Compare and contrast the presentation of place and identity in City Planners and Continuum
“The City Planners” by Margaret Atwood is a poem about her distaste for the obsessive regularity and perfection of the city. Atwood opens the poem with vivid exposition of time and place as she “cruis[es] these residential Sunday streets in dry August. This effectively creates a sense of place and set the tone of the poem. Atwood uses the verb “cruising” which juxtaposes strongly with the obsessively clean and fake suburbia landscape that she is driving through. The constant use of juxtaposition is very effective as it creates a stark contrast between the ordered and suppressing city and the disordered and creative driver in the car.
“The City Planners” is written with no set stanza length and no set rhyme, which usually represents disorder and chaos. This could represent how on the surface, suburbia seems that it is perfect, but under the surface, it is unnatural and obsessive. This is case with “Continuum” by Allen Curnow. This poem has no rhyme, but in comparison to “The City Planners”, it has a weirdly regular form as it is written in syllabic tercets. This obsessive precision and order seems to replicate the apparent perfection in suburbia.
“The City Planners” by Margaret Atwood is a poem about her distaste for the obsessive regularity and perfection of the city. Atwood opens the poem with vivid exposition of time and place as she “cruis[es] these residential Sunday streets in dry August. This effectively creates a sense of place and set the tone of the poem. Atwood uses the verb “cruising” which juxtaposes strongly with the obsessively clean and fake suburbia landscape that she is driving through. The constant use of juxtaposition is very effective as it creates a stark contrast between the ordered and suppressing city and the disordered and creative driver in the car.
“The City Planners” is written with no set stanza length and no set rhyme, which usually represents disorder and chaos. This could represent how on the surface, suburbia seems that it is perfect, but under the surface, it is unnatural and obsessive. This is case with “Continuum” by Allen Curnow. This poem has no rhyme, but in comparison to “The City Planners”, it has a weirdly regular form as it is written in syllabic tercets. This obsessive precision and order seems to replicate the apparent perfection in suburbia.