That Smith was not living in the Gulf Coast area when she wrote the book speaks to the power of her imagination and of persona poems to reach into new experiences and create empathy. Patricia Smith lures the reader into believing that the personified diva Katrina is the enemy, but the enemy is clearly the government who allowed Katrina dominion over the poor and defenseless. Patricia Smith (born 1955) is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist.She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. The Gulf region is prone to hurricanes. The biggest contributing factor to Blood Dazzler’s accessibility is the chronological narrative that gives the collection a plot. All sentences following the opening start with “It,” and although not always at the beginning of the line, the repetition of this small word drives the poem forward forcefully, referencing the actions of the personified eye—“It doesn’t care,” “It needs,” “It spots,” “It spies”—until the final sentence names it again—“The eye // pushes.” Katrina and the eye are not a single, unified force, and the storm’s voice lays bare the disconnect she feels from an eye wanting to “unravel the world for no reason at all.”. Next, the poem enjambs several lines of anaphora, a repetitive scheme at the beginning of a sentence or line discussed in my column last month. Blood Dazzler Book author Patricia Smith ISBN 9781566893657 Publisher Coffee House Press Published Nov 18, 2013 Language English Format PDF, FB2, EPUB, MOBI Pages 90 File size (in PDF) 810 kB. ( Log Out /  “Persona” derives from the Latin “personae,” or mask, and while the Poetry Foundation’s  entry  cites Robert Browning, Linda Bierds, and John Berryman, when I read Smith, I also think of the poet Ai and her persona poems, described by Major Jackson  as “often disturbing dramatic monologues in the voice of public figures, famous celebrities, murderers, and everyday people.” [“Assuming the Mask: Persona and Identity in Ai’s Poetry”]. Smith brilliantly casts Hurricane Katrina as an angry, godlike diva who loathes New Orleans and sets out to teach her a devastating lesson in humility. Through her many speakers, Smith is able to tell the stories of the dead that would have been otherwise washed away. She states “I will require praise,” and pulls in “a bored breath.”  By the end of the book, Smith develops Katrina’s character into a psychotic diva whose “Siblings” never spoke of her. I experienced the story of Katrina that same way thousands of other people did—on television, on radio, in newspapers, online.” While many of us also experienced the storm as Smith did, it is her unique vision that crafted Blood Dazzler from those news stories. Deeper than just imbuing nonhuman objects and entities with human characteristics and actions, personification also powerfully gives literal life to abstractions. © Women's Voices for Change 2020 - All Rights Reserved - Terms and Conditions - Privacy Policy. How unusual it is to see something of this magnitude, power, force, and even violence given the persona of a woman! Paperback: 77pp. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. ”Out of the maelstrom of the Slam, Patricia Smith conjures a harsh and elegant poetry in Blood Dazzler. We humans tend to like the world described in a relatable way, and endowing Katrina with human needs and desires makes her deeply identifiable.

The prologue, a poem entitled “And Then She Owns You,” establishes New Orleans as a sultry seductress who lures in unsuspecting tourists and enchants residents to stay with her sleazy charm.

At the root of it was the fact that most of the people affected by Hurricane Katrina were poor and black, a fact that – in the eyes of many – made the tragedy much less important. In Blood Dazzler, Smith writes in the persona of various victims of Katrina and its aftermath, from nameless inhabitants awaiting the storm in “Only Everything I Own,” to M’Dear, the owner of a Rottweiler left tied to a cypress, whose narrative unfolds across several poems. Poetry Sunday: “In Late Summer,” by Tess Taylor, ‘I Am Woman’ — Not as Strong as it Might Have Been. Being able to make an intimate connection with a storm is certainly due to Smith’s persona work, which puts us in the heads of so many different characters, but it’s also the result of her use of personification, a term many associate with Mother Goose’s fiddling cat and eloping dish and spoon. “Siblings” is an abecedarian poem, which organizes lines alphabetically by first letter. ISBN-13: 978-1566892186 Change ), You are commenting using your Google account. While they enact actions and feelings, Katrina isn’t doing anything; she’s just “their odd sister, / the blood dazzler.” In an interview with Jon Riccio on the Volta Blog, Smith explains how she used “blood dazzler” as “a placeholder,” intending to come back with a more suitable phrase when the right inspiration hit. Between these three stanzas are short single-line stanzas that punctuate and accentuate the focus of the storm: its “hungers” and “The eye.”, This eye is what moves the storm and poem forward, and even Katrina  is at its mercy: “My eye takes in so much— / what it craves, what I never hoped to see.” Beyond the novelty of writing from a storm’s perspective, I appreciate how Smith works here to harness her curiosity to create empathy with Katrina, herself a victim of the eye’s desires. Coffee House Press, 2008 Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. Both of these poems leave the reader wondering how the richest government in the world could allow so many of its poor residents to die. In the poem “Company’s Coming” a naïve, self-reliant man says he “rode the back of the last one”; after Katrina’s wreckage, the poem “Buried” presents another self-reliant man who is forced to bury his own son. In Blood Dazzler, Smith writes in the persona of various victims of Katrina and its aftermath, from nameless inhabitants awaiting the storm in “Only Everything I Own,” to M’Dear, the owner of a Rottweiler left tied to a cypress, whose narrative unfolds across several poems. She amazingly provides the raw intensity of an action movie and simultaneously allows the reader to make deep emotional connections with all of the speakers who are fucked over by Katrina, FEMA, or Dubya.

