Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Marge Piercy's "Wwhat's That Smell in the Kitchen?"
Well, now we're really into what we call free verse. In other words, we're really
not concerned with the
rhymes or any kind o
scheme as far as rhythm,
unstressed versus stressed syllables, iambic pentameter,
and all of this. It's just free verse, and so.. .
this type of poetry. . .students usually like this because
it's easy to read, it tells a story, and it's easy to follow what's going on
in the poem, so obviously there is a lot anger in this poem.
Let's see, women are burning dinners
all across America. . .steaks in Chicago haddock
in Providence, and it says, all over America, women are burning food
they're supposed to bring with calico smile on platters
glittering like wax. So we might start to think about,
as we did with some other poems written by women, much earlier poems like
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's, what is
the situation of women in society
at this point in time? For example,
we can talk about gender-role
constructs. In other words, constructs being
the construction of gender roles in society.
What were they like when Montagu was writing?
If we have looked at in this particular course the lady Mary
Wortley Montagu poem "Written the First Year I was Mary'd," then
that was a whole different time period when women first started writing.
Then we have a more contemporary period like Piercy's poem we're looking
at now,
but really, with our gender-role construct today, how do we construct the
roles for what's expected of
men in society today and women
in society today. Things have certainly gotten much better for women,
but do we have for equal pay for equal work?
Probably not. I mean, certainly we don't,
and there are expectations placed on women to care for the home more,
even today, than probably there there should be,
and that's certainly not the case in every marriage or in every relationship,
but we haven't gone completely away
from there being a difference of the expectation men and the expectation
of women.
The playing field is not level, and in this poem,
the speaker. . .really women in general. . .
are downright angry about it, so
we have a a line like "Carbonized despair
presses like a clinker/ from a barbecue against the back of her eyes."
This person is angry. There's no question about it,
and we might start to think about, if you choose to write a paper over a
poem or group poems, how
the female poets we've been reading the poems of in this course. . .
how do those poems work together? What are the common
themes? For instance, I mean,
angeris is certainly a theme
that would play out in this poem. Is there a certain
courage? Would that be a theme? Is there
a theme sort of like duty, and then how do we define
duty? What is the duty to the self?
what is the duty to move these gender role constructs to a better place?
Does a woman necessarily have the duty of doing all the cooking?
There is, perhaps, suffering,
freedom, happiness. There are a number of
themes that you can choose from in a poem like this,
and as I look now at
the closing lines: look, she, says once I was a roast duck/
on your platter with parsley but now I am Spam. So,
you know, roast duck with parsley. . . something elegant. . .something that
takes a lot of work. . .we would think that probably is a very good meal
even if you don't like duck but Spam?
Spam is something. . .maybe we like Spam
too, but it's a rather pedestrian way to cook, so she was once roast
duck
to be held up as is something probably very nice
now it's just spam maybe this is the result of how she feels
after all these years of cooking for her husband.
In the final line of the poem: Burning dinner
is not incompetence but war.
So apparently war is about to
break out, and it could be quite an uprising according to this poem.
Think about how this poem works with the other poems we're reading
in the poetry section of this course. Thank you.