Professor Warnke
7/30/13
Paper 2-Poetry Cathy Song is a 60 year old woman who resides in Honolulu HI with her husband and 3 children. Along with being a wife, mother, and daughter, Song is a developed poet as well. Although Song does not particularly like being classified as an Asian-American poet, her ethnicity largely influences her poetry as well as her family life. Concerning her ethnicity, Song states “I am just a poet who just happens to be Asian-American.” Ethnic background and her family are not the only things that distinguish Cathy Song apart from other poets. Song also has a habit of bursting strong imagery in her poems during pivotal points in her poetry to help a particular piece of the poem stand out and convey a certain idea or theme to the reader. While analyzing three of Song’s poems the reader is able to understand and recognize the characteristics that set her apart from other poets in general. “Picture Bride”, “The Youngest Daughter”, and “Eat” (which are three of Cathy Song’s poems) showcase these characteristics well. Picture Bride, a poem that we recently studied in class, helps to illustrate ethnicity, family and imagery. These characteristics are connected because her ethnic background is also the people that are in her family and the imagery she uses to convey these values highlights important details that she wants to illustrate to the reader.
“Picture Bride”, a poem that we have studied in class recently, is a great example of her ethnic style that Cathy Song has in her poetry. The reader is able to recognize Song’s ethnic background having an influence on her writing especially when she reveals towards the end that her grandmother came from Korea to an “island whose name she had only recently learned” who met her husband on the shores of this strange land for the first time. This is a point in which Song illustrates how her family came to America and essentially what brought her to be the person she is today.
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