A Certain Kind of Eden by Kay Ryan : The Poetry Foundation
"you can’t go back and pull/
the roots and runners and replant"
It's hard for me not to read Ryan's poem as a feminist lament. If the foundations of our story are unhealthy and skewed, can't we start a new one? Some people argue that feminism, by always reacting to patriarchy, is restrained from new and original growth. But aren't we bound by our origin stories? We can attempt to change them, recode them, but can we ever destroy a story with the power of Eden?
"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...
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