Stragey Response 1, Week 12

Poem: Let me be reckless with the word love
Strategy: The title as part of the poem; Reckless shapeshifting of the word/notion of 'love'.


Two strategies stood out to me in the piece, “Let me be reckless with the word love.” The first is how Weisse immediately imbeds the reader into the poem by making the title the first line of the piece. There’s no need to separate a “title” from the poem because in retrospect, the entire piece is strong enough to stand by itself without the signpost that a title often provides.

The second strategy that stood out was the many visual images used to signify the word ‘love.’ The images are presented in a way that the notion of ‘love’ itself recklessly shape-shifts into a variety of forms throughout the piece. These many morphs show just how reckless love is, in that it is never really found in one solid, stable image/imagery (neither in this piece or in reality).

For example, the first stanza of the poem states, “Let me drive it into the deepest ditch/ in the darkest country and pop its hood/ to inspect the engine for broken valves.” Here, the imagery established for ‘love’ is that of an automobile. But by the end of the third stanza (and going into the fourth stanza) we receive the lines, “let me walk it/ through the living room, leaving tracks in the plush pink carpet. Let it say,/ I’m sorry. I seem to have made a mess.” In this instance, ‘love’ is the muddy footprints left over from when the speaker attempted to salvage it earlier after driving it into a ditch. In the next stanza, love embodies the entire situation, which the speaker intends to “blow up” in the back yard while the neighbors enjoy celebrating the anniversary of their relationship.

So love has transformed from a car, to muddy footprints, to a fight encompassing the entire situation presented in the piece, as well as the relationship the speaker has with her lover.

What I admire about this strategy is that the images were not just injected into the piece at random; and each image was not reflected or represented in its own stanza. Instead, the images are interwoven to serve as transitions describing the details of a rough and tumble scenario for the speaker, who is also an amputee. Love is a car, love is hitch-hiking with a pervert, love is the muddy stains left on a carpet, love is is arguing with one’s partner, love is staying with an amputee despite her hardships, and love is transformed into all of these images in a manner that influenced the fluidity of the piece as a whole.

The speaker then indicates that her partner does not know how love means “sticking with/ the woman whose one foot dangles/ from the window of a pick-up truck” (17-19). Afterwards, she states that she has become an apostrophe by its Greek definition.

To be an apostrophe means to give personification to an object or abstract idea. So, in the end, love recklessly transforms one more time into the amputee herself; who is turning away and cutting herself of from not only the poem (as an ending), but what one could conclude is the relationship itself.