“The great white way” of standard English, Dumont writes in “The Devil’s Language,” “has measured, judged and assessed me.” What’s ironic is that a number of the poems stay within the tidy confines of its “picket fence sentences/ and manicured paragraphs”; without a doubt, Dumont can talk that talk. She experiments with several syntactic styles, including the slangy, offhand colloquial and the honed lyric. She gives narrative prose poems a whirl too. But the most memorable poems are those in which the awareness of being a “halfbreed” creates a powerful inner tension manifested in the form itself. The “Half Human/ Half Devil (Halfbreed) Muse,” for instance, viscerally conveys the speaker’s feeling of being torn apart: the syntax is deliberately
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First, across green girl’s second section, "City View," the speaker transforms from an outsider-observer of the Vancouver cityscape into an empathic insider-participant, modeling ways not simply to observe a text but rather to participate in it. Second, the collection as a whole narrates a transformation of emotion. Although Dumont describes her poetry as "all autobiographical" (Andrews, "Among" 148), green girl moves beyond simply autobiographical to become a sort of auto/biography, the story of a single speaker whose life resembles Dumont’s own. Its five sections explore in turn the poet’s prairie childhood, especially her relationships with her mother, her father, and one of her eight siblings ("Homeground"); her experiences in Vancouver, where she obtained her Master of Fine Arts and has lived for about half of her life ("City View"); ways in which she has been influenced by both prairie and ocean ("Gazing Ground"); her relationships with lovers and friends ("Mine Fields"); and her writer-teacher persona, fascinated with sound and language ("Among the Word Animals"). More …show more content…
Scholarship on Joy Harjo’s poetry, for example, indicates that emotions can be transformed and that they can serve as transforming agents. Harjo explicitly seeks the transformation of emotion, commenting, "I hope that on some level [my poems] can transform hatred into love. Maybe that’s being too idealistic; but I know that language is alive and living, so I hope that in some small way my poems can transform hatred into love" (43-44). Janice Gould (Maidu) contends that love itself is transformative in Harjo’s poetry: "While other emotions — hatred, humiliation, and shame — can lead to psychological and even physical metamorphosis, changing our perceptions and our actions in the world, Harjo’s emphasis is on love as a positive force for change" (145-46). These two links between transformation and emotion are summarized succinctly by Jacqueline Kolosov, who argues that Harjo’s poetry "demonstrates the way imagination and language can transform loss, hatred, and suffering — into and through love" (56; emphasis
First, across green girl’s second section, "City View," the speaker transforms from an outsider-observer of the Vancouver cityscape into an empathic insider-participant, modeling ways not simply to observe a text but rather to participate in it. Second, the collection as a whole narrates a transformation of emotion. Although Dumont describes her poetry as "all autobiographical" (Andrews, "Among" 148), green girl moves beyond simply autobiographical to become a sort of auto/biography, the story of a single speaker whose life resembles Dumont’s own. Its five sections explore in turn the poet’s prairie childhood, especially her relationships with her mother, her father, and one of her eight siblings ("Homeground"); her experiences in Vancouver, where she obtained her Master of Fine Arts and has lived for about half of her life ("City View"); ways in which she has been influenced by both prairie and ocean ("Gazing Ground"); her relationships with lovers and friends ("Mine Fields"); and her writer-teacher persona, fascinated with sound and language ("Among the Word Animals"). More …show more content…
Scholarship on Joy Harjo’s poetry, for example, indicates that emotions can be transformed and that they can serve as transforming agents. Harjo explicitly seeks the transformation of emotion, commenting, "I hope that on some level [my poems] can transform hatred into love. Maybe that’s being too idealistic; but I know that language is alive and living, so I hope that in some small way my poems can transform hatred into love" (43-44). Janice Gould (Maidu) contends that love itself is transformative in Harjo’s poetry: "While other emotions — hatred, humiliation, and shame — can lead to psychological and even physical metamorphosis, changing our perceptions and our actions in the world, Harjo’s emphasis is on love as a positive force for change" (145-46). These two links between transformation and emotion are summarized succinctly by Jacqueline Kolosov, who argues that Harjo’s poetry "demonstrates the way imagination and language can transform loss, hatred, and suffering — into and through love" (56; emphasis