Amanda Hopper
D. Reynolds
Research Poem
12 November 2015
Analysis of “Hunger in New York City” by Simon Ortiz
In Simon Ortiz’s “Hunger in New York City” the speaker represents Ortiz, a Native American author in New York City with the yearning to return home and be as connected to the earth as when he was a young boy living in the village of McCarty or “Deetzeyaamah”. This poem can be easily misinterpreted. The reader may at first visualize starving people living on the streets of New York, but a second or third read of this poetry can reveal that the “hunger” Ortiz mentions is much more abstruse than it appeared at first glance.
“Hunger in New York City” starts off with the personification of hunger which continues throughout the whole poem: “Hunger crawls into you / from somewhere out of your muscles” (1-2) . Primitively you would think that hunger was external to begin with, but the second line reveals that it comes “out of your muscles”. Hunger is portrayed to have always been inside you, which creates the sense of having an eternal bond with where you grew up or memories from your childhood. He also gives examples that would represent the contrast of New York and the village he was raised in: “or the concrete or the land / or the wind pushing you.” (3-4) . These lines characterize how connected to nature his home village was to nature and industrialized New York is. Ortiz’s culture reflects in his literature with a tenacious feeling of his past connections and Native American roots.
The second stanza shows the increase of hunger over time. First, hunger asks simple questions: “It comes to you, asking / for food, words, wisdom, young memories / of places you ate at, drank cold spring water,” (5-7) . Hunger asks for “young memories” (6), which would trigger memories of his childhood home, reminding him of his Native American traditions and how connected to the earth he once was. The questions further deepen: “or held somebody’s hand, / or home of the...