The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body - Jessica Martinez

Alberto Rios creates insightful meanings through his poetry collections in his book, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. He combines childhood memories along with culture and family legends to provide the reader with a sense of awe and wonder once they've completed any selected poem. Alberto is very passionate when it comes to family matters and this is clearly viewed throughout his collection. He describes the situation, or better yet, his memory using vivid language and imagery and lets the reader come to their own conclusions. Rios leaves the ending open so that one may figure it out for ourselves. He never comes out and says, "This is what happened," he shows you. Good poetry always contains a hidden message, a moral that is intertwined within the words waiting to be discovered with thought and effort. All of Alberto's poems succeed in doing this. There were times while I was reading certain poems in this collection that I just couldn't decipher the meaning, then suddenly I would understand. Some poems were so intense I never comprehended them. Others, were so simple yet so complicated that I got hundreds of different possible meanings, each one viable in their own way. The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, raises questions but also creates answers that based on opinion, can or cannot be helpful when it comes to life situations. Alberto Rios is a great author and his work of writing is even greater.

REFUGIO'S HAIR
By: Alberto Rios
In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera- The Land of the Lime-
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrin
And he placed the baby in his arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full towards the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the alamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.

Ariel Taylor Johnson

Slyvia Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963 and left the world one last manuscript of forty poems later to be produced into her book ‘Ariel’ put together by her husband Ted Hughes. The theme for Ariel possessed many different options for discussion and while all have been accurately presented in her work; the theme of freedom seemed to really be heavily backed up by her interesting vocabulary, voice, and other various literary devices to show us what she may have wanted us to discover.
The name itself is the name of a horse she used to ride often. On the title poem she wrote, “Another horse back riding poem, this one called ‘Ariel’ after a horse I am especially fond of.” Noted by her daughter Frieda Hughes. Horse back riding and her horse Ariel symbolize the sort of freedom she grasped momentarily before her suicide, and before she believed that nothing could complete her again. So this poem all about her journeys horse back riding gave a detailed picture about the sort of freedom she gained and to just get away from the world. This was Slyvia Plath’s freedom. This gave her true joy and something that would never betray her, this is freedom.
This poem was written in between her depressive state and the edge she was pushed to (suicide), which was her way to freedom. Slyvia Plath really put her emotions to work and it showed more and more as her poem Ariel developed a new tone. It consisted of a tone of urgency, freedom, and force. She seemed to newly expose herself about her life, depression, and hobbies. She dug up everything she must shed in order to move on. And this poem as well as the rest of the collection showed the world her anger at the divorce with her husband, the fights she fought within herself to be happy again.

Kayla Bates-The "Ariel" Poems by Sylvia Plath

“Ariel”, the title of a detailed collection of poems written by Sylvia Plath, tells of a few experiences and even uses illusion through imagery and definitions. The meaning of the title has three meanings, which are all referred to by Plath. The most obvious meaning would come from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, meaning being “airy spirit”. “Ariel was also, in fact, the author’s horse, of which she would ride occasionally. The Hebrew meaning of “ariel” is “lion of God”. In the poem “Ariel”, she mentions “God’s lioness”. The poems are fixed to rhyme at only certain stanzas. This sets different settings and feelings based on how often the lines rhyme and where they rhyme. She also uses imagery in terms of Biblical settings. She also refers to herself as the “cauldron of morning”. The line says, “Eye, the cauldron of morning,” but could really mean “I, the cauldron of mourning.” This could mean the author feels as though she is the mix or creator of mourning. A. Alvarez said, “The difficulty with this poem lies in separating one element from another. Yet that is also its theme."
The many poems in “Ariel” associate with feeling of hurt and depression, in my opinion. “Lady Lazarus” seems to talk about attempts to suicide. The title “Lady” refers to herself and “Lazarus” is an illusion to the Biblical figure, where Lazarus is resurrected by God. This poem is about her third attempt at suicide, where the doctors save her from death and for this, she sees them as her enemies. In real, after writing the “Ariel” collection, Plath succeeded at suicide after a few attempts at thirty. “Lesbos” describes a mistress as being evil. She talks about two women being completely different and she also mentions a husband. She talks about two women who are not lovers, but rivals (Therresa Kennedy). I believe she is talking about herself in this poem, “her shadow rival” as Paul Brodie said it. Aside from poems about herself, Plath did write some poems in “Ariel” about people she knew. In “The Rival”, I believe she is talking about her mother. She wrote, “Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity…no day is safe from news of you…” Sylvia’s mother did write a book about her letters home, and her high expectations of her daughter probably worsened her suicidal tendencies, as Annie Chen tells us. “Daddy” could be talking about Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband. She was married to him for seven years, and one year he wasn’t very faithful to her, as she found out he was cheating on her. Some even say that this could be a confessional poetry, just like “Lesbos”. Some even say this was actually about her dad, dying when she was only eight.
The “Ariel” poems were all written during the hard times of Sylvia Plath, around her suicidal attempts. Her poems are basically about her life situations and experiences. Sylvia’s death took place shortly after these poems were written. She used many techniques such as allusion, imagery, irony, and so forth in her many complicated and mysterious poems. I find these poems very interesting because of the rhyming differences in each poem and stanza of each poem. She bases her poems off of times and events and even places, but mostly off of emotions.

Changes to the Reading Schedule

For those of you who have completed the June post, I will be responding by the end of next week. Thank you! I look forward to reading your thoughts...

I am canceling the last assignment for the summer, as I have made some changes to the school year syllabus. Please disregard and do NOT complete the following assignment:
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
~Post a thorough blog entry and respond to 2 other students by August 11th ; be sure to specify which collection of poems you are responding to in your post.

Happy Summer!