Opening Quatrain of Power Politics by Margaret Atwood
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
Found Tanka:
You fit into me
like a hook
into an eye ...
a fish hook
an open eye
The untitled quatrain above is the opening poem of Margaret Atwood's Power Politics, a "groundbreaking book and cultural document,.. characterized by a typical Atwoodian blending of genre and gender revisions" (Reingard M. Nischik, Engendering Genre: The Works of Margaret Atwood, p. 18). It is one of her most famous poems and successfully sets the tone for the whole collection, in which Atwood incisively criticizes love as an "earthly religion" and dismantles all the ideals and conventions of love poetry (Nischik, p. 7).
Structurally speaking, Atwood's "found tanka" is made up of five poetic phrases (five ku in Japanese), and the two parts of the poem consist of similes, separated by "..." that gives the reader a longer pause to reflect on the significance of the superimposed image of psychological and physical brutality through the double meaning of "eye/I." And the use of enjambment in L2 helps foreground the image of a hook that creates different thematic and psychological effects in the two parts of the poem.
Thematically speaking, the opening simile suggests a complementary combination in which two people join together to form a loving relationship (between the active "you" and the passive "me"), and symbolically speaking, this emotionally positive simile embodies a sexual dimension -- a "scenario of possible penetration" (Nischik, p. 25). However, the superimposition of the second part of the poem makes a dramatic shift in theme and tone. It erases all the positive connotations of the first part by specifying the meaning of "hook" and "eye" as fish hook and human eye and relating to each other in a brutally different way (Nischik, p. 25). The image of a fish hook in an open eye reveals a destructive and painful nature of the union. Through the skillful juxtaposition of these two different views of gender relations, Atwood's visually stunning and thematically unsettling "found tanka" stirs the reader's emotions and reflection on what a loving relationship/love is.
