Cozy Apologia by Rita Dove

Question 1

Story + Message of ‘Cozy Apologia’

Answer 1

• Love poem where narrator is at home reflecting on her current and previous experiences with love and is expressing her love to her current partner whilst waiting for Hurricane Floyd
• Defending ordinary + everyday nature of their relationship through comparison to traditional representation of love and narrators previous crushes

Question 2

Tone of CA:

Answer 2

• 1st stanza – dreamy tone, idealistic rep of love -> heroic couplets
• 2d stanza mocking tone of previous experiences of love
• 3rd stanza – defensive, realistic tone, long-term fulfilment

Question 3

Themes

Answer 3

love and relationships
place
strong emotions

Question 4

1. I could pick anything and think of you—

Answer 4

• The poet begins in informal, everyday language that the reader identifies with and will feel sufficiently drawn in to carry on reading.
• Dove asserts her poetic prowess, her ability to draw an analogy between random objects (lamp, rain, ink) and her husband.
• The dash is used to interupt the flow of thought in the poem; a caesura or pause which gives her thinking time to invent bizarre comparisons

Question 5

2. “This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue / My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page.”

Answer 5

• The close descriptive detail gives the poem its intimacy and, ironically, its strength
• It’s the ordinary things that make the reader identify with the poet
• We have the hint of the weather in ‘wind-still rain’ that will later develop into a hurricane

Question 6

3. ‘shooting arrows from the heart’
   ‘astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart’
   ‘chain mail glinting, to set me free’

Answer 6

-Love appears dreamlike and all-consuming in Cozy Apologia, with the cupid inspired metaphor “shooting arrows to the heart” implying her heart has been captured by her husband.

-Cupid is symbolic of love & fidelity, therefore employing this metaphor could reinforce the strength of feeling she has for her partner in the poem.

-Alternatively, the presentation of her husband as a knight in shining armour “chain mail glinting” could be ironic and therefore, using these clichéd presentations of love may be a deliberate teasing by the poet.

Use of romantic cliches and 1-14 are often in heroic couplets - old, traditional style of writing poetry could reflect on the old fashioned cliches surrounding love and its ideals for many years

Informal, colloquial language reflects on the every day love portrayed in this poem

Question 7

4. “Today a hurricane is nudging up the coast, / Oddly male: Big Bad Floyd, who brings a host / Of daydreams:”

Answer 7

• The speaker of “Cozy Apologia” uses personification in two places in the poem, both times to describe Hurricane Floyd
• The speaker describes the hurricane as a man, calling it “oddly male” and “big bad Floyd.”
• These moments of personification are important to the poem
• They allow the speaker to think of Floyd, with its violence and energy, as a man - in so doing, they allow her to reminisce on her past crushes-the storm brings with it “a host/of daydreams.”

Question 8

5. “awkward reminiscences
   Of teenage crushes on worthless boys”

Answer 8

The name of the hurricane (‘Big Bad Floyd’) triggers memories of her contrasting first experiences of ‘love’ – her immature, transient crushes on ‘worthless’ boys with less macho names.

Question 9

6. Were thin as licorice and as chewy, / Sweet with a dark and hollow center.”

Answer 9

• But, like a hurricane, those boys were hollow at their centres: their love might be as powerful as a storm, but it’s ultimately empty and unsatisfying
• Personifying the storm allows the speaker to reflect on the seductive appeal of such love-and it also moves her toward an appreciation for the much richer, if less dramatic, relationship
  Dove describes the memories of her first experiences of love ‘awkward reminiscences of teenage crushes on worthless boys’

-portrays the immaturity of these past ideas of love as well as their emptiness - she has now fallen in love seriously and is happy - compared to her love, these boys had no substance - pathetic and humorous

• In terms of humour this is the dramatic climax, starting with ‘kiss you senseless’, bringing to mind clandestine kisses at school that leave the girl with sore lips.
• ‘sissy names’ – also humorous ‘

Question 10

7. “Floyd’s / cussing up a storm”

Answer 10

• The poet darts back to the personified hurricane, using the colloquial ‘cussing up’ to make the storm seem less dangerous
• The enjambment helps the poem to flow, suggesting again her wandering mind

Question 11

8. “You’re bunkered in your
   Aerie, I’m perched in mine
   (Twin desks, computers, hardwood floors):”

Answer 11

-portrays the every day, unromanticed nature of their love

-couple depicted to have matching offices - a subtle reference to the harmony of their relationship

• It is a love poem filled with day to day details such as “compact disks” and “faxes” which shows it is about the realities of relationships, not “the divine”.

