There was a new reading conducted at the Bull bar on March 15th, 2018. Hannah Whiteman was given the opportunity to read and present her work to others visiting the bar. Her work was packed full of colorful imagery, surrealism, colors, and alliteration, at least according to other reviewers of her work. Whiteman was introduced by a friend in the same academic program as her. After listening to three of her works, I would have to agree to the idea that her work is strong with colorful imagery and musical structure. Her writing may be strong, but her performance leaves a lot to be desired. Whiteman’s first poem of the night discussed the recent hurricane that had devastated Florida, Texas, and Puerto Rico, hurricane Irma. She based her experiences …show more content…
After utilizing the clever name origins as a categorization of the hurricanes, she then compares those hurricanes to more mundane occurrences in her life. One lovely comparison was that her house already shutters from the booming of garbage trucks. Here she shows a comparison between a hurricane’s thunder and a loud machine that visits every week to collect trash. This allows for the poet to verbally show that they do not give the storm any extra fear, it’s just like the visiting garbage truck. This is another affective use of show versus tell. Of course, the poem then ends on a more light-hearted and comedic tone as she verbally tells the moral of this poem. “Wear shoes”. This not only adds to the levity of the poem, but also helps support her assertion from earlier, that she does not fear the storm. The most excruciating part of their experience in the hurricane shelter was not weathering the dangerous storm but weathering the men with the disgusting feet. The storm is just another storm she has weathered through in the past, as documented by them listing names of other storms like Katrina, Matthew and Harvey. The speaker will be …show more content…
The poem does not have a title yet, which means that this poem is a work in progress. This poem is a perfect example of an ekphratic poem and is a great example of Whiteman’s skill of creating strong imagery. In this poem, she decides to take a more direct approach to setting imagery by plainly using direct and highly specific language that describes the jewelry and woman behind the portrait within the jewelry. Whiteman describes the woman wearing an “S-bend corset”, floor-length skirt, and broach around her neck. The poem then delves into the existential background of the work of art, which is the lost model of the painting. Whiteman mentions before her poem began that Gibson girls, which is the girl later described in the poem, were later lost to history, and no one knows the identity of the inspiration behind the many works of art they create. Here, the poet plainly repeats this fact in her poem, comparing the missing items of clothing and obviously dead model to the fact that the model within the painting is, on a personal level, unknown. The beautifully blends these ideas within the imagery of the painting, how many details are lost within the painting’s whole and how the plaque describing the painting also loses vital information about the model. The poet then continues her poem by describing what others see within the poem. The