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Location: Texas
Age: 34
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I have to write about this poem for english class, but i'm having trouble understanding what it is about. I think its about how you shouldn't hide yourself from others, but i'm not sure.
Loud Music
Stephen Dobyns
My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.
You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.
But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.
With music blasting, she feels she disappears,
is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.
But at four what she wants is self-location
and uses her voice as a porpoise uses
its sonar: to find herself in all this space.
If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study. But me, if I raised
the same box to my eye, I would wish to find
the ocean on one of those days when wind
and thick cloud make the water gray and restless
as if some creature brooded underneath,
a rocky coast with a road along the shore
where someone like me was walking and has gone.
Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language-
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors
thanks to anybody who can clear things up for me!
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I hear something a little different. I think that the poet is saying that his step-daughter is young and she likes things to be clear-cut and 'decorous' and to make sense. She likes to look at the world and see herself reflected back. She puts herself out into the world (with her voice) in order to know where she stands in it, location-wise, and probably metaphorically as well. When she views herself, she is wearing red pants, jacket, and yellow plastic lunch box. Proper and serious are the words used.
The poet is older; he prefers music that surrounds him and jam-packs the room. He likes to feel it smacking his gut. When he peers into the box, he sees not just the ocean, but the ocean with gray, restless water and thick cloud and rocky shore. He talks of turbulence and sharp colors. I think what he's saying is that since he has lived life a while, he likes how music evokes the challenges of life, or the rocky shores, which forces him to lose his self-interest and the ways in which he focuses on himself in order to see the clarity of a life with turbulent waters and rocky shorelines. I think he's saying that as we get older and more experienced with life's turbulence we are more able to focus on the rest of the world and the stark beauty to be found even in its hardships, and less on ourselves or our projections of how things are supposed to be.
Good luck,
Sabine
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