Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Associate Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

Matthew Eck

Making Ugly

In writing “Ugly,” I wanted to convey themes that at times feel unconveyable: self-hatred, body dysmorphia, and pure terror. Although these themes cycle in and out of our everyday lives, it is difficult to present such themes in a way that avoids the cliché or nihilist depths. However, my imagery gravitates toward surrealism, which transforms the mundane into the extraordinary. As a result, I aspired to create a poem that leverages the tension between beauty and horror in order to invoke feelings of discomfort and wonder.

At the time I wrote “Ugly,” ugliness visited and haunted me in multitudes. I thought about an act as simple as looking in a mirror after committing a shameful act, criticizing every dimension of our physicality and psychology while mediating the gravity of guilt. I thought about others’ atrocities and how they visit me in our age of twisted political logic, how they transport my psyche to uninhabitable spaces. “Ugly,” therefore, seeks to encapsulate our feelings of helplessness as agents in a nonsensical world.

In the opening lines, I introduced “Ugly” through metaphor instead of simile to highlight a paradox. I could have narrowed the poem’s scope to something that ugliness is “like” — ugly like a serial killer, ugly like a toothless man. Instead, I asserted “Ugly” is this specific set of imagery — bathroom mirrors that break reflections into pottery — because this imagery follows no logic in our rather backward age of reasoning. Rather than clarifying the word “Ugly,” the metaphor makes the concept of ugliness more complex. The opening lines of the poem are therefore totalizing yet infinite in what the reader can take away from them. These takeaways may be contradictory and confusing, but that is their purpose. The words evade any imposition that seeks to assign logic to their meaning.

Ugliness is subjective after all. I thus made the decision to employ the second person because this poem is not just internal. The poem is a reflection of the ways ugliness manifests within us and between each other. The second person acknowledges our interconnectedness and the presence of a seemingly uncontrollable factor at play in our universe. I want the reader to see how the existence of “I” implies an “other” and the imposition of “you” implies an “us.”

The poem, then, instead of continuing its spiral from constellations to butterflies to mandalas, suddenly stops. “It reminds you of pity” interjects this chain reaction, reflecting the turbulent psychology that can control neither vivid ruminations nor the stark interruption of introspection. Like feelings of “self-hatred,” “pity” is also a nuanced abyss of meaning. I think of pity toward others, pity toward oneself, pity that one desires from others for themselves, and pity with roots we cannot necessarily explain. “It reminds you of pity” is a fulcrum point that shifts the poem from the fantastical to reality. The speaker’s psyche unravels to a hearsay narrative of a girl who trips, and along with her “trips” both the stanza to a new one and the atmosphere from this abstract sphere to the concreteness of a damp sidewalk.

But the poem still maintains this eerie vagueness — “a girl” is composed of an indefinite article, and a little girl tripping in mud is a subtle example of a tragedy. This eeriness abruptly escalates this realism to grotesquerie, as the girl grabs a “dead body with blue cotton candy in its mouth instead.” The surprise and horror of a dead body starkly contrast the placement of blue cotton candy, which we commonly associate with carnivalesque, jaunty, jovial, and childish moods. Suddenly, the poem links the beautiful-ugly of the first stanza with the ugliness of a child’s exposure to death. The image is reminiscent of the “Killer Clown” sprees that galvanized my worst nightmares into a panic. And perhaps the image, and the entire poem, is reminiscent of an uglier presence that only each reader can pinpoint for themselves.

WORKS CITED

Poole, Steven. “The great clown panic of 2016: ‘a volatile mix of fear and contagion.’” The Guardian, 31 October 2016, amp.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/31/the-great-clown-panic-of-2016-a-volatile-mix-of-fear-and-contagion. Accessed 3 March 2023.

Contributor Bio: Matthew Eck
Poem: Ugly

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