I really enjoyed the variety of poems that Garren Small offered during his lecture. It touched on a lot of different but equally powerful types of love and desire, some of which we have not addressed much in class, such as his poems about parental love, or feeling the power of seeing someone else’s love from afar. The hustle and bustle of city life in many of his poems highlighted the importance of communication and the difficulties that come with attaining it, something that Small seemed particularly passionate about. His poems had the warmth of a content love along with the coldness that comes with being alone in a crowd of people.
In many questions that have to do with morality, I often find myself saying that the answer is communication. How can you protect your daughters from the hegemonic representations of women in the media? Talk with them. How do you protect your sons from the ever growing ease of access to pornographic images? Discuss it with them. How do you help someone grieve for a lost loved one? Get over a break-up? Apologize for doing something wrong? The answer is always communication.
But Small’s lecture helped remind me that communication is not only a solution but a preventative. It’s a way to stay on a path, not just to get back onto it once we’ve strayed. Communication can keep a relationship alive, not just revive it. Many people forget about communicating with each other until the relationship is already at its breaking point. Yet, Small’s poetry still left me with the question of why we sometimes find it so difficult to share what we are feeling and thinking with others. Is it because we are afraid of being honest with the other person, or is it because we are afraid of being honest with ourselves?
