My Favorite Poem in the class (at least as of now)

My favorite poem in the class so far has to be Edward Taylor’s “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly.” No, it’s not just because I am able to understand it—however, it does help a lot since it is maybe only one of a handful that I did really understand. It is my favorite poem because it certainly relates to me as a seeking Christian. I call myself a seeking Christian because even though I’ve had a strong foundation at a church, an education at a Catholic school, and beliefs and morals that match many of Jesus’ teachings, I am still seeking as to exactly who I am.

At times, I would feel like the fly, trapped and hopeless, and even dead to society. Other times, I would feel some kind of supernatural strength helping me fight through tough times in school or with family. Taylor presents the poem really well with the different scenarios of a wasp and a fly being caught in the spider’s web. The poem helps to create visual images that can be disturbing—“And hind the head/Bite dead”—but also revealing and hopeful—“Thy grace to break the cord, afford” (Taylor 24-25, 43).

Another reason as to why I like Taylor’s poem is because it is familiar to what I am used to seeing in poetry. I know this may be because I am very narrow-minded in the field of poetry, but I like how there is a specific structure to the poem. There are 5-line stanzas with the rhyme scheme of ABACC in each stanza and the syllable counts as well (I observed these myself!).

I’ve learned to appreciate this poem a lot more as we progressed in this class because we got into the more modernist poetry and lots of poems that I just could not understand. I would ask myself, “Why would O’Hara write these poems?” Honestly, I’d try to fool myself into an answer that is somewhat satisfactory, but I still have no idea. Moreover, Marianne Moore and Harryette Mullen are two other examples of poets who I still have no idea as to what the purpose was in their writing. As for Taylor, I understand that he is trying to glorify God’s grace and almighty power to the world. In his poetry, Taylor praises God as the one who can help you out of the vicious deaths in meaningless activities on earth. “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” certainly holds a lot of meaning in its short lines and I certainly do like this poem.

I really do hope that I continue to read poetry, even though I was discouraged a lot this semester by all the complex poems we read. I also hope that you, as well, will continue to read poetry.

Coping with the Waste

After studying for the final exam, I realized how Wendy Cope's name is so fitting for her poetry. For example, the first poem we read is called "Engineers' Corner" and it describes the harsh life of an engineer when the poets seem to have such a grand time. It is as if she is trying to help engineers by recognizing their hardships and helping them cope with the problems. Moreover, she points out specific differences between the lives of poets and the lives of engineers such as a "statue in the Abbey" and "must be hell" (Cope 12, 15). It's funny how Cope would point out these differences when she herself is a poet.

In the second poem, "Waste Land Limericks,” Cope helped me cope with trying to understand what Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was all about. She follows the five section patterns, but very briefly describes the sections. At first, it may seem like it's just a parody and there really is of no importance to her poem in relation to Eliot's poem. When I read it over again, I see how accurate her sections are to the actual "The Waste Land." She points out the death in the fourth section, the typist's encounter in the third section, the two couples in the second section, and the different speakers in the first section.

Although Cope’s poems are in a way mocking and fun, her points do get across. I would not be surprised in the Renaissance if there were many engineers who lived unnoticed because they were overshadowed by the writings of poets. I would not be surprised if people were able to understand Eliot’s poem just a tad better because Cope explains it with more pedestrian language. In addition, the parody format helps to lighten up the mood and not make it seem like an assignment.

Why do I bring up Cope? Well, she brings me hope to the final. Her style of poetry is kind of the life that I want to be able to live: Recognizing the hardships in life, but being able to live through them by poking fun at them. As finals week dawns upon us, may we be able to see some of the humorous aspects of our lives rather than just slaving over the textbooks.

Authors

I noticed that Andrew came up with a list of the poems we studied in class this semester with his summaries next to them so I thought I could post a list of authors and some of the things that help me remember who wrote what.

