Addonizio Stuff

Let's start with... Story time!

While it's entirely up to you in terms of how you begin your own poems, the approach you take in the first stanza often (if not always) sets the tone for what's to follow and establishes the subconscious expectations of the reader.  Then, it's a matter of deciding whether you'll give the reader what they more or less expect or risk steering the poem in an entirely different direction.  Kim Addonizio is a great poet to study in this regard because her poems have a performance-like energy but instead of being too general (a common criticism of performance pieces), she still maintains a strong level of emotional resonance.  Let's take a closer look at a few poems from Lucifer at the Starlite.

In "The Burning," p. 27, Addonizio begins with Dante put the philosophers in Limbo.  How would it change the poem if she started with something like, My brother told my father to go to hell?

In "Where Childhood Went," p. 35, imagine The teeth sold to the fairies / are tombstones in the graveyard of the fireflies replaced with something more direct and personal: My parents are showing signs of rot.  

In "Crossing" and "Weaponry," pp. 61-62, how would it change the poems if the "I" were shifted to "He/She" or "You"?

Other questions:

1) Take a look at Section II (Jukebox).  The first few poems (especially "Snow White: the Huntsman's Story" and "Dream-Pig") seem to be persona poems; how does that go with the title of the section?

2) Addonizio uses quite a bit of anaphora in her poems: "You" on p.31, "Forms of Love" on p. 47, and to some degree, the before-mentioned Snow White poem that often starts sentences with "I."  Any other examples?  What are the benefits and risks of that approach?

3)  Especially in a poem like "November 11," p. 17, what's the risk?  What's the payoff?  What's her approach to political subject matter here?

4) Let's take a closer look at the organization of these poems, plus the titles of the sections.  Do you see a progression of theme here?

Activity: take a look at "The Matter" (p. 59), another example of anaphora.  This can be good because the repetition gives some extra grounding to the author and the audience, alike.  (Side note: this is also reminiscent of what Albert Goldbarth does in "Library," using a somewhat consistent structure as an inversely liberating imaginative device).  Taking the same (or a similar) structure, write a "Some...." poem of your own.