Dove poem is an ‘apologia’ - her defence at being happy in her normal, bland domestic situation in opposed to a romanticised idea of it.

Dove’s poem reflects on the key poetic trends of the 1990s where many poets wrote autobiographical poems which experimented with many poetic devices - lyric narrative

-therefore as the poem is addressed to her husband ‘for fred’, the poem is deeply personal from the offset and dedicated to her husband

Question 12

9. “We’re content, but fall short of the Divine. / Still, its embarrassing, this happiness -”

Answer 12

-reason for this apologia - she is safe and happy and this poem is her defence for that

(Traditionally, poets are meant to be unhappy, ill and die young, or die violently — like Keats and, more recently in the twentieth century, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. For a poet to be happy is an embarrassing departure from the accepted image)

Question 13

“And yet, because nothing else will do
To keep me from melancholy (call it blues),
I fill this stolen time with you.”

Answer 13

• She knows that only her partner can keep her from being, to use the poetic term, ‘melancholy’
• She adds ‘call it blues’ to be more up-to-date
• Filling her mind with thoughts of him is the answer for her
  -filling her mind with thoughts of him is the only answer for her
  -shows the extent and seriousness of her happy marriage

-poem written while Hurricane Floyd was happening - and its violence and energy allows her to reminisce on her past crushes - the storm brings with it ‘a host/ of daydreams’ - while these boys were passionate like the hurricane, they were also hollow at the centre - theur love may be as powerful as a storm yet completely unsatisfying. Allows her to appreciate her richer and less dramatic relationship

• informal tone at the end

Question 14

Stanza 2 – caesura and enjambment

Answer 14

• choppy and broken up – ordinary relationships are not heroic couplets – they are starts and stops and end and beginnings
• volta – change in tone from heroic love to mocking tone of past romantic experiences

Question 15

Personification of Hurricane Floyd:

Answer 15

o They allow the speaker to think of Floyd, with its violence and energy, as a man
o In so doing, they allow her to reminisce on her past crushes-the storm brings with it “a host/of daydreams.”
o These past crushes were on “worthless” teenage boys with all the passion and swagger of a hurricane.
o But, like a hurricane, those boys were hollow at their centres: their love might be as powerful as a storm, but it’s ultimately empty and unsatisfying

Question 16

Rita Dove’s use of poetic forms:

Answer 16

• However, Rita Dove is also a virtuosic user of poetic forms, a poet with a hunger to experiment and play with many different kinds of poetic techniques
  o And, with its frequent iambic pentameter lines and its rhyming couplets (approximating heroic couplets

Question 17

Rita Dove as a poet:

Answer 17

• Rita Dove wrote “Cozy Apologia” in the late 1990s, at a time when she was already a major figure in American poetry
• She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 and served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993- 1995.
• She was the first African American poet to be Poet Laureate.

Question 18

Is Rita Dove’s poetry reflective of the trends in 1990s?

Answer 18

• Dove’s poetry certainly reflects some of the key poetic trends of the 1990s.
  o At the time, many poets were writing autobiographical poems: poems that reflected on key moments in their personal experience
  o They used loose free verse to do so
  o In other words, this group of poets-sometimes called “lyric narrative” poets-had left behind the wild experiments of the early part of the twentieth century
  o While their poems rarely follow strict forms such as sonnets, the poems also aren’t radically experimental
  o The easy-going tone and autobiographical musings of “Cozy Apologia” fit in these poetic trends

Question 19

Who did Rita Dove marry?

Answer 19

• Married to fellow-writer Fred Viebahn
• Cozy Apologia seems to be an affectionate tribute to him - ‘For Fred’

Question 20

How harmful was Hurricane Floyd?

Answer 20

• The poem is set against the arrival of Hurricane Floyd, a powerful storm which hit the east coast of the USA in September 1999, causing $6.9b of damage

Question 21

How does the speaker use Hurricane Floyd?

Answer 21

• The speaker of “Cozy Apologia” uses personification in two places in the poem, both times to describe Hurricane Floyd
• The speaker describes the hurricane as a man, calling it “oddly male” and “big bad Floyd.”
• Later, the speaker leans into the idea that the hurricane is a kind of bad boy
• She says that “Floyd’s / cussing up a storm”-as though the storm itself, with its powerful, destructive wind comes from the Floyd’s rough, tough personality, his cussin