Strategy Response, Week 9

In Angie’s Estes “Wrap in Parchment and Also Pink Paper” I became particularly interested in the permanence of memory as it is passes through manifestations of text or language. The first stanza gives us the “first images of the human face” as it was “carved on limestone / slabs” (lines 3-4). The faces are anonymous, yet the exist just the same in the limestone—as if upon examination today we would see these peoples as they were in the third millennium B.C. There stands the idea of permanence for this particular group of peoples through a textual representation of their appearance on the stones slabs. What I find jarring in relation to the remainder of the poem is the second stanza allusions to silence—“faces with no ears or / mouth—as if, in the place they were / headed, they’d have no desire / to speak or hear, never need to / eat” (6-10). Silence comes back into the poem with the figure of Mina Pachter, a woman who starved to death in a concentration camp; and who, ultimately, was physically silenced. Just like the faces in limestone, Pachter and the other women from Terezin became victims of extinction and the limestone faces eerily function as a symbol of future fate for the women of the camp. Just like the representations of the humans on the stone slabs the women also have created a text of themselves to exist in the permanence of memory. Through the language of familial recipes Patcher creates a cookbook that can continue as a representation of a physical embodiment of her after death. There is legacy in language/text and that is especially true in this poem; and also extends to the overarching collection. One question I have for this piece is how does Estes make that turn from the third millennium B.C. to the shaded allusions to holocaust? Is it in the silence of “faces with no ears or / mouth” with “no desire / to speak or hear, never need / to eat”? What is this text saying about both social and poetic traditions? The text speaks to other poets/poems we have covered this semester—Matejka and Meeks mainly come to mind with strategy and the theme of allusion; but also Trethewey and a more maternal link through Estes’ figure of Pachter who passes down her recipe, her textual representation, and her memory of existence through language.