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.
Kathy Fagan’s strategy in dealing with clichés follows the strategy we are often taught, to inject fresh language into and around the cliché in order to personalize the phrase. Fagan does this every couple of poems, even developing an entire poem off the phrase “a monkey on her back” (2) in "Womb To Tomb Pantoum." This use of clichés makes the diction of Fagan’s poetry very casual and familiar, but the personalization of the clichés makes the specific language pop out with originality. Fagan takes the phrase “’pretty on the inside’” (19)in reference to girls that aren’t stereotypically beautiful and lets it reference specifically “the ones” (19)in "'69." Moments like this make Fagan’s poetry comfortable to an American audience, yet intriguing. If for no other reason, I continue to read Fagan’s work just to absorb how she twists clichés and trite phrases. When you catch one in her work, you expect her to twist the language into something that feels familiar, yet ...
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