Strategy Response 1, Week 4

Strategy Response

Poem: Seven Days of Falling

Strategy: Juggling


The strategy that I observed this week was that of juggling in order to construct poetic pieces. According to our Writing Poetry textbook, poems can consist of a variety of imagery, settings, notions, and experiences that are all juggled and blurred in a manner and eventually results in one composed piece (75). This is particularly evident in Adrian Matejka’s piece, “Seven Days of Falling.”

Concepts like movement, imagery, experiences, and notions are all tossed about back and forth throughout the poem. Each line or set of lines composes notions that are distinguishingly distinct from each other. For example, Matejka begins the piece with a ‘metaphor of movement,’ “Today, I’m assimilating like margarine into hotcakes” (1-2). With this line, he foreshadows the continuity of moving that is presented throughout the entire work. He continues by comparing himself to Danny LaRusso, also known as the Karate Kid of 1984. The next line then presents a completely different imagery of him being so low after the Karate Kid’s leg sweep, that he becomes a “flower in common decency’s / lapel” (5-6). Even later, Matejka mentions the experience of a friend minting t-shirts with Juan Valdez (10-14). Distinctions such as these are blurred over the course of the work the way balls blur while flying through the air in a juggling act. One can also see how the piece is composed of imagery from the implied movement and balance within the poem’s entire composition.

Transitions such as the concept of travelling “Going the way of skin—radio waves, thoughts / like ear-to-ear transmissions grounded / into the ozone on the way from mindless / space to forgetful Earth,” contribute to the piece’s constant movement that was foreshadowed earlier in the first stanza of the work (14-18). Lines 14-18 can also be balanced against, “hand grenades reshaping / my palms into their own militaristic orbit,” due to the correlation between ‘space, Earth, and orbit’ (21-22) The same balance can even be seen at the beginning of the piece with the Karate Kid’s kick sweeping as low as a flower in common decency’s lapel. These notions are contextualized and tempered by each other. Though they are different individually, they end up balancing each other when they are put together.

Continuous movement and contextualization work together throughout the poem to make it a successful juggling act of fusion and balance. The final result is a dynamically interactive performance of overlapping and blurring that produces an intriguingly vivid work on the part of the poem as a whole.