Sign Inventory, Week 3

"Campaign Speech" by Erika Meitner

There are those who say we are up all night
with the highway on. There are those who say
we are as peripatetic as every red planet in orbit.
But summer is always barefoot and adhesive,
then wanders off in the most unattractive
flip flops. Slip-slap. With something jammed
between our toes like that, it's hard to feel inviolate.

There are those who say the Good News Gospel must be
spread in schools. There are those who say this country
is in the autumn of its time. But each and every one of us
already learned in early grades to wind our breath through
mangled versions of pilgrims' feet and Mary tunes
on the recorder, no matter how many times we had to stop
and suck our inhalers, yellow as caution tape.

There are those who say accidents like the Pinto
are unavoidable. There are those who say we have lost
our pride, and quality is no longer a way of life.
But after midnight the radio plays a steady ocean
of mariachi music and sad almost-cowboy songs.
After midnight our ministering angels do what they want,
whisper Ticonderoga pencil, certain poppies, or summer squash

to each head on the pillow of morning, each mouth
slack with sleep. Nothing can travel faster than light.
What are we going to do about it?


Sign Inventory:

• Throughout the poem,in the first three stanzas, the writer seems to use anaphoric litany and epistrophe in order to inflect a very specific tonal registar, and also to acknowledge the work is governed toward a particular audience and/or varying issues
• The orator appears to be using language in more than a "persuasive" way (that is typical of campaign speeches), but in a way that also reads sarcastically and mockingly.
• The piece also has a tonal register that appears to undermine the voice(s) of "there are those who"
• The overall rhetoric of the poem effectively helps to steer the lines in each stanza, allowing the language to move at it's own pace, and seemingly "guiding" the reader into the politics of the speech/agenda being pushed
• Interestingly, the closing stanza of the piece is rather ambiguous and open-ended- leaving the reader to question, wonder, and grapple with what exactly is to be done about "it", because the unknown 'it' isn't fully explained or made discernable