I’ll even bring up ambergris, which I’ll describe as "whale vomit," and how it is used in making fine perfumes. I’ll talk about spiders spinning their gorgeous webs as a way to trap and kill. I’ll mention Monet’s paintings of the Seine, where the magnificent colorations he depicts are actually a reflection of the river’s pollution, as well as the excitement of the billowing smoke in his railroad station paintings. I'll talk about London's mysterious, evocative fog of previous decades and its ordinary origins in coal smoke. Many know about the spectacular effects air pollution has on sunsets. How? Why?Īs the students think about the poem and my questions, I’ll begin to discuss other possible conceptions of beauty, where else we can see it and of the possibility of beauty growing out of what we might also think of as “ugliness.” For example, they've all seen rainbow oil sheen in puddles on the street. And yet, Cortez insistently speaks about the beauty. So where in the poem, I’ll ask the students, given what they’ve described as beautiful, is the beauty? The poem is full of sadness and grief (“broken / bloods of broken spirits broken through like / broken promises”), violence (“they burn up couches they burn down houses”), garbage (“mask of hubcaps mask of ice picks mask / of watermelon rinds mask of umbilical cords”). But Cortez demands the opposite: she wants us to look and to look hard. To get students thinking in this direction, I ask them to think about what “beauty” means, what they mean when they call something “beautiful.” Their initial responses are often conventional: from natures-flowers, a meadow, sun, stars, moon from the urban-gleaming skyscrapers, glittering night streets, well-dressed people strolling from people-those nice clothes again, muscular men, slim women, implications of good times.Ī natural response to what Cortez describes is to look away. They’re not used to taking images or ideas that are ostensibly “ugly” and thinking of them as beautiful in another context. Most students are not used to thinking about beauty as something that isn’t obvious, something that can be hidden. Cortez’s ideas about beauty often frame out conversations. Whenever I’ve taught this poem by Jayne Cortez (usually with ten-to fourteen-year-olds), I’ve always been surprised by how willing the students are to tackle the poem’s complexities: its harsh descriptions of urban life, its anger, and its notion-serious and ironic-of what, in al this chaos, is beautiful. How many more orphans how many neglected shrinesīeautiful in your turban of funeral crepe They burn up couches they burn down houses Self conscious against a mosaic of broken bottlesīloods of broken spirits broken through like This top heavy beauty bathed with charcoal water Where is the lucky number for this shy love Punctured bladders moving with a mask of chapsticks Who will enter this beautiful beautiful mask of Of watermelon rinds mask of umbilical cords Who will enter its beautiful calligraphy of blood
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