The Red Dress by Kim Addonizio
My favorite aspect
of this poem is what it talks about but doesn’t say. When I read this poem, the
narrator’s red dress is her persona. She wants the perfect persona to address
the world in. There isn’t anything special about the dress itself, it’s what
the dress does to her, how she wears it. The dress empowers her through the
world, yet the outside world has no power over her. She walks past all the
working class people at their blue-collar jobs because she can have anything she
wants and hasn’t a care about anything else, all thanks to her red dress.
The Street Stephen Dobyns
What strikes me
about “The Street” by Stephen Dobyns is the imagery. As soon as the poem
begins, Dobyns starts in describing the scene. His descriptions are very real
and seemingly exact yet I happened to find them simultaneously dull and
strange. Usually, strange would mean interesting but Dobyns seems to have
painted a dull world then placed characters in it doing thing that are either
abnormal or described unusually. Or perhaps the world is not so dull but the
tone. Regardless of what exactly it is, the poem, despite the unusual events
taking place, the poem feels boring up until the last two stanzas in which all
the preceding stanzas are strung together and the poem takes on a whole new
life. Up until that point, it feels as if we exist in the black space, watching
these twinkling stars like passing lights. However once we reach the end, we
see the black space and the stars as a whole with all the parts woven together
in a midnight tapestry. Without the last two stanzas, I would have missed the
beauty of this poem. Which is to say I would be missing out on the beauty of
life if I neglected to see how I fit in to everything else happening around me.
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