( Log Out /  Blood Dazzler effectively uses its speakers to show racial and class-related injustices. While eagerly anticipating my baby, my joy was tempered by what Katrina revealed to me about the brokenness of our country and the potential hazards of the natural world. Rather, Smith presents a confluence of factors and an extraordinary range of voices that evoke a deep connection with readers of all kinds. From her first introduction, in the poem “5 P.M., Tuesday, August 23, 2005,” Katrina is characterized as a conceited goddess. Eventually, however, the “two words had stretched to fit. They bellowed and mystified, all wrong and yet perfect against each other.”. Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler is an impossible to make action movie, cleverly disguised as a collection of poems. But there was a damning psychological undercurrent with more strength than any storm. Another wonderful example of personification is in “Siblings,” the poem from which Smith takes the title of the book. Not simply an arbitrary force of nature, a scientific result of various factors, or a punishment from some god, Katrina-the-storm is something we can relate to on a human scale. While we must remain vigilant in separating intention from impact when employing a persona in a poem, it’s also important to remember the power of persona and the positive effects of investing in new and “other” perspectives that include a panoply of voices. This city steeped in hedonism is drunk on herself, blissfully ignorant that any force can destroy her.

The poems “What to Tweak” and “Michael Brown” both show the anemic and uncaring response of the federal government through the use of their apathetic and privileged speakers.

Currently a 2019 Fellow at The Writers Grotto, Amanda is a high school teacher and Marin Poetry Center Board member, and she lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter. ( Log Out /  There is much discussion in contemporary poetry about appropriation and who has the right to tell what stories, a conversation shining important light on various harmful forms of appropriation. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Zyzzyva, Cream City Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and Best New Poets, and she is the recipient of writing awards from The Writing Salon, Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and The Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts. The poems in Blood Dazzler present voices never heard on the news during the coverage of Hurricane Katrina, voices not usually part of such reports but which reflect the human side of tragedy. “34” creates the last words of all thirty-four elderly residents who were left to stagnate and die in a flooding nursing home, while Smith uses Tanka poems to convey the thoughts of those who died rapidly in flood waters. Katrina evolves into a relatable and “restless” being with needs and desires, one who “loudly loved / the slow bones // of elders, fools, and willows.” At the end of the book, in the second of two poems titled  “Katrina,” she calls herself  “a rudderless woman in full tantrum, / throwing my body against worlds I wanted”—directionless, hapless, in search of fulfillment. While an action movie would fail to believably personify an act of nature or a family pet, Smith has no trouble conveying believability and authenticity on the page. Blood Dazzler is an accessible, emotional collection that could easily appeal to a mainstream audience and encourage necessary social change. Blood Dazzler grabs the reader’s attention like an action film, but the reader comes away bloodied and dazzled with a hundred new perspectives on the inequality that still exists in America. It is this tension that I like so much about the pairing—“dazzle” is something I certainly aspire to do with my words, my ideas, perhaps even my aesthetics or looks—but what does it mean to “dazzle” someone’s “blood?” A “blood dazzler” is a thing of visceral power, strength, and beauty, but it is not without harm or consequence, the perfect description of that awe-ful, destructive hurricane.

This confluence of storm and new birth perhaps renders Katrina a more compelling narrative to me than to others likewise unaffected by the storm due to distance or privilege (or both), but because of this personal connection, almost every August I reread Patricia Smith’s inimitable Blood Dazzler, a book of poems published in 2007 and nominated for a National Book Award. Subscribe to our daily newsletter.Women's Voices for Change may use the information you provide on this form to be in touch with you and to provide email updates. Almost immediately, there is a sense of endings. “In Late Summer” opens with a vivid image that, for me, captures the essence of August in New England. Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith Posted: March 10, 2012 | Author: sirjeremyball | Filed under: poetry review | Leave a comment Coffee House Press, 2008 ISBN-13: 978-1566892186 Paperback: 77pp.

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