Usually people think of may as an optimistic month and related to the arrival of spring. Why does he take the opposite side and said that it is “cruel” ?

Usually people think of may as an optimistic month and related to the arrival of spring. Why does he take the opposite side and said that it is “cruel” ?

This is such a disturbing and deep poem.  Where did Bidart get his inspiration for such a topic?  I feel like poets often comment on issues in society through their poems, so I’m wondering if “Herbert White” is a metaphor for something, or if the literal meaning is as Bidart intended it to be.

As a reader, do you think it’s hard to appreciate Frank Bidart’s ability to tell stories due to its content? Bidart claims he started writing poetry “trying to be ‘universal’ by making the entire poem out of assertions and generalization about the world—with a very thin sense of a complicated, surprising, opaque world outside myself that resisted the patterns [he] was asserting.” Do you think Bidart was successful i making his poems less general and narrow-minded after writing pieces such as this and Ellen West?

• Why did Frank Bidart choose to address this specific topic of anorexia in his poem? Did he feel like it was a topic that was commonly overlooked at the time and thus needed some attention brought to it?
• I know that Edmund White regarded the poem as “a work that displays Bidart’s talents at their most exacting, their most insistent” but was Bidart’s reason for writing the poem more personal than to display his talents? Did someone in his family possible suffer from anorexia and is that why he chose to write such a dramatic monologue.

When I read the poem, I felt repulsed by Herbert White. Yes, it was very well written and I’m sure that’s why I felt so much emotion. However, why does the article on Frank Bidart say “Bidart’s achievement, even a tour de force, is to have made [Herbert White] human”? That’s not what I got out of the poem…

“The truth is that most poetry, even most of what is greatly prized and read today, even what has been wrested from nothingness by these heroes of mine, is destined to be forgotten. But that’s not our concern. The future will decide what it can make use of.”

After reading this, I realized that Galassi was probably a dark or pessimistic writer since he understood that writing fades away.  After reading Flow, I saw that he was also very knowledgeable in his Ancient Greek stories (“Apollo” line 7, “Phoebe” line 11, the “with my arrows, my bow…” line 6).  His diction is dark and gloomy while having a violent bone-cracking chill to it, like when he references suicide (2) and “coiling” “battered” and “scarred” (20, 22).  I’m curious as to why he threw so many Greek references and dark words around in this poem.

Did Ellen commit suicide because she did not want to live in her body anymore or because she is mad at herself for refusing to “sit on the ground” and be well again?

“Audience tolerance for the unfit at costly professional dances is unlikely.” This seems to be referring to the body type and body tone of the dancer. However, if the author continually says that dance is a combination of body as well as mind and spirit, why does it matter if they are unfit? Isn’t it enough that they perform the piece with the feeling that it was meant to be performed with?