A major defining trait of Denise Duhamel’s poetry collection Blowout is how conversational her poems are and how she uses colloquial language, such as wild crush, cool, and jerking off, to name a few. Her poems are distinctly of a contemporary age, especially with her use of pop culture references, like Madonna and Jodie-Foster-ash-blonde.
While writing my poem, I found the most difficult part of imitating Duhamel’s style was actually writing in a conversational tone. Of course, a conversational tone is how I naturally speak; however, when I tried to deliberately recreate it, it came out stiff and more like description than actual conversation. Instead of writing lines like Duhamel’s “That’s how freaked out/I was” and “Whom did I want to have sex with then, if not him?” I wrote “I veer off,” “I must stoop down,” "widow's chair," and “I rush between and under.” My poem was very narrative, like I was telling a story, rather than having a conversation with the reader.
For my second draft, I reread Duhamel’s poems and found that she sometimes used questions to make her poems more conversational, such as when she writes “So what if he couldn’t dance?” and “So/then when would you sleep?” These questions suggest that she is speaking to the reader or even herself, oftentimes via rhetorical questions. In my poem, I ask “did you know glass melts with age?,” which I mark off with em dashes. While Duhamel doesn’t really uses dashes in her poems, I felt they acted as a good stepping stone for my own poem, almost acting as the speaker’s reminder that there’s a reader to address. In later drafts, I reduced my use of dashes, and focused on only using commas, periods, and question marks. The use of these punctuation marks helped my poem to have a natural flow more similar to Duhamel’s poems.
While adding more questions helped increase the conversational tone of my poem, I found that the language was still very antiquated—quite the opposite of Duhamel’s poems. Instead of using up-to-date language, I used lace, townhome, tapestries, stoop, etc. Of course, as soon as I tried to write using more current diction, any slang I might have known rolled out of my head rather than off my tongue. In this instance, I resorted to Urban Dictionary, a site that allows users to define slang and older words with more colloquial meanings, such as pimp, sick, etc. As a result, I incorporated words like sucked, sweet, and awesome, and added exclamation points to suggest a more youthful enthusiasm in my poem.
I also skimmed Duhamel’s poems for more instances of present-day language. While doing this, though, I remembered how often she referred to celebrities, most notably Madonna, and other pop culture references to give her poems a contemporary flair. With this in mind, my most recent draft included phrases such as “hunky-forever-unmarried George Clooney” and “Katy-Perry-highlighter-strands.” By adding just a couple of these hyphenated descriptions, similar to Duhamel’s “Pamela-Anderson-platinum” hair, I was able to update the tone of my entire poem. I found that using her hyphenated phrase technique also enabled me to write more unique and interesting descriptions that didn’t drag the rhythm of the poem down.
Using these quick-paced and brief descriptions and incorporating one or two pop culture icons greatly helped me imitate colloquial language. Although my poem is still a work-in-progress, it is definitely no longer the antiquated, tapestry-laden piece it was.
While writing my poem, I found the most difficult part of imitating Duhamel’s style was actually writing in a conversational tone. Of course, a conversational tone is how I naturally speak; however, when I tried to deliberately recreate it, it came out stiff and more like description than actual conversation. Instead of writing lines like Duhamel’s “That’s how freaked out/I was” and “Whom did I want to have sex with then, if not him?” I wrote “I veer off,” “I must stoop down,” "widow's chair," and “I rush between and under.” My poem was very narrative, like I was telling a story, rather than having a conversation with the reader.
For my second draft, I reread Duhamel’s poems and found that she sometimes used questions to make her poems more conversational, such as when she writes “So what if he couldn’t dance?” and “So/then when would you sleep?” These questions suggest that she is speaking to the reader or even herself, oftentimes via rhetorical questions. In my poem, I ask “did you know glass melts with age?,” which I mark off with em dashes. While Duhamel doesn’t really uses dashes in her poems, I felt they acted as a good stepping stone for my own poem, almost acting as the speaker’s reminder that there’s a reader to address. In later drafts, I reduced my use of dashes, and focused on only using commas, periods, and question marks. The use of these punctuation marks helped my poem to have a natural flow more similar to Duhamel’s poems.
While adding more questions helped increase the conversational tone of my poem, I found that the language was still very antiquated—quite the opposite of Duhamel’s poems. Instead of using up-to-date language, I used lace, townhome, tapestries, stoop, etc. Of course, as soon as I tried to write using more current diction, any slang I might have known rolled out of my head rather than off my tongue. In this instance, I resorted to Urban Dictionary, a site that allows users to define slang and older words with more colloquial meanings, such as pimp, sick, etc. As a result, I incorporated words like sucked, sweet, and awesome, and added exclamation points to suggest a more youthful enthusiasm in my poem.
I also skimmed Duhamel’s poems for more instances of present-day language. While doing this, though, I remembered how often she referred to celebrities, most notably Madonna, and other pop culture references to give her poems a contemporary flair. With this in mind, my most recent draft included phrases such as “hunky-forever-unmarried George Clooney” and “Katy-Perry-highlighter-strands.” By adding just a couple of these hyphenated descriptions, similar to Duhamel’s “Pamela-Anderson-platinum” hair, I was able to update the tone of my entire poem. I found that using her hyphenated phrase technique also enabled me to write more unique and interesting descriptions that didn’t drag the rhythm of the poem down.
Using these quick-paced and brief descriptions and incorporating one or two pop culture icons greatly helped me imitate colloquial language. Although my poem is still a work-in-progress, it is definitely no longer the antiquated, tapestry-laden piece it was.