I’ve been told “think of the starving children” so many times over the course of my life that it doesn’t illicit a reaction for me anymore other than maybe the rolling of my eyes. If the poet wants me to actually absorb this shift in perspective I require something else, more effective and specific imagery, more concrete examples… something. Simply saying it doesn’t do anything for me, and if anything it took me out of a poem I otherwise enjoyed.
But I appreciate that may be a me-problem. I may be too cynical and jaded.
That’s what I’m getting at: I don’t think it’s just a you problem. The cliched-ness of the examples (hungry child, climate change, powerful men making life-or-death decisions), the very fact that they are common enough to be cliches, makes me think of the callouses that build up out of necessity that allow us to function in a world filled with things that, should we ever experience them first-hand, would shatter us. Or would they? I’ve never seen a child starve to death. I don’t know how I would react. But the fact that such awful things happen while I blithely comparison shop soaps is… it feels like it should be jarring but it isn’t, and that absence is a kind of discomfort I don’t have a good word for. Ennui maybe?
I’ve been told “think of the starving children” so many times over the course of my life that it doesn’t illicit a reaction for me anymore other than maybe the rolling of my eyes. If the poet wants me to actually absorb this shift in perspective I require something else, more effective and specific imagery, more concrete examples… something. Simply saying it doesn’t do anything for me, and if anything it took me out of a poem I otherwise enjoyed.
But I appreciate that may be a me-problem. I may be too cynical and jaded.
That’s what I’m getting at: I don’t think it’s just a you problem. The cliched-ness of the examples (hungry child, climate change, powerful men making life-or-death decisions), the very fact that they are common enough to be cliches, makes me think of the callouses that build up out of necessity that allow us to function in a world filled with things that, should we ever experience them first-hand, would shatter us. Or would they? I’ve never seen a child starve to death. I don’t know how I would react. But the fact that such awful things happen while I blithely comparison shop soaps is… it feels like it should be jarring but it isn’t, and that absence is a kind of discomfort I don’t have a good word for. Ennui maybe?