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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!

ok im just going to wing this...

i think what the poet is trying to say is that his stepdaughter and him are very different..he would prefer to be kinof lost in the crowd and like just a part of something bigger(if that makes sense) and his daughter is more of an individual she likes to keep quiet and have things simple. when it says with the music blasting she disapears it kindof gives me the sense that she likes to be noticed and not just part of the big picure....i hoped this helped alittle ...but this probably sucks

-katie

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