Strategy Response, Week 1

One element of Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” that I would like to mimic in my own poetry is his tight structure and internal rhyme that he plays with through out the piece. Notably, for me, in the second stanza I began to notice a dedication to the vowel o and the connection it makes from line to line. There is romped, from, and mother in what I would call the first grouping, and then countenance, could, and unfrown in what I would the second grouping of “o-play.” The romp, from, and mother all posses the ‘om,’ even though in mother it is reversed. The sounds of these words all internally harmonize with each other and create a great formally structural component. The next group of words: countenance, could, and unfrown, all contain an ‘ou’ and the ‘ow’ in unfrown mimics the same sound. To take a basic look at the second stanza, it is visually pleasing on the page. Also, upon reading the stanza out loud, after taken a studious note of the vowel play, I can hear how Roethke keeps the poem compact and voids the arbitrary. This would be a move I would want to incorporate in my own writing to create a connecting thread from stanza to stanza. Something I would also like to develop this semester is paying better attention to scansion (of other poets as well as my own) and building a better reading voice to present my own poems in a public arena. I feel that “My Papa’s Waltz” would be beneficial for me to scan and learn to recognize the natural rhythm of the poem. By doing this on a regular basis with poems I will better able to construct it into my own drafts and establish a stronger, and less arbitrary, poetic composition. Lastly, one other element of this poem that I would like to integrate into my own work is what I would call a “misplacing” (or maybe even “poetic projecting”?) in which Roethke has the speaker project the action from himself onto another person/place/thing. Example: “My right ear scraped a buckle.” Instead of the buckle scraping the speaker, it specifically scraped his ear. I like this particular move because it helps deflect from the autobiographical and helps the poet remain personally detached from his work or poetic narrative. If following the more violent interpretations of this poem, some argue the father’s [belt] buckle was used to physically harm the speaker. Whether or not that is true to the narrative, Roethke’s own life, or his intend for the interpretation for the line, the “misplacing” does remain a tool that I want to utilize for my own writing.