As I read Sandra Alcosser I had a difficult time enjoying her graphically hatred poetry. It is evident throughout that she has some form of built up anger towards men and their presence. I am going to take a leap here, but after talking to Melanie maybe I am not far off, but I think at one point she was raped as a child. Maybe by Artie…I am not exactly sure but the reference to her lover’s body “like water snakes, his sweat the odor of crawfish, boiled” (Pole Boat at Honey Island). She also makes reference to a farmer demonstrating how worms make love or in all reality was it two people?
Some days he’d rub two pegs together
Until they made a greasy hum
like rain, the sound of moles
gnawing the dirt’s grain, the song
soils sing before a quake,
and the red bodies would hang
above the ground in a kind of confusion
or ecstasy. They would writhe.
Her sexual reference is apparent throughout all of her poems. At times, in a disturbing way which leads me to believe that something detrimental happened to her. Possibly by the white-toothed Artie…although, why would she make it so obvious, we all no that is not the “way” of a poet. What is your interpretation of Artie? Am I the only corrupt mind in the room?
Artie
Among the claw-foot sofas, under the looming
mahogany of my grandparents’ living room,
the hoodlum and I played with flames-
while Grandmother slept under chicken feathers
and Grandfather snore in his separate bedroom
above my head. Strop, strop
Grandpa’s razor would bite its black strap.
His bumping hammer could flatten fenders.
Thank god he was deaf and drunk.
Smart ass punk, that’s what people called Artie,
weasel trash, this gypsy who rubbed against me
grating his pink lips into my braces.
Mrs. Molenda’s grandson came from the West Side
to clean her pigeon cages, and he became the rebel boy
of Dixie Highway for girls whose daddies owned
the gas station, the Dairy Queen, the bait and tackle.
Artie had the whites teeth and his dark Hungarian skin sheened
where I reached to stroke behind his waist and earlobes.
I was fourteen and months later found myself on hands and knees
scrubbing linoleum for the first time above a tavern on the West Side
hanging limp café curtains with hopeful rickrack snowballs,
for my friend Laurie, a shy, cracked-tooth towhead
who had the body of a boy, and for Artie and their baby-
who’d curl on their beaten mohair sofa cooing just like us.
This poem makes me think that her virginity was taken by this boy at the age of fourteen. It seems like the stereotypical teenage thing…boy comes to town sleeps with one girl and runs off with her best-friend. Huh?
Anyways, I could go on and on about her sexual reference but truly what is the point, it doesn’t help me to make sense of her poems.
One poem that I did like was “In the Jittering World” (20). I chose a short stanza to share with you. It doesn’t get much better than this…
In a world jittering with possibility,
how did I come to this sour basement
in a Southern city to grade rhetoric,
water dripping all day down drainpipes,
and at night for recreation,
to nurse a lizard? I love his sticky toe pads,
the way he rests
between death and life, leaf-veined, reflective.
Carefully he picks across the blue carpet, as if
it were a globe laid flat.
Perhaps we both are lost in our landscape,
woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin.
