Atwood Is Okay
Atwood is "Okay"
What is Atwood? Blunt dissatisfaction
Slyly woven into a hysterical articulacy, flowing, clever, biting, and unforgiving. Atwood's resounding words become the voice of dissatisfaction of any simultaneously subjective and objective mind a paradox in itself -- united because they aren't content with the small quarters society has so graciously allowed them. In any collection of her works, we're consistently pelted with pebbles and boulders lighting a path in the politically and emotionally fragmented world that leaves so many of us looking for so much more, so many of us asking "Why is this okay?" Atwood's rhetoric challenges the standards and the double standards that are so inherently imposed on her ... and us. She struggles. She bites. She spits. She speaks. She takes her graceful leave.
For she draws one consistent answer from the chaos she strangely recreates in her stanzas that contradict the stagnancy around her: seen on the surface, in the mundane, wrapped around petty excuses, thriving in the present tense and saturating the epidemic of static relationships she is overcome with, Atwood knows that she must stay in motion (Just keep swimming, just keep swimming
). Given all these disenchanting aspects, Atwood is a miracle for the dignity she maintains. And where, dear friends, does this dignity take its roots? The quiet spaces between her brackets that give her anxiety the fuel it needs to drive us mad
Maybe only an indignant madness, punctuated with enough alliteration and dissonance to keep us calm. Through this chaos, a common theme for this Siren, how can order of her successes be found? Perhaps some routine deconstruction becomes necessary.
First? the indefinite question she poses: A challenge to the mind from the body: "Can you accommodate both man and woman? Past and present? Here and there? Simultaneously!" Atwood deals a risky black-market of paradoxes and...
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