Poetry Response 1

Mr. Fear, by Lawrence Raab.

As I was looking up the poem, "My Fear" I honestly couldn't find a single thing. Then I realized after a half hour of searching the poem is actually titled, "Mr. Fear." It makes so much more sense now! I spent probably 12 minutes wondering why fear was always referred to as an outside source, or 'Mr.' everywhere except the title. Anyway, Mr. Fear was written by Lawrence Raab, who actually died recently just to let you know. At least according to Google. So when I was glancing through the poems, I sped-read this one and got really excited. For some reason I thought it was talking about the Vietnam War. So I was really excited to study a poem about Vietnam and so I read Raab's short biography and was somewhat surprised to learn Raab had never been to war. I searched four more websites then finally decided to actually read the poem. Now I'm basically positive that is was indeed not written about Vietnam, but technically I guess it could apply. We're not going there.
One thing I like about Raab's style: he used small words and phrases to convey a massive concept.
One thing I dislike about Raab's style: it can come off a bit choppy and sometimes unclear. His punctuation actually distracted me as well.
I read several blogs from random people about this poem in other classes most likely similar to ours, and most thought this was about a reoccurring dream, which would make complete sense. After all, it mentions sleep and night. Then I read another blog which got me thinking. So maybe this poem was written about nightmares and was actually meant to be literal... but how much fun would that be?
Sometimes when something truly traumatic happens, we feel like it's a dream. Someone dies who is close to you and you wake up thinking it didn't really happen, they weren't really gone. You just want to wake up and for all the pain to have gone away. Some people even describe traumatic events as though they were watching it, like they weren't even there. I would like to think this poem is about trauma, the point where each day is a reoccurring nightmare. Raab always refers to this poem as Mr., which makes complete sense. When something traumatic happens we always look for someone to blame. Sometimes we blame ourselves, but usually it's the infamous "them."
Why did "they" do that, why did "insertwhateverorwhoeveryouwanthere" let this happen? "Mr. Fear" is this massive, happy-sucking amoeba who has no choice but to exist. I love the lines, "Maybe he smiles when he finds the right one. Maybe he's sorry." Raab refers to fear as an actual being because we can't control others, only ourselves just as we cannot control fear. Fear is something that consumes and destroys us unless we learn to wake up from it all. "Let it fit in my pocket, let it fall through the hole in my pocket." Wouldn't that be nice? To just forget about your fear and while you don't even notice, it's gone forever. To heal or finally cope with reality. I'm not sure how much I really enjoyed this poem, but I do think it's a bit like putty. It's a kind of hard lump, but if you bend and stretch enough it actually becomes something.