Poem In Ten Parts

This is a video of "Poem in Ten Parts" by slam poet Carlos Williams,

one of my brother's teammates at the CUPSI competition I mentioned

a couple posts back. Talking about my brother's slam poetry

background got me looking back through videos he had showed

me from the finals of that competition, and when I got to this

one, two images in particular struck me when thinking in relation

to our class.

The first came when Williams considered the urban:

"the skyscrapers were proud to have been built by us,

back when we spoke the language of the reaching

like the clouds were fruits to pick"

And the second came when he considered the natural:

"the ocean only knew the warm tongue of the endless,

which it could not teach us, but it sent waves,

preaching the language of CRASH

and now we throw fists like the atlantic, but we hug like the pacific"

I found it interesting that, like Whitman's redwood, the skyscraper

is personified as being proud of man's progress, a thought that

is not necessarily typical of an environmentalist, yet when

personifying the ocean, Williams portrays a friendly

relationship between nature and humanity. In the poem,

the ocean is a mentor, telling humanity how to speak

"the language of CRASH" - a lovely thought, though

decidedly anthropocentric. I think this is mainly because

these place metaphors, though copious, are not the driving

force of the poem, and thus the optimism of each image

works with the flow of the poem even if the images are a

bit contradictory (i.e. the ocean being friendly to humanity

even though humanity pollutes through continual progress

- building skyscrapers and the like).