Orleans before, during and after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Smith chronologically follows the path of the “Mistress of Destruction” as she sweeps across the Louisiana Delta and over the lives of so many of the New Orleans residents. She gives voices to the multitudes of people that we witnessed struggling through bacteria infected flood waters and huddling under the protective concrete roof of the superdome. In some pieces Patricia Smith speaks from the vantage point of Katrina herself, in others the voodoo spirits, a dog named Luther B, a drag queen, a dying grandmother, nursing home inhabitants and the then President George W. Bush. Compared with the beauty and elegance of her prose her message is a dark reminder of the ferocity of the storm and its devastating aftermath. In a world where everything is mater-a-factley shown on the news it is easy to feel apathetic towards the plight of the inhabitants of New Orleans but Patricia Smith through her mastery of prose and use of intense imagery brings the true feeling of despair and darkness home to the reader. The horrific, gritty, harsh and tragic details of Hurricane Katrina have been lain out for us by Ms. Smith, not in the form of an abstract television report but rather as tangible facts. It’s through these facts that Ms. Smith conveys the tremendous despair invoked by “the Mistress of Destruction” and connects the reader to the plight of her victims.

The tonality of Blood Dazzler is what sets it apart from other similar works. Patricia Smith evokes the true emotion of the storm through dark and often unsettling tones to push the reader past their comfort zones and into a world where emotions are lain bare for all to examine and experience. Among other things Ms. Smith portrays death, rape, starvation, a menacing storm, looting, abandonment and just pure destruction. Understandably when writing about such things Ms. Smith naturally must use dark tones and imagery. It’s these dark tones in her work connect the reader on a much deeper level to the despair of which she is writing about. Patricia Smith doesn’t merely state that Katrina was a bad storm or bad things happened as a result of Katrina, but rather she takes the reader on a journey with her through the darkness that was the storm, and its affect on individual lives and the city of New Orleans. We are transported from the unemotional television descriptions of Katrina into a world of horrific pain, death, suffering, loss and despair all portrayed by the tone of irreconcilable darkness. Without the tones of darkness this collection is just another news story saying Katrina was a bad storm, but by using these dark tones Patricia Smith takes the reader on a journey through the despair and destruction that was Katrina and provides the reader with a deeper understanding of the affects and ramifications attributed to this terrible storm. Patricia Smith provides the uncensored facts of the true darkness of the Mistress of Destruction and her storms aftermath.

Responding to Smith - Allie

Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith is a collection of poems largely about Hurricane Katrina and her effects on the people of the Gulf Coast. Her poems are extremely powerful and truly capture the emotions, thoughts and actions surrounding the horrific disaster.

My favorite poem of the collection is called “Katrina” on page 31. The poem personifies the hurricane, emphasizing her hunger for destruction. Smith describes Katrina as being “birthed…elsewhere” (Katrina 1), and the use of the word “birth” makes me feel immediately empathetic towards the body of water. I feel as though this body was born under uneasy circumstances with the use of the word “restless” (Katrina 1), and that she was pushed forward and propelled toward her destiny by an unknown cause.

The overall tone of the poem is violent, accentuated with the descriptions of the destruction Katrina caused, but somehow I still feel empathetic towards her. She “broke through branches, steel” (Katrina 3), destroyed the very fabric of peoples’ lives, in addition to causing the deaths of “elders, fools, and willows” (Katrina 9), but the use of the word love instead of kill in the seventh line curbs my anger towards her. She “loudly loved the slow bones” (Katrina 7), not “violently killed.” This choice of words curtails the hatred that builds for Katrina after her birth in the first line, and increases my compassion towards this ferocious catastrophe.

I believe the personification of Katrina in this poem is what causes me to feel empathetic towards her. The use of the description of birth in the first line of the poem, and death in the last line makes me feel as though I have known Katrina her whole life. In addition to the hate I have for her for causing so much death and destruction, I also have a strange feeling of sympathy towards her, which makes for an overall conflicting tone of this poem.