- The poem, “Ode to Epinephrine”, is an anxiety-provoking poem that leaves the reader to learn about her experience with epinephrine, something used for allergic reactions. To start, I’d like to talk about the title and how it’s an “Ode” to this neurotransmitter. The title almost seems disconnected from the actual poem itself. The writing seemed less like praise for it and more like an experience that started with a violent relief of her symptoms and ending with giving her terrible anxiety and sickness. What do you think of the title and how she worded it? How do you feel about how the nurse and doctor treated her in the poem, how at first they treated her like a sick patient and then later like a mistake?
- In the previous section, we talked about how Choi writes themes of women and vulnerability, domestication, and identity and any disconnects one may have. The structurally complicated poem “Chi”, ties together a lot of those themes, and I wanted to talk not only about them but about how the poem is structured. What significance do you think section 3 “Conjugation” has in this poem. Why do you think she slowly filtered out the word Chi for other words such as chit, chip, click, clit, etc?
- The poem, “Turing test_problem solving”, is very interesting, both language and structure-wise. Her responses to the question “If you don’t like it here why don’t you go someplace else” didn’t seem to satisfy the interrogator. For example, her responses like “Have you ever been /too drunk/ to be afraid” and “have you ever tried to shake/ your body/ into obedience/ tried to shake yourself/ back into it”. Although they explained her feelings, they still didn’t feel like enough. After the interrogator says “Now if we could return to the experiment”, we get these fantastic word couplings sliced in half like “organic/origin”, “stained/page”, and “mother/land”. Although it feels like these words belong together, she separates them. What do you think is the purpose of her doing that? Also, why do you think she makes her language so repetitive and leaves us with an incomplete word at the end of it?
Kenzie’s guided reading questions for October 9th
I *loved* “Turing test_problem solving”, and my group on Wednesday also noticed that the breaks there break up phrases that seem like they go together, which is different from the purpose they serve in the first Turing Test poem, where it seems like they separate phrases that make sense but create double meaning if we read beyond their boundaries. Now the audience has to read without regarding the breaks in the text if we want to make ‘sense’ of the poem, and the final section devolves from these breaks into fragmented repetition. I read it as an evasion of the question that the interrogator wouldn’t allow, followed by a breakdown of language created by an answer that can’t quite be put into words. It also made me think of repetition as a destruction of meaning – words begin to look and sound meaningless if you look at them or say them enough times, so the repetition of of ‘country’ brought to mind the nature (and fallibility) of American nationalism.