Essay Questions

How does the speaker convey a sinister quality to the title characters?

The title characters are consistently referred to through the pronoun “they” which is extremely suggestive of anonymity. We know that “they” are municipal planners and builders, but the constant use of the more allusive pronoun as an identifier imbues them with a symbolic status indicating something larger and potentially more threatening if not downright menacing. This is a poem inordinately suited for the fecund conspiracy theories characterizing post-Obama America. While the subject may be mere municipal bureaucrats in reality, the speaker’s use of the impersonal pronoun creates an atmosphere of dread in which “they” become all-powerful authoritarian figures capable of controlling the future and even erasing memories of the past on a mass scale.

What one line is arguably most responsible for the poem’s overall tone of conspiratorial paranoia?

From the use of the conspiracy theorist’s favorite pronoun “they” to the overall construction of a feeling of average people being at the mercy of the agenda of the planners, the poem creates and sustains a deceptively dark mood of intensifying paranoia. “They” may be simply municipal bureaucrats in charge of the necessary evil of urban planning on a literal level, but from the beginning they are also charged with vague, ambiguous unspoken powers as well. Imagery endows “them” with the power to alter the past and correct imperfections and even to outwit and bully the power of the natural word. But it is within the dense extended dental work metaphor that inhabits the entire second stanza that the paranoia reaches its climax before immediately beginning to subside back to something a little less extreme.

After suggesting through metaphor that the planners have the power to anaesthetize residents to the shock of the new, the speaker goes all in by then asserting that they can also alter the memories of citizens and even lull them into a state of hypnotic suggestion that facilitates easy and unquestioned compliance with a chilling message that is also an essential part of the conspiracy theory vernacular: “They have the means.” And, of course, the unspoken part of that message echoes that conspiratorial code as well: if someone has the means to do something, you can bet the farm that they will do it.

What use of the literary device of oxymoron brings the poem to its paradoxical close?

The final stanza is much shorter than the others and directed inward toward the speaker himself rather than commentary directed outward toward the effects of the city planners. In what seems to be a moment of supreme resignation to accepting the things he cannot change, the speaker ironically seems to assert that he will not moved to write poetry about the agenda of change and alteration driving the planners. He assures the reader that he will not be moved to expend a single drop of poetic inspiration toward the purpose of staining what has become the blueprint for the future. Interesting, however, he chooses a strange oxymoron for the concept of the future: “our past’s tomorrow.” The rationale for this choice is not immediately clear and it is the ambiguity that stimulates questions about the speaker’s honesty regarding his own future plans.