The hurricane simile one might expect to find in Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” seems, disappointingly, entirely absent. There’s no mention of tropical storms or ocean currents or wind systems in the 1984 single — the central issues we instead find the song’s speaker concerned with are mainly aggressive sexual desire (“The bitch is hungry / she needs to tell”; “On the hunt tonight for love at first sting”), a want for unrestricted movement (“The night is calling / I have to go”; “More days to come / new places to go), and a general preoccupation with winning and dominance (“The wolf is hungry, he runs the show / He’s licking his lips, he’s ready to win).

Class discussion received the text of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” poorly, likely rightly so, with those who analyzed it using what seemed to be what Beth has referred to as “the epistemological method of scorn.” I’m not going to be in class to hear the first four poems of Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler discussed, but I’ll hazard the guess that they’ll be treated more carefully. Unquestionably, the language of these poems is more sophisticated and used to more precise effect than that of “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” but they deal for the most part with the same issues, and both the personified Hurricane Katrina and the speaker of Scorpions’ song seem to feel and want the same things.

Does the voice of “Rock You” demand undeserved praise in their repeated “come on, come on baby” and “are you ready, baby”? In “5 P.M., Tuesday, August 23, 2005” the tropical depression that will become Hurricane Katrina states that she “will require praise / unbridled winds.” The first four poems of Blood Dazzler read as a clear continuation of “Rock You Like a Hurricane,” in a more literarily sophisticated and historically weighty form. Katrina demands to be taken seriously (“How dare / the water belittle my thirst, treat me as just / another / small / disturbance”). The storm craves sensation: in “5 P.M., Thursday, August 25, 2005” her eye “needs to croon in every screeching hue, / strives to know waltz, hesitation, / small changes in sun.” I find it hugely interesting that as Katrina upgrades from tropical depression to tropical storm to full-blown hurricane, the language she uses to express herself becomes not more complex but less so, moving from the complicated syntax of “5 P.M., Tuesday” to a total of 23 words used in “7 P.M., Thursday, August 25” that are nearly evocative of grunts.

The personified Katrina does differ from the unnamed speaker of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” in a crucial way: she is a woman. The first poem of the collection establishes this explicitly, beyond symbolism — “every woman begins as weather,” muses the tropical depression, “sips slow thunder, nows her hips. Every woman / harbors a chaos.” Katrina’s capacity for destruction is equated through her four introductory poems as the awakening of a woman to sensory pleasure: when the storm says “I want it / all” she wants to consume the world, and that means different things if a human woman or a storm-woman is speaking. I’m interested in seeing how a discussion on these poems will play out in class. Responses to “Rock You Like a Hurricane” were strong enough that the song was referred to as the manifesto of an imagined rapist, and I wonder if these poems will be negatively received. I imagine all the evidence is present for someone to say these poems romanticize the cause of a tragedy which killed 1,836 people and displaced thousands and they are potentially damaging in associating female desire (for movement, consumption, or otherwise) with the hurricane. I don’t want to get into speculation as to what the discussion will be, but I know that personally I’m inclined to give Smith’s poems more consideration, and besides the language they are wrapped up in and the National Book Award nomination, I wonder why that is.