Blog Post #3

While reading the poems for this blog assignment, the only title that caught my attention was “The Woman Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window,” because it is intriguing. While reading this poem, I really enjoyed how it is telling a story, without many phrases that are up to interpretation. However, the line, “They could be a halo, or a storm of glass waiting to crush her” (Harjo, “Woman”) is very interesting because of the word “halo.” The word halo gives off a meaning of an angel or holy, but it is used in the sense to “crush” her, which seems like an oxy moron. As the poem goes along, the speaker in the poem is listing all of the people that care about the woman, almost trying to talk her out of her predicament. The speaker also talks about the woman’s past, and how far she has come from “ate wild rice on scraped down plates in warm wood rooms” (Harjo, “Woman”). The part of the poem I really like is the ending. “She thinks she remembers listening to her own life break loose, as she falls from the 13th floor window on the east side of Chicago, or as she climbs back up to claim herself again” (Harjo, “Woman”). This reveals that she has not jumped yet, but is deciding her fate. She is probably standing out of the window, as people watch her from below. The ending is left mysterious, because we will never know if she jumped or not. However, because the poem says the woman is “hanging,” perhaps she did jump.
The other poem that I registered emotion with is the war poem, “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting.” The reason I liked this poem is because I am beginning to read our assigned book, The Things They Carried. In the story, one of the soldiers is really in love with a woman that is far away, while he is in Vietnam. In this poem, a soldier, during a break in the fighting, quickly writes to a loved one. Even though the language is difficult to interpret, the reader can sense the pain that the soldier is going through. “I tell her in a letter that will stink, when she opens it” (Powers, “Letter”). I interpret this as him wishing that he could send a clean note to her, but he is stuck in the war, without any means of cleanliness. This must irritate him, because he says “I tell her I love her like not killing,” (Powers, “Letter”) therefore he would much rather be home with her than killing people.

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For help with interpreting poetry, view
http://www.webster.edu/~armbruka/engl1030/handouts/interpretpoem.htm