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The Rape Joke Patricia Lockwood

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The rape joke is that Patricia Lockwood’s poem, The Rape Joke is a sarcastic joke in itself. Patricia Lockwood writes a poem called The Rape Joke, filled with many repetitions of the phrase “the rape joke is” and she finishes the verse with many different incidents. In the poem Lockwood writes about a rape that you experienced. The poem starts out with your age, “The rape joke is that you were 19 years old”. The entire time throughout the poem, Lockwood makes the poem feel personal to the reader although the experience is someone else’s. Her words have a sense of vivid bluntness to them as she describes the relationship between the main character and the rapist. In this poem, Lockwood uses the phrase the rape joke with punch lines that are mostly an actual horrifying incidents to allow the audience to realize that rape is not a joke, but rather that it is an experience that have actually happened to an individual. She uses a sarcastic tone throughout the poem to show her disapproval of the rape joke and proves that the topic of rape is no humour. In the poem The Rape Joke, one can witness the …show more content…

This becomes quite obvious in the line, “The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.” Here, the readers are faced with the poem The Rape Joke, and within the poem she subtly hints that this may be her experience. The you in the poem left Cincinnati, Ohio and for the next five years all they did was write. They wrote about anything and everything. Then made the argument that if you were to write a poem about rape joke, that's all they’ll remember about you. The author does not blatantly state that she is the victim, however the pieces match up together for the readers to think that the poem is about the author’s personal

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