Reading Response [week three]

Homage to my hips is an awesome poem. Lucille Clifton is an interesting poet. I really enjoy her eloquent and direct way of speaking. Her direct manner of speaking makes her poetry easier to understand, this poem is not something that a person needs to read over and over again and breakdown to understand, but on the other hand rereading the poem can help a person dissect what Lucille is trying to say and what voice she is speaking in. My favorite lines are “they don’t fit into little petty places” and “these hips are magic hips. I have known them to put a spell on a man and spin him like a top”. Her poetry makes her very relatable. I feel that she describes what women who have big hips think but never really say. This woman that is being referred to is very empowering, she says she does what she wants, “these hips are free hips”, while never letting them be “enslaved”. I enjoyed the kind of light-hearted sentiment of the poem. Chapter three voice in Word of Mouth was an intense read, while I enjoyed reading the chapter, some of the things mentioned took a while to set in, but I am looking forward to going back and reading this chapter later on in the semester.




I feel so far that chapter four, style, in Word of Mouth has by far been my favorite chapter to read. With the other chapters, I felt that I was in a sense just drowning in the words on the pages, but with this chapter I did not find myself in the same position. I also really enjoyed the fact that this chapter was semi-short. I liked that the first section in this chapter was Styles versus Style. I felt that this was a great way to introduce the chapter. The recursive method was really enjoyable to try out; the idea of “the power of repetition” is an awesome one. I enjoyed starting to write and seeing where that led me in the sense of letting my words repeat as well as letting them evolve into their own work. Gertrude Stein’s recursive style of writing is fun to read and tricky to say at the same time. What she writes does not really make sense, but she also lets the reader follow her ideas and shows them how she got to where she was going from beginning to end. Professor Ellison’s poem was a good read; I like how she talks about rifles and men leaning on towers.