Rebellious Poems

Poems can be rebellious through the style the author chooses to write the poem, down to the punctuation he or she chooses to leave. The two poems that I thought were rebellious was Williams Carlos Williams' "This Is Just to Say,"and Lucille Clifton's "Homage to my Hips".

Williams Carlos Williams writes a poem where the speaker rebels against what his mother or wife tells him not to eat. The speaker does not feel guilty that he eats plums his wife or mother is saving for breakfast especially since he explains how much he enjoys the plums because they were sweet, delicious and cold. The way Carlos Williams writes "This is Just to say" is also rebellious because it is more straight forward than a lot of poems. There is no underlying message, the reader does not have to read in between the lines to understand the point of the poem.

In "Homage To My Hips," the speaker makes no apologies for the large size of her hips, instead she talks about how she can "put a spell on a man and spin him like a top" with them. The speaker of the poem is basically telling women that they can love and show off their body no matter what shape or size, in a society where the media has a beauty standard for what is acceptable and not acceptable to flaunt.