Gerard Manley Hopkins
-rhyming at the end of each line
-some alliteration
-religious poetry

Emily Dickinson
-lots of dashes, ones in the middle of the line or at the end
-weird capitalization, capitalization of the first word of each line, and capitalization of nouns
-something about death
-short lines
-slant rhyme

William Cullen Bryant
-medium length lines
-some dashes
-talks about nature and how nature is a comforting figure
-capitalization of the first word in each line

Thomas Traherne
-angels
-describing a world someone first enters
-about birth/rebirth/afterlife

Edward Taylor
-about spiders
-very short lines with a specific format (indentation)
-
Christopher Smart
-the line starts with the word “For”
-talks about cats

T.S. Eliot
-dialogue
-foreign languages
-references to foreign places
-
Wendy Cope
-short
-easy to understand
-talks about the wasteland (the few parts I understood)

Marianne Moore
-animals, using specific scientific names
-not much punctuation
-complex sentence structures, very long sentences
-quotes that you won’t notice are quotes unless they are quoted
-things about nature
-things about humans and their relationship to nature

William Carlos Williams
-some poems have very short lines, like a few words short
-some poems have middle length lines
-almost no punctuation (except dashes and commas, sometimes there are periods)

Kenneth Koch
-long lines, sentences
-humorous
-reminds me of the plum poem

Langston Hughes
-about Harlem,
-examples of dreams deferred
-African Americans
-italics
-some onomatopoeia
-short lines

Frank O’Hara
-food
-lunchtime
-seemingly trivial activities
-New York
-foreign places
-vulgar language

John Donne
-love and the lover’s world
-“thou”, “thee”
-Shakespeare-ish language (I forgot what it’s called, Middle English?)

Robert Duncan
-complete sentences
-describes a place (the meadow)
-talks about writing (Structure of Rime)

Lorine Niedecker (I don’t have much to say)
-very short poems
-a little random

Harryette Mullen
-incomprehensible
-sometimes paragraph form
-specific patterns (ex. Sentences start out the same way, lines start with same letter of the alphabet)

Review

Since we have not studied any new work in the past week and the final is coming up, I’m sure everyone cares more about the final than anything else connected to poetry. Here’s a list of the works and authors we have studied. The summaries are not to be taken seriously, just a mnemonic device to help me remember what they are.

Hopkins
God’s Grandeur- even as light of the world disappears, it will always return, as God Is eternal.
The Windhover- talks about how mighty and beautiful that bird is.
Pied Beauty- praise God for all things, regular and exotic, generic and specific.
Spring and Fall- addressing Margaret, comforting her from the grief of a departing friend.

Dickinson
After Great Pain- After the grieving period, the person take cares of chores in a mechanical manner.
Twas Like a Maelstrom- some dreadful imageries—pain, torture, and the likes.
I heard a fly buzz- narrator dies, but is constantly annoyed by a buzzing fly.
Because I could not stop for death- death comes and ferries the narrator away.

Traherne
Wonder- The guy on shrooms thinking how like an angel he came down. Also seeing many colors.

Taylor
Upon a spider catching a fly- Fly gets caught, wasp escapes—referring to level of religious devotion.

Smart
Jubilate Agno—the cat poem.


Bryant
Thanatopsis—land of the dead. People return to nature once they die.

Eliot
The Waste Land—people become mechanical. Loss of individuality. Lots of rape. Lots of quotes.

Cope
Waste Land Limericks—parody of the Waste Land.
Engineers’ Corner—parody of engineers—engineers have it hard whereas English majors seem to have it easy

Moore- A bunch of stuff about observable phenomena particular concerning nature. The following are her poems:
The Jerboa
The Monkeys
Critics and Connoisseurs
An Octopus
Poetry
He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron

Williams
Spring and All—defy convention—“plagiarism” and create new things from personal imagination.

Koch
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams—parody of Williams and how everything seem to be so frivolous and mean-spirited.

O’hara
Lunch Poems- bunch of poems that does not seem to particularly bear much weight.

Hughes
Montage of a Dream Deferred- Black people. White people. Beats.

