Strategy Response, Week 10

What strikes me in Kathy Fagan’s collection Lip as a venue for further exploration is not just word play, but form/structure play. The entire collection ranges in form from the prose poem, “Constant Craving,” to “Butter” which contains only one period at the end and no other punctuation, to “Progressive Lenses” which can be read as almost a list of commands in stanzas of varying lengths. What also proves interesting is that from time to time Fagan’s titles, if we are supposed to refer to them as such, are quotes taken from singers, authors, poets, the Bible, and so on. When looking at the poem that begins “In lieu of the latkes” that itself begins with the “title”—an Eartha Kitt quote: “There’s just one thing: a ring. I don’t mean on the phone.”—a survey of this collection starts to take the argument that we presented in class last week with Angie Estes’ Tryst—a departure from the traditional, patriarchal standards in poetic form and a forge in a feminine realm of non-linear, an absence of terminal punctuation, and an almost circular, disorientating flow of words in how they are physically placed on the page. Yet, Fagan plays with the classic form of the pantoum with poems such as, “Postmodern Penelope at Her Loom Pantoum,” “Pontoon Pantoum #505,” “Saloon Pantoum,” “Womb to Tomb Pantoum,” and “Go to Your Room, Pantoum.” In each of these poems, however, she tweaks the traditional form of having the second and fourth lines of each quatrain repeat in the first and third lines of the next. At times Fagan will keep the line exactly as it is and others she will keep on a common word or rearrange the phrase with the same words from the previous lines. Perhaps this slight mocking—if that is in fact the correct word for this particular poetic action—also highlights the mocking of the content and titles. Looking specifically at “Saloon Pantoum” Fagan uses the traditional pantoum form as a venue to tell a dirty joke, or just a plain bad joke. There is a definite mixing of high and low art here. The poem’s framing lines: “Tell if you’ve heard this one before” and “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before” also plays on the possible archaicness of patriarchal poetic traditions. The question becomes then with Fagan’s collection is what is purpose of calling attention to conventional art forms only to manipulate their structure? Not just with the pantoum, but extending as a metaphor to the entire collection?