Sandra Beasley. Poet Project. Alice Smithson

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1 Sandra Beasley Poet Project Alice Smithson April 7, 2014

2 Biography: Sandra Beasley was born on May 5, She graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, earned a B.A. in English from the University of Virginia, and later received an MFA degree from American University. After she graduated she worked as an editor at The American Scholar before leaving the position to make writing her full-time career which has lead to amazing accomplishments. Sandra Beasley was recently the winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her poem Theories of Falling was also selected by Marie Howe as winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize. By this background she has not only great qualifications to be a writer, but has done an outstanding job at it so far. As far as her ability to write and connect with people through her writing, I believe her awards are the most basic of testaments to prove her writing capability. From 2005 to 2010 she has earned at least 11 awards and prizes for her writing. These awards range from basic University honors to a Barnard Women Poets Prize, in 2009, and an award from the Poetry Foundation in 2009 as well. Her most widely known poems would be Don t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, Flour is Firm, and Let Me Count the Waves. Beasley now lives in Washington, D.C. and continues her writing career.

3 Sandra Beasley is very well known in the poetry world. Her poems often deal with coincidences that happen in everyday occurrences. They can range from her own childhood struggles, to how soldiers look at little thing that we take advantage of, and to the perspective of inanimate objects. In her poems Let Me Count the Waves. Flour is Firm, and The Piano Speaks they all look at life from various perspectives. It is because of this, her not focusing on one single thing to write about, that allows her to write in free verse and write about her own thoughts on life. In Flour Is Firm, Sandra Beasley chooses to use connotation to depict the similarities between a soldier and his hardtack. She begins by giving a sort of recipe for the perfect hardtack by saying Baking two parts flour to one part water/ could stop a bullet. So good soldiers/ carried their hardtack over their hearts (Beasley). By doing this she has not only captured the reader s attention, but given them imagery to follow as well. It is this flow of free verse that allows Beasley to take the poem any way she pleases without having to follow any rules but her own. And that is precisely what she does, when she continues on to state Do stalks know their strength is merely/in their number? What is ground down/ we name flour in promise that it will be/ made useful (Beasley). With this simile, which she is very prone to using, she compares a militaries numbers and purpose to that of a field of wheat. Beasley is making a very large, political statement that maybe our military is not as good, or useful, as we all believe it to be. She then leaves the reader with one final blow when asking the questions Would you call it starving, if a man dies/ with hardtack still ticked in his pocket?/ Can you call it food, if the bullet comes only at the moment he gives in and swallows? (Beasley). These questions leave a sense of sadness with the reader knowing that either way the soldier will die. He can eat the hardtack and get shot in the spot it was protecting all this time, or continue to not eat his food and die of starvation. Either way Sandra Beasley does an amazing job at grasping the reader s attention through simile and connotation. She also uses these same techniques in her next poem The Piano Speaks. With this particular poem Beasley uses the perspective of the piano to write her poem. In her first couplet, she speaks of an hour that she forgot her fat self and her neurotic innards and addiction to

4 alignment(beasley). This is where her use of imagery is very essential to the rest of the poem. If the reader does not grasp her point of view as being the piano from the very beginning, they will not understand the rest of the poem. The poet then continues on to say, And what/ would hatch, I did not know-/ a lie. A waltz. An apostle of glass. (Beasley). These lines are to persuade the reader into believing that anything can come out of something else. The piano does not know what it will play, if it will be good or bad, thought highly of or looked down upon and criticized. It is this unknown that personifies the piano, and makes it take a new shape. No one can possibly know the outcomes that will occur from their lives, or how people will respond to their actions and thoughts. That is what Sandra Beasley wanted people to get out of the poem, that people should step out of their self-scrutiny and create something that can be questioned. The same concept goes into another of her poems, Let Me Count the Waves. In the very first stanza, Sandra Beasley talks about phrases that should not be taken literally. She includes You must not skirt the issue wearing skirts./ You must not duck the bullet using ducks./ You must not face the music with you face./ Headbutting, don t use your head. Or your butt. / You must not use a house to build a home,/ and never look for poetry in poems. (Beasley). This concept is her very foundation to creating her poetry. She never looks at something the way others do, and never takes what is said about an item or life in literal terms. Beasley then continues with this same concept through the rest of the poem, all the while, every once in a while, paying tribute to Donald Revell. This is the man who inspired this poem and concept, and by using these same connotations that he used Beasley is able to connect better with his writing and pay a tribute to him. This is especially apparent in the second to last stanza where she says Shoot if you must but/ Donald, we re with you. Trying to save poems (Beasley). By saying this in her own poetry, Beasley has given the ultimate honor to Donald. She is basically stating that he was the one that create poetry the right way and tries to follow in his footsteps. By analyzing all three of these poems, it becomes apparent that Sandra Beasley has a common form and theme with her poems. They all use connotation and imagery to grasp the reader s attention and to make them think outside of the normal bounds. She almost always focuses a small part to portray the whole, and uses connotation excessively to make these points as well as to introduce her themes.

5 Bibliography Beasley, Sandra. "Amazon Prime Free Trial." Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life: Sandra Beasley: : Amazon.com: Books. Broadway Paperbacks, n.d. Web. 07 Apr Beasley, Sandra. "Poetry Magazine." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 07 Apr Levingston, Suzanne Allard. "Don t Kill the Birthday Girl, by Sandra Beasley." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 22 July Web. 07 Apr "Sandra Beasley." Sandra Beasley. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Apr Links to Poems: