A Hidden Art - Genevieve Rodriguez

When people think about vulgar language, they do not think of artfulness or high society. The first thought that usually comes to mind is lower working class. One can compare a fishmonger to a prince and easily tell which one will use the vulgar language more often. The past few generations, however, have taken vulgar language and elevated it so that it can be used in art to provoke certain emotions. A.R. Ammons does a wonderful job of using a “four-letter word” and turning it into a work of art. The title of his piece is “Shit List; or Omnium-gatherum of Diversity into Unity.” The title alone gives us an idea of what the poem is going to be about: a list of shit. Usually, a shit list is a list of people that have wronged a person, but the next part of the title is saying that it is an assortment of diverse things unified. He begins his poem with a positive attitude: “you’ll rejoice at how many kinds of shit there are;” the speaker could have said “there is so much shit in the world” or something to that extent. He is elevating the “shit” and making it an art. He goes on listing the kinds of shit there are, but instead of just listing them, he uses parentheticals to explain some of the shits. He uses sarcasm in explaining some of the kinds of shit; for example, the mockingbird shit is “dive-bombed with the aim of song,” the eagle shit is “high-totem stuff,” and the baboon shit is leopard induced. These parentheticals keep the reader alert and waiting for the next witty comment, instead of focusing on how many times the word shit is repeated. Ammons keeps the energy going throughout the piece, which is very hard for a person who is just repeating a four letter word over and over again. I think that Ammons does a fine job and that people of high and low society can read this and understand that although we are all different, everybody shits. For me, the meaning of this poem is that we are all connected by our anatomy, and even though we are different, we function the same way.

Something that struck my eye was the tercet style. I read Dante’s Inferno and this kind of reminded me of it because of the way it was written in tercets. It has nothing to do with that but I just thought I would put that out there.