While writing my poem in response to Lucia Perillo’s Inseminating the Elephant, I focused on using a more advanced vocabulary, biological diction, and more of a variety of sentence structures.
In many of my previous poems, I tend to use more common vocabulary. However, Perillo uses more distinguished words, such as miser, erogenous, and priggishness, to name a few. As a result, one of my main goals in writing this response poem, originally titled “The Death of My Sister’s Cat,” was to use a higher vocabulary. For example, instead of using arms and legs, I chose to use limbs. Instead of describing the cat’s body as going stiff, a common adjective for corpses, I wrote living petrification. Because of this richer vocabulary, the poem became more elevated—it became more than simply a poem about death. It became about the moment of feeling something dying and what that’s like on the cellular level.
In addition to elevating the poem to a moment in time rather than a typical narration of death, I was better able to stress concrete images. For example, I used lines like “body softening/as bone relaxes into gravity’s pull” and “pinkish alveoli curl in/as withering leaves in heat” as opposed to something like “her soul faded away into the darkness” or “she gasped for breath.” Although there are still a couple abstract words (i.e. gravity and heat), the former examples create much stronger imagery and are far more interesting to read.
Perillo further influenced me to write using specialized diction. Specifically, she influenced me to focus on biological diction, which is not surprising considering her constant use of scientific jargon, such as neurology, electrostatic, archaeopteryx, etc. I kept this in mind as I wrote my poem, focusing on body diction, such as synapses, alveoli, cartilage, muscle, etc. I found that this forced the reader to hone in on the moment of the cat’s death. The use of this diction not only slows down the reader due to the specific and likely unfamiliar terminology, but also adds a new layer to the death. It’s not just saying “and then she was gone,” but rather showed each stage of her death from within her body. This created a more intriguing take on the death description, in addition to acting as a way of distancing the reader.
Much of the description focuses on the actual act of dying, rather than solely on the emotion. This meant I avoided telling language, such as “I was going to miss her” or “it was so sad to see her in pain.” By distancing the reader through the science diction, the more emotional lines are better emphasized and I avoid the cheesiness and abstractions present in these example lines.
My original draft of this poem was organized into couplets with one brief break from that pattern in the middle. In addition to the couplets, most of the sentences within the poem fell into the subject-verb sentence structure (e.g. “Her meat cage was,” “saliva thickened,” “her pinkish alveoli curl,” etc.). Although my language was more varied with the higher, biological diction, the same sentence structure made the poem read like a list—very repetitive and boring, despite the descriptions. As a result, I wrote the second draft more loosely and let the poem go where it may. By doing this, I ended up with fewer of these sentences (though there were still more than I would have liked), and a far more engaging poem.
Even though I still tend towards subject-verb sentences in my poems, I’ve gradually broken away from that habit. I’ve even written a couple poems without any punctuation—one of the more discomforting styles for me to write. Ultimately, though, this experimentation with sentence structure has allowed me to grow more as a poet and as a writer.
In many of my previous poems, I tend to use more common vocabulary. However, Perillo uses more distinguished words, such as miser, erogenous, and priggishness, to name a few. As a result, one of my main goals in writing this response poem, originally titled “The Death of My Sister’s Cat,” was to use a higher vocabulary. For example, instead of using arms and legs, I chose to use limbs. Instead of describing the cat’s body as going stiff, a common adjective for corpses, I wrote living petrification. Because of this richer vocabulary, the poem became more elevated—it became more than simply a poem about death. It became about the moment of feeling something dying and what that’s like on the cellular level.
In addition to elevating the poem to a moment in time rather than a typical narration of death, I was better able to stress concrete images. For example, I used lines like “body softening/as bone relaxes into gravity’s pull” and “pinkish alveoli curl in/as withering leaves in heat” as opposed to something like “her soul faded away into the darkness” or “she gasped for breath.” Although there are still a couple abstract words (i.e. gravity and heat), the former examples create much stronger imagery and are far more interesting to read.
Perillo further influenced me to write using specialized diction. Specifically, she influenced me to focus on biological diction, which is not surprising considering her constant use of scientific jargon, such as neurology, electrostatic, archaeopteryx, etc. I kept this in mind as I wrote my poem, focusing on body diction, such as synapses, alveoli, cartilage, muscle, etc. I found that this forced the reader to hone in on the moment of the cat’s death. The use of this diction not only slows down the reader due to the specific and likely unfamiliar terminology, but also adds a new layer to the death. It’s not just saying “and then she was gone,” but rather showed each stage of her death from within her body. This created a more intriguing take on the death description, in addition to acting as a way of distancing the reader.
Much of the description focuses on the actual act of dying, rather than solely on the emotion. This meant I avoided telling language, such as “I was going to miss her” or “it was so sad to see her in pain.” By distancing the reader through the science diction, the more emotional lines are better emphasized and I avoid the cheesiness and abstractions present in these example lines.
My original draft of this poem was organized into couplets with one brief break from that pattern in the middle. In addition to the couplets, most of the sentences within the poem fell into the subject-verb sentence structure (e.g. “Her meat cage was,” “saliva thickened,” “her pinkish alveoli curl,” etc.). Although my language was more varied with the higher, biological diction, the same sentence structure made the poem read like a list—very repetitive and boring, despite the descriptions. As a result, I wrote the second draft more loosely and let the poem go where it may. By doing this, I ended up with fewer of these sentences (though there were still more than I would have liked), and a far more engaging poem.
Even though I still tend towards subject-verb sentences in my poems, I’ve gradually broken away from that habit. I’ve even written a couple poems without any punctuation—one of the more discomforting styles for me to write. Ultimately, though, this experimentation with sentence structure has allowed me to grow more as a poet and as a writer.