Atwood Is Okay

Atwood is "Okay"

What is Atwood? Blunt dissatisfaction ... Slyly woven into a hysterical articulacy, flowing, clever, biting, and unforgiving. Atwood's resounding words become the voice of dissatisfaction of any simultaneously subjective and objective mind - a paradox in itself -- united because they aren't content with the small quarters society has so graciously allowed them. In any collection of her works, we're consistently pelted with pebbles and boulders lighting a path in the politically and emotionally fragmented world that leaves so many of us looking for so much more, so many of us asking "Why is this okay?" Atwood's rhetoric challenges the standards - and the double standards - that are so inherently imposed on her ... and us. She struggles. She bites. She spits. She speaks. She takes her graceful leave.

For she draws one consistent answer from the chaos she strangely recreates in her stanzas that contradict the stagnancy around her: seen on the surface, in the mundane, wrapped around petty excuses, thriving in the present tense and saturating the epidemic of static relationships she is overcome with, Atwood knows that she must stay in motion (Just keep swimming, just keep swimming...). Given all these disenchanting aspects, Atwood is a miracle for the dignity she maintains. And where, dear friends, does this dignity take its roots? The quiet spaces between her brackets that give her anxiety the fuel it needs to drive us mad... Maybe only an indignant madness, punctuated with enough alliteration and dissonance to keep us calm. Through this chaos, a common theme for this Siren, how can order of her successes be found? Perhaps some routine deconstruction becomes necessary.

First? - the indefinite question she poses: A challenge to the mind from the body: "Can you accommodate both man and woman? Past and present? Here and there? - Simultaneously!" Atwood deals a risky black-market of paradoxes and juxtapositions derived from the contradictions she's found in "Newspapers" and "On the streets". Fundamentally these contrasts can be broken down into a feminine versus masculine "Atwoodian" comparison. Many of her poems focus on unsuccessful relationships with which Atwood has become bored, frustrated and possibly unresponsive. In turn, due to Atwood's socio-political awareness, the conflicts in the relationship can be extrapolated into greater themes in terms of the flaws she sees in the world at large. "On The Streets, Love" is a stunning show of how Atwood finds that in this day, love and media are inherently correlated, much to her fear and possible disgust. In wonderful irony, she lays down verses of a billboard woman predator hunting the magazine buying men that have been designed to worship her plastic lips(tick). Can these make-believe "pictures" of perfection that we have created honestly be hunting us, harming us and above all, creating doubt in eachother, ourselves, our sincerity? The "poster" people and the "fine print" have infiltrated her fear, her relationship and her mind to the point where she doesn't know which she doubts more: her "Love" or herself. And she asks (again): Why is this okay?

A paradox of this magnitude cannot just end with the streets, though. Atwood delves into her past, and the future, perplexed with the commonly accepted madness of society, and its tendency to desperately try to stay still. In "She Considers Evading Him" Atwood plays on this joke of time, mocking "his" old fashioned indecision. "I could ... switch back in time" she offers, building up her game. She visits different female stereotypes, adeptly expressing her contempt for them all, whether it is as the "queen of the termites" or fast forwarded to "purple veined ... old ladies". Maybe a fight brought this contempt out of her, articulate in her frustration and hysteria, but certainly the cards are dealt before the poem begins as Atwood "pull[s] the nostalgic sheet up over/ [her] waxed farewell smile" justifiably ending the relationship on her own terms. This man -one of society's many drab milestones - certainly thought by Atwood at one point to be fairly profound has now been discovered to be just as unsatisfactorily static as the rest. A typical story, but distinct because of the dry humour Atwood uses to bring this contradictory existence to light. "[She] can change [her]/self more easily/ than [she] can change him", and she proceeds to do so in a whirlwind of witty paradoxes, switching hysterically through time periods and attitudes. This patronizing false attempt to please him thrusts Atwood into a place of high respect for her courage, her intellect and her charm as she discusses her dissatisfaction and dismembers not only this one man, but every dull man, and the places where their influence leaks into society.

This motif of deconstructing the frustrations of societies bored old men carried beyond her paradoxes and well into Atwood's remarkable mechanics and sound devices. Pregnant pauses, dictated by caesuras and enjambments, give reason to an indignant thought; the aesthetic of the negative space between phrases or ideas (which differ) offers a saving grace for this furious anxiety. In moments where Atwood's calm fury mounts to an almost-explosive point, suddenly a line will end

And start up again a quick breath away - allowing us just enough time to find the tact in our irritation before we become the (almost) hopeless cause. And rather than losing her attention in a dense chunk of rage, Atwood has developed a strategy for breaking up her lines, so that the ultimately significant ones can ring out like church bells "for [an] organized instant" in the midst of her perpetual motion. She uses her own vices to her advantage, the still pictures and moments which she carries such disdain for work their way into her poetry, leaving ambiguous images and phrases hanging in our minds. "Camera" in particular is a stunning example of her usual contradictions carried into the structure of her verses. With her usual sincere and critical tone, Atwood described her frustration of be posed "in front of a church, for perspective" while "Camera man" tries to make the world stay still and take a picture of her. Rather than succumbing to this picture of his, Atwood transforms the poem into a sequence of her own pictures, still in essence but "Traveling towards the horizon / at almost the speed of light" in their nature. She proves that despite his attempts to hold time still, that she, women, and nature will reclaim