Found Object
by Lucia Perillo For this blog, I have chosen the poem Found Object, which attracted me mostly because of the mystique that the title has. Click here to see and read the poem. Out of all the poems I have read, this one really struck me as difficult to understand. Even after reading it multiple times, I am still finding it difficult to process and make sense of. Knowing that Perillo suffered from multiple sclerosis, I am led to believe that the poem concerns her sickness and the daily struggles she endured. That being said, the poem contains interesting and vivid language and flows very well. In the first and second stanzas, the narrator speaks of a white T-shirt that has been left somewhere, seemingly in her house because she is wearing it. The shirt bears the words, “I QUIT METH 4-EVER.” This seems to represent the positive outlook that the narrator must hold in the face of her illness. Just like a drug addict first has to be optimistic to stop doing drugs, the narrator must also have a bright outlook despite the pain and suffering she is undergoing. The narrator explains that she wears this T-shirt while roaming around the house in her wheelchair and she feels “half like Bette Davis,” who was a a beautiful and talented actress. With this comparison, the narrator shows that even though she is limited to the wheelchair, she still feels beautiful and impassioned. The third stanza mentions that if everyone saw the same things on television, that we all would “have seen the gulls flying,” which refers back to the seagulls that are seen as angels. Knowing that Perillo worked in wildlife management and loved nature, it can be inferred that seagulls perhaps were her personal angels. The fact that we have all at some point in time seen seagulls flying means we have all experienced the narrator’s personal angels and shared some sort of personal connection with her. As I read, “you can promise them you’ll straighten up,” my belief that seagulls are angels is reinforced as many people turn to religion and often make empty promises that they will try to improve. Of course, as Perillo writes, the birds “are such big cynics,” which epitomizes repeated human fallibility and the weariness that angels must have. At the end of the poem, the tone and subject seem to change. Perillo writes that after an apparent sudden and huge change (“then blam”) you are “transformed into your post-larval being.” She goes on to write that she herself has undergone her own transformation or catharsis, so to speak. Through struggling with her disease, she was changed dramatically, and whether or not we have a disease like she does or not, we are also bound to go through many changes and transformations throughout our lives. I guess this is why we analyze poems. As I was writing this blog post and stopped to really think about what was written, I realized that everything made a little more sense. Grant it, some aspects of the poem still confusing and unclear, I have a lot better understanding of what the main point was. I believe that Perillo had the intention of saying that finding or seeing strange objects (objects ranging from a drug addict’s T-shirt to airborne seagulls) can help us endure certain hardships and metamorphoses that we face. Keep reading, Steven
6 Comments
“Again, the Body”
Lucia Perillo Find the poem here A few days ago I was left suckerpunched upon searching online for a poem by Lucia Perillo only to find her obituary. She died on October the 16 after having lived with Multiple Sclerosis for over thirty years. My teacher offered me to change poets so that I could stay with the theme of living poets; however, I refused. Many of Perillo’s poems were influenced by her disease and many relate back to death and issues with our bodies. I felt that abandoning Perillo would be synonymous with saying that all her poems and thoughts on death were wrong. Although she is no longer alive, Perillo’s poems and ideas live on, and that is enough reason to keep analyzing. Perillo’s poem “Again, the Body” epitomizes her common theme of struggling to accept our bodies and is haunting when read so shortly after her death. The poem’s opening lines are “when you spend many hours in a room alone you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself.” This idea shows that we are the greatest critics of our own bodies. We do not need the opinions nor help of others to find everything wrong with our bodies; it is almost second nature and something that we do automatically. Perillo follows up on this with writing that the main problem of the body is “not that it is moral but that it is mortifying.” Death is a given and something that we should not worry about, but as we continue to live the body somehow manages to shame us when in reality we should be embracing it. We sometimes manage to do both things at the same time just as the narrator does when she speaks of “scratching off the juicy scab” and biting “a thick hangnail.” The mention of the hangnail causes Perillo to change the direction of the poem. She starts to write about Schneebaum, a man who lived in the Peruvian jungles with the Harakmbut people who happen to be cannibals. This tribe is referred by their “kindness,” which is interesting. When I think of a cannibal, I assume him to be very violent and ravenous, which is not the case in this situation. There is a play on words (which I assume was purposeful) as Perillo writes, “who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?” At first I saw this as the cannibals being friendly and understanding, but I see the level on which it could be tender in the sense of easily chewed. As Perillo “chewed too far and bled” with her hangnail she says that the taste was almost satisfying. This combines her own chewing with cannibalism, linking two seemingly disgusting activities into something normal. She repeats an earlier thought with “how difficult to be in a body, how easy to be repelled by it.” Life is so complex and staying alive is not always easy, yet we take our bodies for granted and cannot help but become disgusting by them. It makes me think of Perillo’s struggle with Multiple Sclerosis and how difficult it was to accept her own limitations and not become frustrated with the disease. Rest in peace, Lucia Perillo, and thank you for the wonderful poems -Steven Lucia Perillo
“The Canticle from the Book of Bob" Here is a link to the poem: http://walkingwithghosts.blogspot.com/2007/06/canticle-from-book-of-bob-lucia-perillo.html In Lucia Perillo’s poem “The Canticle from the Book of Bob,” she writes about the funeral of a loved one. She takes an interesting spin on the normal idea of what a funeral is. Perillo puts emphasis on the fact that everything must be “hired” through an extensive use of anaphora. “We hired” shows up in nearly every line, stressing the importance of the fact that the speaker has to hire quite literally every person and item for the funeral. Perillo writes, “then we hired our grief” showing that even mourning the dead comes at a cost. If one wants a nice funeral and memorial for a loved one, it comes at a high price, when a higher price (this person’s death) has already been paid. This poem was striking and deep to me. Although the speaker (along with whoever else may be “we”) has to pay all these expenses just to bury a loved one, she does not seem bitter; instead she seems to accept the costs as a necessity. I particularly liked that Perillo includes, “money changed hands and the process was brief,” which makes the funeral sound more like a business deal than anything else. With this, Perillo effectively takes the emotion out of death and treats death as just a mundane occurrence. “And we hired some tears because our own eyes were tired.” The speaker does not necessarily pay others to cry; however, it must seem like this because enough has already been paid and everyone at the funeral must naturally be crying. The fact that the speaker's “eyes were tired” shows the emotional toll the death and funeral has put on her. Although sad and still mourning, she is unable to cry, thus leading to the “hiring” of others to do it for her. The title of the poem leaves room for speculation. Is “Bob” the person who has died? Bob is never mentioned in the actual poem and neither is the name of the deceased. Perhaps the author left it this way on purpose so as to not take away from the emotion of the poem. Meanwhile, the “canticle” is obviously referring to the song that is sung by the “woman to sing in our stead.” But on second thought, the whole poem might have been written as a canticle itself. It certainly does have a sort of chanting quality to it. -Steven |
Steven-.-* ArchivesCategories |