Poetry Resonse 3-22-11

In Martha Collins “The Story We Know” is a simple poem depicting life at its most basic, where the days are full of the phrases hello and good-bye. It shows the process of decisions, snippets of conversation in a day. She portrays this in that she seems to slip between remembered dialogue and her thoughts behind each interaction. She describes the day as “always the same,” but not in a monotonous way, it more reflects the settled rhythm and pattern of one’s day. In this poem she talks of meeting someone and the pleasantries that go along with it “your hand, your name.” She also makes plans with a friend “lunch tomorrow?” stressing that the beginning of anything begins “simple, sane” and follows the routine of a Sunday. But then she begins to change her attitude, the repetition is no longer looked on as endearing, but monotonous in how it begins to make life too predictable and calluses the individual. But life goes on, the same until something comes and changes the routine, in this instance, a snow day. It stops everything, work, plans, and the routine. It makes everything new and brings people together, but it is new within the story that always begins with hello and good-bye.

I found this a beautiful poem in how Collins shows a typical lifestyle of the Western World, where people depend on their routine to guide them through life, and depend in the dictated norms of society to run everything smoothly. Its only when we take a step back, when people are forced to stop that people begin to look and process the world around them. The underlying tragedy is that most everyone is painfully aware of the effects of the non-stop lifestyle that has become essential to the culture. Collins ends her poem with the apparent sigh of “we know, we know” in the repetitive form of a scolded child to the punishing parent.