Rotation 6 Blog 1
“Lai with Sounds of Skin” by Chryss Yost
This poem has 2 stanzas with 8 lines in each stanza. There is an interesting rhyme scheme of a,a,b,a,a,b,a,a. There are three rhyming couplets in each stanza. Yost also uses alliteration: “living linen”, “warp, weave”, “tightly-twisted thin”, “spoken to silken to spool” and “skin to skein to skin”. This poem is comparing different aspects of linen and to people/skin. The poem also has a sexual connotation when it says “bone weft, pull of masculine into feminine. I think the second stanza is talking about things we say to persuade people maybe even in a sexual way. He compares that persuasion to “yarns” and uses similes saying they are “like wool”, “like will, like has been”. He also says those words are “spoken to silken – to spool”, which gives me the feeling that they are just said to influence a person. He compares people to “thick bolts of linen”. I also get the feeling of the sexual connotation because of the last line, “skin to skein to skin.”, because it is talking about two different things (cloth and skin) becoming intertwined. The tone seems to be almost seductive. When I read it aloud most of the stressed words were the first and last words in the lines. Yost also personifies things such as “bone weft”, because obviously bones can not weave or be weaved.
