Chain Reactions in Peter Meinke’s “Atomic Pantoum”
The pantoum is a form of poetry that includes the repetition of the same end words in each of its six quatrains. Two of those repeating lines will occur in the first stanza and the last stanza, kind of as a way to bring the poem full circle, but by the end, those repeating lines may have a new meaning. This occurs in Peter Meinke’s “Atomic Pantoum,” where the opening line becomes the final line, but with what I believe to be a new meaning.
Meinke’s poem is about nuclear bombs and how they hold a lot of power, as do the people who use them, but not good power. The way he opens and ends the poem is with the phrase, “In a chain reaction” (Meinke 258). But in the first stanza he seems to be talking about the weapons themselves, and in the last, the people with power who abuse those weapons. The first half of the poem Meinke uses to describe the weapons and their horrible destructive nature, as that is their only purpose, saying things like, “The neutrons released, blow open some others, which release more neutrons, and start this all over” (Meinke 258). He quite uncomfortably explains the literal chain reaction of nuclear weapons going off and continuously doing so because it’s so easy for them to cause destruction. Towards the end of the poem before the final “In a chain reaction,” the second half describes the people behind the nuclear weapons, the ones obsessed with power that don’t always see the gross destruction being created. Meinke writes, “we are dying to use it, torching our enemies…blind to the end…we sing to Jesus” (Meinke 258). This seemingly gives a new meaning to “chain reaction;” nuclear weapons have been used so much before that people in power, as well as many others, are “blind” to the unnecessary great death and destruction they cause. Therefore, the initial chain reaction is the powerful nuclear weapons continuously going off and being used one after the other, and the ending chain reaction is the people in power behind those weapons, who do the same as the people in power before them did, blind to the destruction and a solution that doesn’t involve such horrible catastrophe.
Meinke, Peter. “Chain-Letter Pantoum.” An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art. Edited by Anne Finch and Kathrine Varnes, U of Michigan P, 2002, p. 258.
