Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape by John Ashbery
When I initially went to the link that was given to read the
poem, I read the poem, but then I decided to listen to John Ashbery read it. I
knew that the poem was a bit odd because it contained cartoon characters and
there had to be a deeper meaning than Popeye having to leave his small and peculiar
apartment.
When I heard the actual reading of the poem, it seemed to
make a little more sense to me in the fact that the audience was laughing in
the background. Although it was still difficult to understand the entire
meaning of the poem, I think that Ashbery mixes a technical form with cartoon
characters to add ironic humor to his sestina.
Ashbery also uses enjambment in his poem to create a
sentence structure even though he writes a sestina.
The repeated words in his
sestina are thunder, apartment, country, pleasant, scratched, and spinach.
While Ashbery follow the techniques of how to write a sestina, he incorporates
many humorous lines using his “end words.”
My favorite line in the poem is “the thunder soon filled the
apartment. It was domestic thunder, The color of spinach.” I liked this line
the most because who would describe thunder as the color of spinach? The entire
end tercet is just funny to me because of the odd way Ashbery combines all the
repeating words. I find it really interesting how poets can just combine the words
in the final tercet and it makes sense. Although this poem did not make
complete sense to me, the end tercet made me laugh in the fact that the entire
poem is all odd, funny, and poetical all at the same time.
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