Bertha

Fifty two oil changes ago,

I first smelled your leather seats.

When I turned your wheel both to and fro,

When your mats first touched my feet,

The taste of freedom ruled my life

And that taste just couldn’t be beat.

The sun set late as we rode together

We ruled as Queens of the street

I assumed it would be forever

But forever we could not meet

‘Cause last week I hit a wall

Made of reinforced concrete

Still I hear the crunching

Still I feel the heat.

My chest, my heart is punching.

Deepening my crow’s feet.

We were once good together,

But now I keep my feet on the street.

Meta-Commentary

            The above poem “Bertha” was written as a parody of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee”. Although the Poe poem tackles the concept of love in a serious manner, “Bertha” uses humor to attach that love to an object of modern times; the car. The theme of love and loss is found in both works. The first couple of stanzas of Poe’s poem demonstrate his love for a woman named Annabel Lee. He writes “I was a child and she was a child,/ In this kingdom by the sea:/ But we loved with a love that was more than love--/ I and my Annabel Lee” (ll. 7-10). By describing their love as “more than a love”, Poe is able to communicate the magnitude of what he feels towards this woman. Likewise, I spent the first one and a half stanzas of my poem focusing on the narrator’s love for her car also. I write “The sun set late as we rode together/We ruled as Queens of the street”. In the later stanzas, Poe writes “That the wind came out of the cloud by night,/ Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee” (ll. 25-26) to explain the death of his beloved. The narrator of my poem loses her beloved when “last week I hit a wall/ Made of reinforced concrete” (ll. 11-12). Through these similar (but way different) scenarios, the poem “Bertha” follows the story line of Poe’s “Annabel Lee”.

            The most obvious similarity between Poe’s poem and my own is how I tried to mimic his rhyme scheme. The poems are separated into stanzas which according to the course site “Lit Terms to Know” are “a grouped set of lines in a poem, usually physically set off from other such clusters by a blank line” (Creel). Each stanza begins a new set of rhymes. Poe uses and ababcb type of rhyme scheme. “Lit Terms to Know” also tells us that rhyme scheme is “the pattern of sounds at the ends of the lines of a poem” (Creel). This means that the first and third lines end with a rhyme and the second, fourth and sixth lines end with a rhyme. Most often, the fifth line doesn’t rhyme with anything. For example, in the first stanza of “Annabel Lee”, Poe rhymes “ago” (1) with “know” (3) for the A rhymes. The B rhymes are “sea” (2), “Lee” (4), and “me” (6). Line five ends with “thought” that doesn’t rhyme with anything. In the first stanza of my poem I used “ago” (1) and “fro” (3) for the A rhymes, “seats” (2), “feet” (4) and “beat” (6). The fifth line ends with life which also doesn’t rhyme with any of the others. The mimicking was my most successful method of achieving familiarity with the original.

The Narrative of the Drinking Life of Courtney Tyson, PBR Slave.

     I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just east of the Mississippi River. I have no record of how many PBR’s I’ve drank in my lifetime because I don’t keep receipts. Ask any drinker in Northeast Minneapolis how many beers they’ve drunk and the closest estimate you can get is “I don’t know, hundreds?”. The liquor stores like us to forget just how much money we’ve spent over the years; it keeps us from changing.

     My father was a brewer himself, but beer was never part of my family life. I was shielded from it. Growing up, I never saw my mother drink, nor my father.  She must have made him relegate his to bar stools and garages. Because of this, I was not aware of the consequences of alcohol. Many other children knew that answering the siren call of the hooch was to become a slave to it. I however, did not.

     The first time I drank, I stole a twenty-four pack from my father. He kept them in a refrigerator in the garage. Some friends and I snuck past the living room window and went in a side door on a summer evening when I was about twelve. Crouched down in the patch of woods in my backyard, we each guzzled six beers in less than thirty minutes. An hour after that, I was struck by a pain in my gut so terrible I leapt from my spot and ran to the house. Just as soon as I was touching my knees to the floor in front of the toilet a torrent of fermented filth flew from my mouth. The heaves lasted for hours. As quickly as one passed, my body was racked with another. Finally, when it felt that I could take no more, I could last no longer, my stomach quieted its churning.  I was finally delivered from the pain.

Meta-Commentary

     This story is a parody of Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. I understand the gravity of the subject matter that Douglass examined but it seemed that injecting humor into the same format would provide a little levity. The story begins very similar to Douglass’ work. He writes “I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age” (Douglass Chap I). Following the structure of the sentences pretty closely, I began my story with “I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just east of the Mississippi River. I have no record of how many PBR’s I’ve drank in my lifetime”. The first two lines of Douglass’ piece of writing are very identifiable and I wanted to keep the reminder of the original work at the start of my writing also.

     Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is an example of a slave narrative that can be compared to the earlier genre of captivity narratives. According to Prof. Donna Campbell’s website states that slave narratives often “emphasized the cruelty of individual slave owners” (Campbell). Because the slave owner in this story is beer, I wanted to show the damage that beer can do to its slave; the narrator. This damage comes in the form of a long ride on the porcelain bus.

     Donna Campbell also points out that in slave narratives, the slave “is abruptly brought from state of protected innocence to confrontation with the evil of slavery and captivity” (Campbell). This is described in the second paragraph of my parody. It discusses how the narrator wasn’t exposed to alcohol and its effects when he was growing up. He was completely sheltered from it. However, once he decided to answer the call he was thrown in the deep end.