Barbara Hamby Invention

Barbara Hamby's poem Invention has a fairly unique format. It is written in story mode that almost represents a stream of consciousness of the writer. Two lines are paired together before a break. However, the breaks do not correspond with punctuation and sentences are free to spill over into the next section. This creates an interesting and somewhat fragmented design for the poem's structure.

The begging of the poem eludes to the authors fascinations with the development of civilization and the technologies that have helped to move it along. She believes that if it were up to her then people would still be chasing boars and clubbing them to death. She doesn't believe that she could have come up with the technology herself to make these progressions. However, there is one exception; she believes she could handle the development of poetry and theatre.

Yet, inventions such as bread seem elusive. She states that wheat must have been a weed; something that grows in the wild. And the first bread inventor would have had to find the weed, smash and grind it, add water, and mix it with mold (yeast) to make a finished product....

The author also mentions throwing rocks at birds and grilling them and contrasts this with a modern supermarket. Modern technologies can seem unfathomable if you consider all of the necessary steps that must have been taken for them to be developed.
Once the reference to Safeway is made in this line, the conversation quickly jumps to aliens. It is interesting that this connection is made because of all the tabloid magazines in the supermarket checkout lanes often contain such outlandish articles. The author claims that aliens quit visiting Earth because people have become to verbose and vulgar.

She doesn't seem to believe that humanity has the capacity to make all the inventions she lists. She believes some bored alien swooped into give use some technology and help us along. Furthermore, everyone would already know this if it CIA wasn't responsible for the cover-up. Yet, despite the CIA's efforts, some scientists are beginning to tell the story.

Furthermore, these aliens are said to have breed with humans. However, the humans were probably gross as well as the aliens who were the ones that patrolling the outer reaches of the universe.…