I wrote about this poem in my essay, but it remains one of my favorite poems ever even though it's kind of confusing. Its enigmatic style makes it really fun to piece apart and figure out. I am usually someone who likes explicating poetry because sometimes concentrating really hard on one or two word-choices or phrases yields a moment of epiphany. This moment gives me a kind of high that I really enjoy. No matter how small the epiphany, I feel as if all of the thinking I have put in culminates into one single realization that belongs to me entirely.
So, it’s pretty hard to understand the meaning of "Blue," yet every time I read it I get the sense that it's layered with more complexity and emotion than I can consume. “Blue” makes me want to analyze it precisely because its imagery-packed lines provide me with plenty of small epiphanies. Most significantly, the poem’s deliberation over the colors blue, white, and black immediately intrigues me and prove very interesting to unpack.
I really like the way each stanza juxtaposes beautiful and terrible imagery so closely together. For example, the juxtaposition of the brutal comparison of his mother's white flesh with blue veins to a gutted fish and the line "this is her hair, gone / from white to blue in the air" which is beautiful and actually rhymes highlights this theme of disunity and split ideas. In the second stanza, the color shifts from white and blue to black and blue. The speaker says the “blue, shot with black, of [his] dark / daddy’s knuckles” and “the same two fingers he has always used / to make the rim of every empty blue / glass in the house sing” which convey so many emotions at once. Thinking about his father’s knuckles fills me with fear, while the beautiful imagery of making the glasses sing fills me with nostalgia. His beautiful, lyrical imagery culminates in the third stanza, which is by far the most interesting to me.
I think the third stanza conveys the meaning behind this juxtaposition. Phillips was biracial, and I definitely interpreted the poem as an exploration of the conflicted feelings Phillips has about his biracial identity. The third stanza in particular, but also the continuous feeling of self-conflict like he doesn't know what to think or how to relate to his memories, resonates a lot with me. This poem really shows how conflicted it can feel inside my own head, going over who my parents are and not feeling seen by either of them (“I am the man neither of you remembers”). It can sometimes feel like there are two sides of me based on race and then a third side of me that is incredibly conscious of the other two sides, one that is just divided and lost all the time. I definitely have felt “somewhere / between” races and longing to be “finally; nothing” and just human.
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