Donne
The Good Morrow- addresses the lover. Compare their love to the world.
The Sun Rising- Sun, don’t bother my mistress/wife/lover and let us enjoy our morning.
The Canonization- some more lover’s stuff. Particular interested in imagery of sexual climax.

Duncan
Often I am Permitted to return to a meadow- some guy who wants a piece of mind.
The structure of Rime I- A guy talking to a woman who epitomizes sentence.
The structure of Rime II-A guy disguised as a lion talking to a lion.

Niedecker
(A bunch of poems we never analyzed and of which I hope isn’t on the final)

Hass
Skipped

Mullen
Sleeping with the dictionary- trying to be incomprehensible.

General announcements/reminders

1. The exam is in 20 Wheeler (in the basement, lucky us!) on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2 pm.

2. If you haven't picked up your marked-up draft yet, it's in my mailbox in 322 Wheeler, which is open M-F 9am-noon and 1-4pm.

3. Optional exam review is on Friday 9-10 am in 400 Wheeler, where I hold my regular office hours. If you're longing to know what your colleagues would say about a Williams poem, this is the time and the place.

What is the meaning?

I've been thinking, with all that we critique and analyze in class, we come up with a lot of possible explanations to answer why a piece of work is the way it is. And at times we come to really good and valid conclusions, and at other times we fumble around in the dark.

But I've been thinking, is there always an intention or a meaning behind everything that the author or creator makes? Two recent examples that got me to considering this are of Frank O'Hara and Harriette Mullen. Much of O'Hara's writing seems to be merely portraying a particular incident or observation of his on that given lunch day. Mullen creates her poetry through the ispiration of dictionary games.

In analyzing these poems, we come up with many key points and ideas behind them. But is it possible that they could have been written just for the sake of putting pen to paper? Maybe there were no thoughts or underlying reasons for doing so, but they were just created, perhaps aimlessly.

One instance that brought this to my attention was during pin-ups for Environmental Design 1, where we showcase our work on the wall. The reviewers (professor and GSIs) interpretted various works and possible reasons for why the collages were a certain way, and sounded very astute in their observations.

One comment was, "the hint of pink used throughout this collage perfectly accents the dimmed lights within the museum, and it really carries across well to the viewer. We get a sense of colors blending in together due to the lighting." It was something to this extent. "Was this why you chose to include this color?"

"No... my printer was just running low on ink..."

And this GSI stood there, stumped, with many annonymous giggles to highlight the embarrassment. And this happened on numerous occasions, with similar responses, such as "No... I ran out of cardboard" or "I didn't have anymore photos to include." We all found this hilarious :]

So my question is, is it always necessary to find meanings behind everything (especially for Mullen) ? It seems like sometimes we may just be swinging in the dark.

treatment of machines in the waste land

In the tale of the typist, in The Waste Land, Eliot makes clear that the typist has no will; she is “indifferent,” and “hardly aware,” and the two seem connected to her “automatic” motion. More interesting to me, however, is the action of the lover, the man the majority of our class felt was a rapist.


He is “patronising” upon leaving, which would indicate that although he is aware of her lack of desire – that he knows her “indifference” is not in his favor. The typist never resists, though. She never makes a negative motion; indeed, she makes no motion at all. She never exercises her will, never seeks to control her circumstances. Her actions are automatic, robotic, machine-like, and he treats her as such.


The question I would raise, and which I believe Eliot is raising through this passage, is whether the atrophy of will is simultaneously the atrophy of humanity. On the basest level, it is necessary to show consideration for the impact an individual’s actions will have on others. If those others are not capable of feeling, of being affected by one’s actions, or at the very least not capable of voicing their concerns, do they still deserve consideration? Do their desires, their preferences, still matter, at least in the context of how their preferences impact our decisions?


Eliot does not deign to answer this question directly; rather, his example of the typist points out that whether or not the lover is morally in the wrong for caressing the typist with the knowledge that his “caresses” are “undesired,” the action is still carried through. This is a key point – the lover continues to act. Where are the repercussions for his violation? Where are the checks to his desires? If she would speak, the typist would say no, but she does not speak, and so he continues – and this is no one-time occurrence, for he is an “expected guest.”


