Corpse Pose
The poem “Corpse Pose” features the stream of consciousness of the narrator as he is lying in bed, reading, and trying to ignore the flies around him, thinking back to when he moved into this apartment.
At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is lying in bed one morning, wondering whether the flies around him mistake him for a corpse. His hand, turning over a page, catches the narrator’s attention and, thinking back to all the skin his hand has touched in the past, to the revelation that he is all alone in his apartment.
The narrator’s thoughts move to earlier in the morning, when he woke up, fully clothed and with candy next to him, without any memories of the previous night.
His thoughts finally go back to the day he moved into this apartment, seemingly after a breakup, with little more than his extensive book collection.
Eventually, the thought that there is no food in his two rooms leads the narrator back to the flies, and he wonders how they survive on nothing and if they are simply waiting for his death to be able to feed off of him.
A Natural History of My Name
In the poem “A Natural History of My Name” the narrator is delighted after learning that the fact that his name features an equal amount of vowels and consonants is very rare and goes through the rest of his day feeling superior to everything and everyone else.
The first stanza begins with the narrator gleefully informing the reader that he has just learned the fact that names featuring more vowels than consonants are very special and that this makes his own name (Jason Koo) special as well. After leaving the building he was in and walking outside, the narrator analysis the vowel-to-consonant-ratio of other things he encounters on his way and delights in the fact that none can match his ratio.
In the second stanza the narrator encounters ice on a river and, after admitting that the word ice has an even more impressive vowel-to-consonant-ratio, rationalizes that his name is still better because o would be a better vowel than i and e.
In the third stanza the narrator thinks back to his school time when he was bullied for his Asian heritage and concludes that the bullying must have been motivated by jealousy for his name. He then links the vowel-consonant-ratio of his name to the oppressed history of the country his ancestors came from.
In the short fourth stanza the narrator finally amuses himself that the joke is now on the former oppressors, whose traditional names do not compare well to his.
Driving Home, I see a Rothko Painting in the Distance and Pull Over to Give It a Lift
In the abstract poem “Driving Home, I see a Rothko Painting in the Distance and Pull Over to Give It a Lift”, the narrator picks up a painting he finds at the side of the road and ends up having a philosophical conversation with it in his car.
In the first four stanzas, the narrator is talking to the poem, seemingly more to distract himself than to actually talk, interpreting answers and movements into the painting’s colors and lines.
In the fifth stanza however, the painting begins to actually talk, startling the narrator, and asks the narrator questions about things they encounter on the road. After the narrator answers the painting’s apparently rhetorical questions, it launches into a philosophical lecture about windows in stanza six which makes the narrator uncomfortable.
In stanzas seven to ten, the narrator attempts to find out why the painting ended up where he found it and why it wanted him to pick it up, to which the painting only gives unclear and mystical answers.
In stanzas eleven to fifteen, they discuss where they want to go next. The painting wishes to go to the horizon (though it implies that the road is more important than the destination) which the narrator, originally wanting to go home, rejects, only offering to drive as far as Houston.
In stanzas sixteen to eighteen the narrator reacts to a particularly philosophical statement the painting made, and imagines how all things around them applaud the statement. When he tries to applaud as well however, he finds that he cannot move his hands away from the steering wheel.
In stanzas nineteen and twenty however, the painting rejects the praise and the narrator’s thoughts go back to his original plans for the day, while he begins to regret picking up the painting.
