The poem my group discussed in class was Song of the Fucked Duck.
I'm not really positive about what the title means, but I'll take a shot
at it. I think the poet is saying that she is the duck, she's been
screwed over, and this is her lament. Hence "Song of the Fucked Duck".
Perhaps she chose a duck because we always say that water slides off their
backs easily and perhaps she let things slide for too long and she got
hurt. I could be wrong though. Maybe she just wanted to use
the word Fuck and the word Duck happened to rhyme. Like I said, I
really had very little insight about the title.
The basic theme of the poem is that the author loved someone very
much and they used her and left her. Understandably, she is very
bitter and she angrily recounts all the pain that this person has caused
her. The metaphors and imagery in this poem are incredible.
You can completely see what kind of a person her ex was and how he made
her feel. After he has left her, she describes her life as trying
to read a "guidebook of Marx in Esperanto". That line made me laugh
at first, but is an accurate description of how lost you are when someone
leaves you. Marx is difficult to understand by itself, let alone
trying to understand it in another dialect or language. The other
lines that stood out in my mind were "Come back and scrub the floor, the
stain is still there, come back with your brush and kneel down scrub and
scrub again it will never be clean." Anyone who's ever been hurt
by someone they loved can completely relate to that thought. When
someone hurts you that badly, you want that person to make the pain go
away, but nothing ever helps. The remnant of that pain will always
leave a stain. The other part that struck me was "There are lies
that glow so brightly we consent to give a finger and then an arm to let
them burn." That is so true. We want so badly to believe that
someone loves us when they say they do, that we will give anything to keep
believing it.
In class, my group discussed Marge Piercy's
"Song of the Fucked Duck." I want
to to into detail about what we discussed
because I think this is a very good
poem, one which actually makes you think
about "hidden" meanings. Starting at
the beginning, she introduces herself as
the one being conned by the
manipulator and consenting to all of his
lies. (that is almost verbatum from
teh lines)In the next part, though, she
goes into a part that appears to be
almost like a circus scene--which we took
as her being like a sideshow act
being made fun of and embarrassed by this
guy. The next part is my favorite
lines " and turns himself into a paperclip,
into a vacuum cleaner, into a
machinegun" because I think the three objects
represents their relationship:
this guy attached himself (paperclip), the
sucked the life out of her (vacuum
cleaner) and then killed her soul (machinegun).
I just find that so vivid and
creative. She wants a "Cinderella-esque"
real true love because "fantasy
unacted sours the brain." She discusses
the cockroach who is a survivor in the
game called life and I took that as her
being a survivor dealing with the
con-man. When you're being manipulated
adn used by someone you care about, all
you can do at that point is try and survive.
In the last line, she describes
herself as a stunted tree with dried
leaves and I feel as if she's saying that
she is lifeless/soulless right now, stunted
and not being able to move on and
love agian.