Poetry and Such

These poems all raised some questions for me about both what the poets were trying to convey and about America itself.  Starting with the first poem on the list by Barbara Ras, I wondered how much of her vision is accurate.  I'm going to point out that I am from Chicago, and I don't have the strongest concept of what rural life is like these days.  However, I think what Ras was trying to point out is that many of the things in Country music are things that we want to believe about America, but aren't necessarily true.  She talks about how the package store is next to the chicken plant.  Well, nowadays, the package store probably lost its business to Wal-Mart, and the chicken plant couldn't keep up with foreign production.  She points out that the other aspects of life (e.g. smoking) are often erroneously depicted the way we would like them to be.

I thought the poem History of America was harsh, but not entirely untrue or overstated.  It is essentially an environmentalist critique of Manifest Destiny.  One particularly interesting line is "The caring was a necessary myth."  These words recall the PR efforts of both private and public institutions in this country to convince the public that they are carrying out their goals with respect to nature.  Of course, the most recent example being BP and its extensive ad campaigns in the aftermath of the oil spill.

Haugen's piece about the relatives who visit America and come back intrigued me.  His first comments about how they changed seem fairly superficial.  However the comment about seeing foreign things really confused me.  What sort of things would they consider "foreign"?  What sort of changes did they undergo?  Haugen's tone suggests that his relatives and acquaintances were changed for the worst, but experiencing a new culture often opens one up to new ideas and possibilities.

Learning to Love America seemed to be the poet's attempt to establish herself as an American.  I do not know what she is referring to when she talks about a "pure product", but the rest of the poem was mostly straightforward.  Through her son especially, she can root herself in America, although some of her lines (e.g. "because he answers I don't know") suggest that there is still some uncertainty in this identity.
The poem about sailing didn't seem to say a whole lot about America, but it was interesting to consider two kids in another country dreaming about coming to a place I've lived my whole life.  It was a fitting reminder that we shouldn't take our country for granted.