Critical 5-7-12

In her book “Ka-Ching”, Denise Duhamel uses several different forms of poetry. She wrote a villanelle “Please don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen”. The repeating lines in this poem were “remember to pamper, remember to preen”, “Don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen”. Denise wrote this poem based on graffiti inside of a ladies’ bathroom. She did a pretty good job of making fun of what society thinks about women and attempting to show women to take pride in themselves. This poem proves to be limited because she has to rhyme everything with preen and queen. Some of the stanzas don’t quite go together and seem forced. “Smile, especially when you’re feeling mean. Keep your top down when you take your car for a whirl”, these lines have nothing to do with each other. The first line is basically saying bite your tongue if you’re angry and just put on a smile and the other is talking about when you are in your car going for a drive. Duhamel has also used the word ‘girl’ to rhyme all the middle lines of the stanzas. This is limiting her to certain words as well and I think when she used the line with whirl she was just trying for something to rhyme with girl.

Denise wrote a sestina about Sean Penn in her poem “Delta Flight 659”.  When I first read this I wouldn’t have understood why every line ended with ‘pen’ if it hadn’t been for her lines “maybe this should be in iambic pentameter rather than this mock sestina, each line ending in Penn”. These lines made the rest of the poem more understandable, in the sense of using Penn at the end of each line. A couple of her lines seem out of place in the theme of 9/11. Her line “poets who waddle toward your icy peninsula of glamour like so many menacing penguins” doesn’t seem to make sense. It seems like she is stretching it out just to be able to get the ‘pen’. The poem seems to be about the differences between her political beliefs and the political beliefs of Sean Penn.

Duhamel’s first 10 poems are all the same type, which are unlike any other in the book. They are more in paragraph form then in the shape of a typical poem. These stood out to me because they were uniquely written, sideways in the book. Every title is a dollar amount. Every single one of these poems talks about money in some shape or form. When I first saw that the titles were dollar amount and went up to the by 100,000 until they reached 1,000,000, I thought they were going to be stories told in a consecutive order. They seem almost random though. Each one talks about something different. This was a surprise to me, I am not sure why Denise did these poems this way other than the fact they all talk about money. I really liked her sentence in the $100,000 “there is a metaphor here somewhere, that making money can be messy and aggressive, that wimps like me will never truly take a hammer to a gift”. This sentence stuck out because some kids don’t want to break their piggy banks that they received as gifts but there are others who don’t care all they want is the money out of it.