All-American Girl

3 Pages 806 Words

All-American Girl

All-American Girl the title of Robin Becker’s book of poems suggests her view of what an American girl is. Becker shows through her poems that an American girl doesn’t have to be what society would call an American girl. She instead has a view of what an American girl is based on her life. She uses religion, culture, and human nature of society in most of her poems to demonstrate what an American girl is to her. Becker uses the titles of the poems as the setting, and sometimes the theme for her poems. Some of her titles are everyday events or activities. The style of doing this is very unique way to interpret an All-American girl. She controls the tone by the style she lays her poems in too. She either makes it smooth as satin or rough as sandpaper. Using different techniques causes the reader to flow through the poem, or stumble along having pauses to find your place. These ways are all very good put together for the reader to feel, and understand Becker’s views.
Becker’s first poem “Shopping” is one of the everyday events, she takes this everyday event and makes her feelings and views expressed. In this poem she uses the word “if” repeatedly, this type of style flows like the nursery rhyme mocking bird. This repetition is often followed by a negative word in the sentence. Some of these words included are, don’t, can’t, leave, undress, and never--she says twice. What does this style have to do with being an All-American Girl? It has a lot to do with her view, after each and every negative sentence she follows with a positive sentence, usually with humor. An example of this is
“If we can’t make peace
I’ll order the leather duster and swagger
across the plaza in the Santa Fe,
cross-dressing for the girls.”
This one sentence in the Shopping poem is what an All-American Girl is all about. A girl that has the freedom to suppress her feelings by going out and doing something like thi...