This is a last minute blog once again so; I will try to be blunt. Form my short essay number two, I decided to write about “Charlie Howard’s Descent” by Mark Doty. In the short explanation of the poem it is about a gay hate-crime in Bangor, Maine 1984. It is written in the perspective of the victim. Now after reading both articles I found myself (literally contemplating for maybe three minutes) that they both have truths about the poem I chose. This poem is “neither emotional nor political” like, Carolyn Forche may describe but like Sam Hamill “it as deep truth.” Sam Hamill describe about the truth that is hidden between every silence. The distinction between speaking the elements for what they are and the ignorance of the blind. Sam Hamill talks about violence in its distinct forms. He himself talks about a very traumatic event in his life, being gang raped and stabbed left to die. Charlie Howard dealt with what Sam Hamill describes, “Every fourth homosexual male in a U.S. high school is the victim of a major assault during his venture.”(Hamill Pg.553). During his articles he explains that the reason of such crimes are because we tend to hide or ignore the truth for our own sake or the “children’s” sake. We think that because we don’t talk about them violence doesn’t occur. Carolyn Forche talks about war, exiled, or prisoner poets and how they don’t see black and white like we mostly do. She says that poems are not all black and white “we distinguish between “personal” and “political” poems- the former calling to mind lyrics of love and emotional loss….” For Charlie Howard he is both. IT was emotional by the way he had died and his last moments of panic but also brought attention to hate-crimes state wide.
Here is a timeline of controverersial poets over history.
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