What's Wong?

For my mentor poet, I chose Kimiko Hahn. I checked out her work pretty much arbitrarily, but a certain poem caught my eye, "The Ashes" . Even now, I have to say that I don't completely understand the poem. If you want to read it, just be aware that it is 80 lines across 14 stanzas. Not terribly long, but there is some pretty high diction ("reticent", "apoplectic", "intransigent,") which is not what I would consider a casual read. After my first read through, I felt that chunking would not be the best approach. There was plenty of vivid imagery, but deeper meaning started to form when I began to relate lines from separate stanzas together. For example, take a look at the eighth stanza: I tucked away our baby’s pink layette in circumspect mothballs for a christening that never took place. As well, a doll that Auntie crocheted. More than anything, I love tidal pools.  On its own, to me, this largely read as just a scene, although the third line...

     So, I recently read Siddhartha, and I didn't like it all that much. However, it did get me thinking about the concept of the self, and what self discovery looks like. I am certainly no expert on the topic though, since I don't really know myself all that much. What I do know, though, is that social pressures most definitely do not help the process of defining that inner self.  Oooooooh, it's a visual metaphor     I, as a person, tend to try to please people. I'm sure that everyone deals with this to some extent, and I think we can agree that we may act differently in front of other people. There might be people who do this that have a really good idea of themselves, but in my experience, I certainly do not know in detail who I am (at least that I care to share). Anyway, I have found that compromising parts of your personality tends to obscure the self.   Social pressure? I guess?      As an example, if you still remember m...