Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Beth Ann Fennelly’s "I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese" is a playful yet deeply self-aware meditation on cultural aesthetics, personal sensibility, and the tension between artistic restraint and exuberance. The poem humorously explores the speaker?s perceived shortcomings in taste, self-presentation, and poetic refinement compared to the sophisticated minimalism of the French and the Japanese. Through a dynamic, conversational tone, Fennelly critiques the very notion of cultural superiority while embracing the lush, unapologetic vitality of her own artistic inclinations.

The poem begins with the speaker contrasting her preference for "big sugar, big fruit" California wine with the French appreciation for "smoke and rot." This sets up the central conflict: a desire to align with the understated, cultivated elegance of French and Japanese sensibilities, yet an acknowledgment of her own sensory preferences for excess and immediacy. The humorous paraphrase of Cézanne—"Le monde—c’est terrible! / Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie."—highlights how the weight of cultural prestige can make even despair sound refined in another language. The French, she suggests, have a built-in intellectual authority, while the Japanese revere transience and restraint, finding beauty in what is not fully revealed.

This contrast extends to the speaker?s own experiences. Despite having visited "the temples of Kyoto" and "the Pont Neuf," her instincts remain rooted in American populism. She confesses, "my taste buds shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field," grounding her aesthetic in the realm of baseball, cheap beer, and the tactile joy of "foam fingers." The exaggeratedly casual phrasing makes clear that the speaker is not truly ashamed of her preferences—rather, she is staging her own supposed cultural shortcomings for comic effect. This theme is reinforced in the anecdote about the French designer who dismisses her opinion as unsubtle, prompting the speaker’s imagined retort, "Mississippi, sweetheart. Bet you couldn?t find it with a map." Here, the poem pivots from self-deprecation to defiance, suggesting that regional identity and an embrace of fullness—whether in flavor or expression—are not inherently lesser than European sophistication.

The final third of the poem moves from cultural commentary into poetic theory. If she were Japanese, the speaker muses, she would write a haiku-like fragment ending before "anything bloomed," stopping at the moment of swelling buds—"like a fairy’s cast-off slippers, like candy wrappers, like spent firecrackers." The comparisons evoke both delicacy and impermanence, fitting within the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi, or beauty in transience. But if she were French, she would focus not on the moment before bloom, but on decline—the "post-peak" beauty of "petals floppy, creased brown with age." The bees, once agile, now "bungling the ballet," signify a shift toward decay, a kind of existential resignation, evoking the melancholic grandeur of late-stage French art and philosophy.

The poem closes with a striking metaphor, suggesting that a French or Japanese poet would appreciate "the red-tipped filaments scattered on the scorched brown grass," resembling "matchsticks." The final line—"and it?s matchsticks, we all know, that start the fire."—delivers a powerful resolution. It suggests that while the speaker may not fit into the mold of minimalist aestheticism, her own exuberance, her big sugar, big fruit approach to life and art, is just as capable of creating beauty, transformation, and even destruction.

Ultimately, "I Need to Be More French. Or Japanese" is less about self-correction than self-celebration. The speaker’s imagined refinements—her pledges to wear gray, to be more subtle, to cultivate restraint—are knowingly futile. Instead, Fennelly highlights the power in excess, in bold colors and full bloom, in American sensory richness. The poem defies the idea that beauty must be quiet and controlled to be legitimate, instead embracing a vision of art that is sprawling, immediate, and alive.

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