Some Thoughts on "Woodwork"

Well, the break is almost over and I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving.

The poem that I have been dwelling on the most is "Woodwork," and what Daniel said about poetry often beginning in a single moment. I believe that moments are what our memories are built off of as well. The stronger the moment is, the more vivid of a memory it becomes. In "Woodwork" the first part of the poem relates the moment in which the speaker has a kind of revelation of the mortality of his father. The speaker's father takes on ghost-like qualities as he is working with wood. And then when the father passes on, it is the woodwork that retains the essence of the father.

In the second half of the poem, the speaker looks to the tools and the senses of "color, scent, and shade" that have been saved, and uses them to carve and "woodwork" his memory of his father. The last stanza of the poem talks about memory as something we can "groove," "level," and shape.

The mimetic words used in the poem create strong visualiztion and the sounds of wood carving. When I read words like "ripped" I could hear the high whine of a saw blade cutting through a plank of wood, with sawdust flying through the air. And in the second stanza I could hear the "grinding gravel." In that same stanza I also felt like there were some ghostly qualities being forshadowed with the words "a stair's creak," mostly because creaking stairs seem to be a part ghost stories, but that might be me stretching a connection. I think that the use of auditory words is important to the poem, because woodworking includes a lot of auditory sounds, and words that involve the sense perceptions make the poem real as I read it.

Well thats about all I have to say. I like the poem. I actually like studying a poem written by our teacher. It's cool.