Autobiography Of Red: Poem Analysis

Over the course of the semester, we read several hybrid genre books and some with hybrid themes. For the topic of my personal narrative, I settled on a subject near to my heart, the prospect of summer. To establish my theme of a blissful summer surrounded by nature, I implemented several elements from parts I and II of Jean Toomer’s Cane, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red.
The title of my narrative establishes the setting; it takes place in the summertime. I chose the adjective “emerald” because green is my favorite color and my narrative contains a lot of bright, chipper green throughout. The basis of Bluets is an obsession with a color, so my common theme of green in my narrative parallels this to a degree. The poem beneath the title is formatted like something from Cane. However, the content and voice is more similar to that of Bluets, more specifically, the use of first person and the personal conclusions made.
The first body text is formatted based on a combination of Autobiography of Red and Cane. The dialogue is italicized instead of being traditionally placed in quotation marks. This technique is borrowed from Autobiography of Red. I like how the dialogue flows more naturally this way, and the distinction between who is speaking is a little ambiguous. For instance, in the

lines “What happened to the town? / Cooked. There was a survivor—prisoner in the local jail. / Wonder what happened to him,” Geryon is talking to Herakles, but it is up to the reader to keep track of who is saying what (Carson 46). The remainder of that first section is back to a style more similar to Cane’s because it is written in paragraphs, not lines of verse.
The overall format of my narrative is similar to that of Cane because it is made up of a combination of prose and poetry with one following the other. Additionally, the overarching theme of nature that is present in my narrative is similar to that present in Cane. In the poems Nullo and Storm Ending, nature is the backbone, but a dark theme is present with images of pine needles falling and “bleeding rain” (Toomer 27, 66). However, I take a more bright and optimistic tone, focusing on the good times of being in nature in the summer with the flourishing, verdant trees where Toomer focuses on the golden light which has a more aged, dusky, coming-to-an-end feeling.
Another stylistic choice that I tried to emulate is the use of metaphors and similes in Cane.

This is coupled with the content inspiration of male-female relationships also from the same work. For example, I use the similes “like a dog-ear on a page” and “like a flashlight through red-pink skin.” Additionally, I use metaphors in my last poem, describing the two people, “her fingers thin white keys” and “his voice modest honey.” I was inspired by some lines from Cane, such as “Rhobert wears a house, like a monstrous diver’s helmet, on his head,” where humans are described as inanimate objects, a flipping of the common literary device personification

(55).
My personal narrative is mostly inspired by Jean Toomer’s genre-bending work Cane. The hybrid genre lends itself to more artistic freedom and precision; sometimes straight prose cannot truly capture a feeling or scene. In my narrative, I try to capture the hopeful feeling of the start of an endless summer using a common thread of happy people and green nature imagery.