Poem Analysis: Sticky Fins

When I started editing “Sticky Fins,” I knew I had a lot of work to do, but I didn’t know where to start. I wanted to improve the clarity of the poem so that it communicated the theme of invasiveness. In my final version, “their words,” I think I was able to do this. Although it may seem like a completely different poem at first glance, I used many of the major motifs, images, and themes that were part of the original version. For example, I expanded upon the images of “peanut butter” and “light that bleeds through the blinds.” The true difference is that, as I revised, I approached the task of communicating the idea of the invasiveness of gossip in the speaker’s relationship with her/his partner in a more focused way. I thought about the connotations of my words, and how the logic of the metaphors I was employing worked. …show more content…
Moreover, rather than work with the idea of fish and water which seemed to get tangled up among the other images and lead to a lot of confusion, I incorporated the image of “hollow ceramic.” This came to represent false gossip, empty lies, that ultimately still have the power to negatively impact the speaker and her/his relationship. These metaphors worked to explain the relationship between the speaker and the “you” in the poem and how “their words” affect that relationship, rather than creating elusive questions about the “we” in the first version of the