Crime Against Nature
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Minnie Bruce Pratt in her book of poetry Crime Against Nature shows a concern with issues of family, of mothers and their relationship with their children, of the force of history and the degree to which the individual is or is not connected to it and perhaps responsible for it, and of many of the social movements and political concerns of the age, concerns which impinged on families in America and separated generations. She is herself a product of the 1960s and was affected then by the women's movement, civil rights, the war in Vietnam and protests against it, and the general counterculture movement. Pratt remembers the world as it was before these movements changed it and now reacts to the world that has been created. She knows that her sons have emerged into a world where women have more choices than they had in the past, and she wants them to understand how many changes have been made, to respect those changes, and to continue pressing for the advancement of human justice and equality. The primary subject matter for Pratt is her own life and the issues raised in that life, issues which she tries to resolve through her poetry but which she finds persist in spite of her efforts. The primary image in these poems is the image of the woman as mother. In some of the poems Pratt refers to her own sons and speaks to them as the mother who nurtured them and who is concerned for their future. In others she refers to women as mothers, or as in "Two Small-Sized Girls," she c
. . .
s and people he has only heard about, and shows how all are connected both by being infused with life and by being constantly threatened with death. Gunn consistently refers to AIDS as "the plague," giving it an almost biblical connotation as something visited upon the population and as something that has become inevitable, a cloud hanging over the community and taking first this one and then that.
Work Cited
Gunn, Thom. The Man with Night Sweats . New York: The Noonday Press, 1992.
Poet Mark Doty in his book Atlantis reacts to the AIDS epidemic and to the devastation it has brought to certain segments of the population. Doty's imagery is largely derived from nature and from rural scenes along the coastline of Northern California. His poetry is structured on short lines evoking image after image to build a picture, often building from the first line on the image created by the title of the poem. For instance, "A Green Crab's Shell" begins as a comment on the title: "Not, exactly, green" (Doty 8). This poem also carries through the general theme found in these poems, a theme about the meaning of death and the difference between the life and death cycle that is part of the natural world and the cycle that has now bec
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Lesbian Poetry, Crime Nature, Weeping Woman, Homo Inherit, Crab's Shell, San Francisco, Life Talking, Small-Sized Girls, Brad John, Graduate Student, gay lesbian, gay lesbian poetry, sexual orientation, death gunn, life death, lesbian poetry, animal instinct, gunn 59, infused life, poets represented, joan larkin,
Approximate Word count = 2327
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Crime Against Nature
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
