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Strategy Response, Week 12

I really admire two small features of “Parenthetical,” the first being the influence of color. Usually, when a poem doesn’t explicitly state specific colors, I imagine my own colors into and for the scene, but in Jordan’s poem, the colors white and red receive notice, as does darkness, smoke, and a streetlamp. This minute inclusion forced me to imagine the poem in black and white with random red, grey, and pale orange. The scenery of the poem became very cinematic for me, but I enjoyed this restriction of colors, even if it was only in my head. The restriction of colors leads me to the other facet of the poem that I admire, the imprisonment of the speaker between the club and window across the street. As a reader, I felt imprisoned by specific colors and scenes, but the speaker also feels this same oppression between the club and window, silence and deafening noise, memory and the present. Though all poems require certain specificity, the limited scenery of “Parenthetical” really made the poem for me. I felt as claustrophobic as the speaker. I never would have expected a few colors and limit of two scenes to perform like this.

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