I have gotten to know Dickey well through his book The Deliverance. Out of all the pieces I decided to talk about "Cherrylog Road". This piece is intense the language he uses is hurried and anticipating. The main character is a man probably a young man in a junk yard jumping from car to car while he waits for Doris Holbrook (who seems to be his lover). Doris as a character seems like she is also young and rebellious looking for a good time. I also picture Doris as some sort of artist because she is going to the junk yard for car parts. This maybe a more modern day approach to Doris, but I just picture her a some sort of sculpturer. The setting like I said before is a junk yard in a rural area and it also seems to be in a hot area probably down south and/or the summer.
The author describes Doris as mouse "I heard Doris Holbrook scrape Like a mouse in the southern state sun". And I felt that the main character is the blacksnake because it describes the "blacksnake as dying with boredom" then it hunt the mouse. The blacksnake can also symbolize the man's penis "So the blacksnake, stiff/ With inaction, curved back to life, and hunted the mouse"
The couple has the junkyard and the junkyard alone they don't seem to spend any other time together. "We left by separate doors/Into the changed, other bodies/Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road/And I to my motorcycle" They leave "by separate doors" is them going their separate ways into their separate lives.
I really liked this poem because it is clearly written by a man and at the same time I understand the message it is not confusing at all. The images are easy to understand and the relationship is to. This poem is better then reading The Deliverance.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
When I read this, I thought of the two of them as having an affair. Doris seems like a "goody-goody" on the outside, but like you said, she has a rebellious side. I think she was going to the junkyard just to meet this man. But, she is clever, and carries some tools so she won't look so suspicious to her father. "Loosening the screws/ Carrying off headlights/ Sparkplugs, bumpers/ Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs/ Getting ready, already/ To go back with something to show." Then, the two of them have sex in some sort of abandoned vehicle: "With deadly overexcitement/The beetles reclaimed their field/ As we clung, glued together/ With the hooks of the seat springs/ Working through to catch us red-handed."
I think that they are being a little careless. Part of the fun is the chance that they may get caught by the girls father. At the end, they go their separate ways. I'm not sure if they plan to do this again, or if it was a way of goodbye. Doris goes back to her farm, but he takes off on his motorcycle. "wringing the handlebar for speed, wild to be wreckage forever." To me, this line implies that he is taking off on a trip or moving somewhere. I think this implies his free-spirit. "To be wreckage forever" means he is never going to settle down.
The line in this poem, “In the parking lot of the dead” really caught my attention because I had never read a poetic description of a junkyard before. I usually think of visiting the dead by going to a graveyard, and it seems that Dickey is trying to attribute sentiment to the dead cars and relate the site to a graveyard by his description of the cars in the first two stanzas. The first car is a “’34 Ford without wheels” and is “Smothered in Kudzu” or vines. It seems as though he is trying to give each car a personality or at least trace its signs of death, like people who have been violently killed have their signs of suffering sometimes described.
I agree with your sexual interpretation of Doris and the writer’s relationship. The snake hunting the mouse seemingly represents the sexual relationship they have. I also agree with Shannon that they are seemingly having an affair of sorts as they boy seems concerned about having the father catch them. Since the boy’s penis is represented by a “blacksnake,” Doris’ skin color is described as “pale,” and her father’s red hair is mentioned, I am wondering if the reason for all the secrecy to their relationship is because the narrator is black and Doris is white. Race boundaries could be the reason the lovers leave “by separate doors.” However, I am just questioning whether the male is black or not. Having him ride off on a motorcycle certainly is not a stereotypical depiction of an African American male.
I also took thier relationship as an afair, the secretly meet in the junkyard. I didnt picture her as a sculpture, i thought that she was just getting the car parts for either a car or as a cover, so that she can meet with him. in all of Dickey's poems he relates things to death and dying, or tells poetic reancantments of deaths. I think this is intresting since we havent really read to many artists that view life in this way. or lack of life. I thought this poem was intresting and it kept my attention, i also understood the symbolism, which is nice when you are reading a poem.
I agree that I thought they were having an affair and that the reason that Doris was collecting the parts from cars was so that she could use it as an excuse to meet the boy. I also though it was interesting that Dickey repeatedly mentioned death as a symbol starting in the very beginning of the poem when he described the junkyard as a "parking lot of the dead." I thought that there was also a difference in the race of the two characters that made sneaky around necessary, as well as there being a difference in their social class.
I’m impressed that you can look as far as you could into this poem. I had a much more difficult time, but as I read what you wrote I compared it with the poem and was able to understand your descriptions. While I was reading this I didn’t realize that an affair was taking place. I was focusing more on trying to understand why they were in the junkyard, and that didn’t come to mind. Yours descriptions made this much more apparent and upon rereading the poem I had a much better understanding of what was going on. My favorite line in the poem was “Drunk on the wind in my mouth.” I thought this was a great description of how the man felt while driving down the road on his motorcycle.
I have to stay that nothing will convince me that this poets work is easy to understand. I honestly have to say that much of his poems are hard to understand without the aide of a teacher you knows what is going on about them.
I liked that you bloged on the author, because i only blogged on the actual poem. At least yours is self explanatory, I couldnt even understand what was going on in my Poem. In this poem they have something intresting and common going on an affair. Sometimes people wrote poems on this topic because that the only way they could write it in such a hidden way.
Post a Comment