Kelli Gray

As the Daughter Recites Psalm 91

Chelsea Dingman

“Billy” by Chelsea Dingman

I think it took me at least 10 times of reading this peom to really understand what was going on and what Dingman was trying to say. The poem says “for my father” at the beginning which typically gives you a sentimental feel like ‘oh this is dedicated to her dad, how cute’ but then you read it and it’s a very sad story. Basically the way that I understand this poem is that she’s writing to herself about her dead-beat father (and if not her, some else with a bas father) and I didn’t get that at first, I kinda thought that she was writing to him but that didn’t really work. This poem kinda tricks you by saying “for my father” then talking bad about him. She says that he wasn’t around much, like she was waiting for him a lot (“waiting for your father to come home from the fields”) and he was unreliable (“ not knowing when he made you quit school, you’d pay for the son before you”). She writes this peom like she’s telling a story, I think that’s she’s trying to tell herself ‘look how far you’ve come’ and ‘you’re better off without him because he wasn’t there’. This poem is thought provoking and very sad as she talks about a father who wasn’t around.

I went through and looked into a few different poets but none of them stood out to me the way the Dingman’s did. Her poetry stood out to me because of its raw emotion. She writes about topics, like loss and abuse, that many people would be too scared to write about, but she is so intone with her experiences. Her poetry digs into deeply emotional themes that I found very interesting. This is the very first poem that I looked at, from what I can tell, its Dingman telling the story of how her husband died. She doesn’t sugar coat her situation, she tells the reader the outright truth. You can really feel the pain, regret and grief through her words and her imagery. I really like this poet because she is blunt while at the same time being deep, and it really gives the reader an inside look at her life and her experiences. 

https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/brokering_servitude

(Secondary Source #5/#6) These two sources give some insight as to why women in China’s husbands ended up traveling to America and ended up starting a family of their own. In Chapter 4 of my book, the narrator’s aunt is discussing with her family about her husband who had left without her to go to the Americas around the 1950s which resulted in him starting a new family there with two new kids.

This is my 7th secondary post. I picked this article because for one it gives a modern day perspective of a certain idea in my book; since my book was published in the 1970s, having a current day source is helpful. I furthermore picked this because I wanted to research more on the living conditions in Chinatown. In my book, Kingston writes, “Then five or six people would crowd into the bed together. Some slept on the ironing tables, and the small children slept on the shelves.”

Here is my third secondary source which are first-hand accounts of Chinese immigrants to the United States throughout the years.  I decided to pick this because the narrator’s parents were immigrants to the United States in the 20th century.  I thought it might be a good idea to compare these stories to those that her mother has told her in the book.  

Several times in this section of the book, the narrator’s mother refers to Americans as ghosts.  Clearly this term is not one of endearment.  Just earlier in the story, the narrator’s mother refers to different people in America as  “Newsboy Ghost” or “Garbage Ghost.”  The author capitalizes these to give them importance (meaning referring to them as people), but not enough to actually give them the acknowledgement of being a person.

The reason why I find this paragraph incredibly important is that it, once again, compares and contrasts her mother’s life experiences in China versus the U.S.  Here, the author uses the ideas that in America, people have less time to lead a life of free-time while in China, people can catch a breath of fresh air.  I’m not sure if this was exactly how life went at these times, as the narrator clearly wasn’t either given her disengagement in the second to last paragraph.