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https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47867/facing-it

This poetry blog is on “Facing It’ by Yusef Komunyakaa. It is part of Komunyakaa’s collection called Dien Cai Dau. The collection and “Facing It” is about Komunyakaa’s experience with the Vietnam War. Komunyakaa served in the Vietnam War as a correspondent. He experienced the horrors of that war and the residual pain from it. The Vietnam War was very unpopular with the American public. Veterans of the war were not treated with the usual respect. “Facing It” is a poem about Komunyakaa’s visit to the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C. The first thing I noticed after reading the poem is the length of the lines. The entire poem consists of lines a few words long that leave much to the imagination. The short lines show that he is so overcome with emotion while thinking about his time during the Vietnam War and while visiting the memorial that he can only use short sentences to get his words out. It simulates the feeling of not being able to make complete sentences when you are crying. You have to choke your words out. Another thing that stands out in the poem is all the figurative language. There are many examples of metaphors and personification. The first metaphor in the poem is, “I’m stone. I’m flesh.” This has many meanings. The stone means that he is not going to let his emotions get the better of him. He does not want to cry. It also means that he left some of himself in the war. He is a part of the stone of the war memorial just as much as the names of the dead engraved in it. He watched some of the names on the wall die. The first personification uses the stone for deeper meaning, too. The line states, “…the stone lets me go.” The literal meaning of this line is that he looks away from his reflection in the stone. The personification also means that the memorial and memories of the Vietnam War still have a mental and emotional hold on him. Komunyakaa also uses multiple ceasuras in this section of the poem. Komunyakaa states, “ I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference.” The fragmentation imitates stuttering. This connects back to the effect the short lines have. It is like he is choking out his words. The pauses create heightened emotions and tension. We get a glimpse into his internal struggle. Being at the memorial brings up memories he might have suppressed, and he is pausing to process all the pain. The next line that stood out to me is stated, “I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke.” This also connects back to another part of the poem when he says, “I’m stone.” A part of him died during the Vietnam War, and coming to the memorial is forcing him to confront that. Another interesting aspect of the poem is the recurrence of birds. Komunyakaa states, “My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey,” and “Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s wings cutting across my stare.” The mention of birds could have many effects and meanings in the poem. Birds are often seen as freedom, so being at the memorial could be a freeing experience for him. A way to let go of all the pain the war caused. There is also the reoccurrence of reflections in the stone. He is reminded that he was a part of the Vietnam War. It also indicates that the speaker is finally confronting his trauma and reflecting on his experiences. 

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This poetry blog is on Nicole Tong’s poem “Sister” from her book How To Prove A Theory. This poem talks about the speaker’s relationship with their sister. They were close and did the normal sister things but they also bonded over their trauma from their parents. Despite the sister leaving one day, they are still close and the speaker remembers how their sister was there for them. The first thing that caught my attention was the use of italics throughout the poem. They are used to represent memories of the speaker during her childhood. The first was a good one. A moment with the sister, but the rest are about their crazy parents except for the last one. The last is also about this sister. The use of emphasizing these memories shows that despite how prevalent the bad memories of the parents were, the sister’s kindness was the most important to her. Tong also uses the same style of short stanzas that can be seen in many of her other poems. I think she set it up this way because she is remembering her childhood in small pieces. The memories are so intense and traumatic that she can only handle a little bit at a time. She even states in this poem that decades later, she and her sister still cannot say the name of the institution their mother was put in. One specific line I thought was notable was “…ours was a house of exits.” This metaphor suggests that people were leaving her and her sister’s lives all the time. People leaving became normal to them. Expected. The harshness of this line shows that she still has resentment toward all the people who left her even if their reasons were notable. In each of the stanzas, the lines slowly move further and further away. I think this is to give the effect of her sister slowly driving further and further away from her in that parking lot when she left. The pain keeps coming back again and again which is why all of the stanzas continue to follow this pattern. Another meaningful line is “Waited for feedback from the shadows.” The metaphor and personification convey that she was waiting for attention from her parents but it was like talking to a shadow. They weren’t there for her. Her sister then comforts her which displays their relationship to the reader. Her sister is likely older if she is the one doing the comforting. She takes on the role of the parent while the real parents are absent. This is also why the speaker felt so betrayed and angry when her sister left. She wasn’t just losing her sister, she was losing the only parent who was there for her. She was too young to understand the complexity of her sister putting her in a boarding school to protect her from their parents. There is also a repetition of not speaking and silence throughout the poem. “the difference between not speaking and letting something go unspoken” and “We can’t say…” This choice by the author conveys to the reader that what happened to the sisters is so traumatic that they still struggle to speak about it and that one of the negative impacts is they struggle to speak about their emotions on a deeper level, especially to each other. The last line I want to point out is “You walked beside me each day”. The reader understands that her sister was obviously not with her every single day but because of the compassion and support that her sister gave her, the speaker feels like she is always there for her no matter what every day. 

