Commentary

"At The Doughnut Shop" offers a very contemporary view of the frenzied pace of life. The narrative pace of images presented in the poem is random and rapid. The images are spit out one after the other as though fired from a rapid fire gun.  The narrator, presumably a customer, has entered a doughnut shop for  snack food and drink and is tempted with offerings of

A HOT BUTTERED CROISSANT
FRENCH VANILLA COFFEE

HAZELNUT

But is instead faced with the reality of

OUT
OF ORDER

The narrator's attention is diverted to "white SILK lilies / and roses / in a cheap glass vase". This carefully selected image symbolically represents the "artificial" quality of the world in which she finds herself existing. All is "illusory". Hot coffee is offered for sale but the machine is out of order. Or, "all" is briefly expressed in newspaper headlines—never mind reading the story in the "UN-TOUCHED" newspaper "on the table". All is implied in the headlines about "Post-Election debris", the removal of "sigh-ns", "a decline / in American Civilian / deaths / in Iraq". Everywhere the narrator looks there is "the sound of change" and the presence of "scrap metal". The "scrap metal" image is another of those commonplace images that suddenly becomes symbolic of the environment and surroundings presented in the poem—"scrap metal"—the stuff of real life. Suddenly, another rapid, and successive image is presented—"a new dimension" presumably portrayed with another newspaper headline:

an increase
in women
choosing
double-mastectomies

It is as though the human dilemma a female cancer victim faces is nothing more than tossing away her womanly uniqueness as so much junk metal tossed on the scrap heap—and some women are choosing to make a double sacrifice—the implication being that the double choice is elective and not necessary. The narrator's attention is diverted without comment to a final set of images from the external world in which she finds herself emerged:

chill day
green and blue
sweat shirts

This final three line image is very haiku like.  It presents two juxtaposed images with the middle line—"green and blue" functioning as a pivot line. Thus, the poet gets double use out of the images and creates two views out of a single set of image details:

chill day
green and blue

and

green and blue
sweat shirts

Graphically,, the poem uses juxtaposition and symbiosis as techniques to convey information visually on the page. First, the images are quickly placed next to each other in rapid gun fire bursts on the printed page; no comment is made on the images, they are just presented. The images exist in this environment in a state of symbiosis—they exist side by side in the same environment intimately intermingled in close association, yet they each retain their own distinctions. It is the realization of contradictions on the part of the reader that results in an aha of understanding. This understanding in a large part is brought about by the graphic presentation on the page of a seemingly unrelated series of images. In "At The Doughnut Shop" the author has melded the graphic form on the page with a conceptual idea to create a memorable poem.

John Daleiden