“She Being Brand” and “Coming Home Detroit, 1968”
The poems “She Being Brand” by e.e. cummings and “Coming Home Detroit, 1968” by Philip Levine, both express the authors feeling through metaphors for driving a car through a city. Though the poems use the same metaphors they do have very different feeling or tone.
“She Being Brand” by e.e. cummings takes place in the 1920s. The author expresses his love, excitement and anxiety throughout the poem explaining it is a “brand new” car or experience. He shows how the car reacts for the first time and how he was nervous “a little stiff I was careful of her…”. While reading you get a feeling that the poem may have a more intimate meaning than a man driving his new car, but rather a man and a woman experiencing each other for the first time “it was the first ride and believe I we was happy to see how nice and acted right up to the last minute…”. The poem is smooth, fun to read and figure out.
“Coming Home Detroit, 1968” by Philip Levine has a much deeper, darker feeling to it. The author brings you into the poem with the first line “the city pouring fire…”. It gives you a sense of unease and almost disgusting feeling about the way the author felt about Detroit at the time. I read a little bit about that time period of riots and the disgusting auto factories. Levine really expresses his feeling about these matters within the poem “The charred faces, the eyes boarded up…” and “One brown child stares and stares into your frozen eyes” as if no one cares what is happening around them. The authors ride through Detroit was a sickening and sad one.
For the photoshoot I would like to shoot two distinctively different photos with possibly the same car. For “She Being Brand” I would like to shoot an old style car with a romantic lighting maybe red in the background. I feel like the reflection and lighting will go well with the overall feel of the poem. For “Coming Home Detroit” I would like to have less lighting, dark background and focus on the car to cause a dramatic and dark feeling.