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My first poetry blog is on Nicole Tong’s “Generational Memory Theory”. The poem details the speaker’s trauma stemming from a toxic relationship. She talks about passing that trauma on to her future daughter. When I first read this poem, I thought of the concept of generational trauma. Recently it has gained a lot of spotlight, especially from social media like TikTok. I noticed a lot of it would be about their mom. They would use phrases like “As a woman, I empathize with her, but as her daughter, I can never forgive her” or “People say it was her first time living but it was my first time too”. I thought of these mother-daughter dynamics when I read the poem. By staying with a man she knows is toxic, she is creating or passing down generational trauma that will affect her daughter for years. This connects with the title and the mention of the science behind it. The poet was comparing her and her daughter to the mice in the experiment. “…the mice’s offspring and its after that would avoid the scent, despite never having experienced that sweetness.” I thought this comparison gave this part of the poem a more detached and clinical feeling. It felt like she used this metaphor to convey her dissociation from the trauma. The comparison with mice helps her detach emotion from the situation. I also found the juxtaposition in the preceding lines interesting. “…a scent as sweet as cherry blossoms passed down the anxiety…” The words “sweet” and “anxiety” are on lines right next to each other. This highlights the effect that trauma has on the speaker and the speaker’s daughter. The poet puts “the fear of the man” and “who was her father” on separate lines. The speaker does this in an attempt to defend and humanize her abusive partner. Circling back to Tiktok, I would see people say when their father wronged them, their mother would jump in a defend his actions. The speaker is trying to defend him to their daughter even though he is toxic. Another aspect of the poem is how the stanzas are set up. The poem is just short couplets. It is very choppy. I feel like it could represent the ups and downs of an abusive relationship. The low lows and the high highs that make it feel like staying is worth it. There is also a shift in the poem towards the end. She goes from a kind regretful apology to her daughter to describing details about her toxic partner that makes the reader want to shudder in disgust. The way that the couplets are set up, sometimes a line could stop and have a period instead of going on. Reading it this way changed the meaning in some places. “Tell her you’re sorry you didn’t know” has a different effect on the audience than “Tell her you’re sorry you didn’t know what to do with the fear of the man…” The first one makes it seem like the mother did not know how abusive the father was and that she is completely a victim too. The second one makes it seem like the mother was already aware of what was happening but did not do anything about it. This adds so much more complexity because it brings up the question of whether she is an accessory because she acted as a bystander or if her part should be ignored because she is a victim too. Lastly, I want to talk about how this poem could be from two different perspectives. It could be from the perspective of the mother or the daughter. The daughter could be talking about how she wishes her mother had handled it differently.

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Tong is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Fairfax County, Virginia. She received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and George Mason University. She is a professor of English. Her writing has appeared in American Book Review, CALYX, Cortland Review, and Yalobusha Review. Her book “How to Prove a Theory” won the 2017 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize.

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