There can be no morality in this new world because although all of us are humans, not all of us have that intangible quality of the will. Those of us who do can hold our own, can speak out, but those who do not are indistinguishable in the “crowd”; these machines walk, talk, and look like us, but they are susceptible to the same violation as the typist – their preferences effectively mean nothing for they cannot express their will upon reality.


In a sense, this de-humanization speaks more about those who do have will than those who do not. How do we treat our machines? How do we, who have the ability to make and carry through decisions, treat those lesser than us, who cannot speak up for themselves? From the point of view of absolute morality, we rape them. But in reality, if an issue is intangible, without visible symptoms, and its sufferers do not voice their pain, the healthy cannot be blamed for failing to take the appropriate action.

Are they simply words?

The most basic idea of a structured society is usually composed of a high class, middle class, and low class. When we discussed Mullen’s “Mantra for a Classless Society, of Mr. Roget’s Neighborhood,” it was discovered that the seemingly simple poem actually had more substance to it than initially thought. When I first read this poem, I thought there wasn’t much to it, Mullen probably just grabbed a thesaurus and put synonyms together and structured the lines so that it would become a poem. I thought it was impossible to get some sort of meaning out of it, but I was completely wrong.

We established in class, several ideas that I agree with. The lines of synonyms actually have some sort of order, one that can be considered to be modeled after a social hierarchy. It starts out with words that describe “the wealthy,” or people higher up on the social ladder. They are “cozy” in their “shelters” and “protected concealed” most likely in gated communities. At the fifth to sixth lines the words begin to transition into descriptive words of the middles class. Immediately after that line, Mullen begins a description of the lower class. It was interesting to notice that there are less lines describing the “wealthy” and more lines describing the “poverty-stricken.” This led to the reasoning that there are wealthy people but they are the few compared to the majority of people who live under “uncomfortable” situations.

I was beginning to see that this poem had so much potential for interpretations. I could sort of make a connection between the title of the poem and its overall meaning. Obviously there seems to be some sort of contradiction because the title says a classless society yet for many reasons, when I read this poem the most dominate aspect of it is that there seems to a rough description of a social hierarchy which deals much with status and class. Since Mr. Roget’s Neighborhood is a reference to Roget’s Thesaurus, perhaps Mullen is trying to show that these words that she puts together are not just words. Usually, we do not see words as being separated into groups of words that are better than other words; that is the classless society. However, when the meanings are considered, can we truly say that because this word would describe the wealthy is a word higher up on some status quo for words? Mullen cleverly manipulates the words and structures them so that make a status quo out of something that is classless. In the end we forget that they are just words.

'Pataphysique and Oulipo

I was just reading the wikipedia article on OuLiPo when I stumbled on something called " 'Pataphysics ". From my understanding of the article, 'pataphysics is a sort of meta-meta-physics, and a parody of modern science and philosophy. It turns out that Oulipo started out as a sort of sub-committee at the College de 'Pataphysique, and so I was wondering what the relation was between the movement and its ideological origin.

Even the central tenets of the "college" are paradoxical and slightly amusing: "The real 'pataphysicist takes nothing seriously, except 'Pataphysics... which consists of taking nothing seriously." The whole movement is almost a big joke, and yet it produced some very pertinent and powerful work, for example, the Oulipo that we have been studying. This just goes to show that parody and criticism truly are powerful and constructive tools in the literary world.

Something I noticed, however, is how similar this whole abstractions of abstractions concept (the "meta-metaphysics") sounds to Marianne Moore's "works so derivative as to become unintelligible". In the end, I find that the Oulipo poets sometimes differ only very little from those poets who like to fill their work with quasi-indecipherable metaphors and all sorts of esoteric literary allusions.

While Moore criticizes poets who go so far from reality as to make it disappear amongst the complexity of the allegory, I think that the Oulipo poets sometimes stray so far from the standard forms of poetry that the initial concept is swallowed up in the lists of words or structural games. With moderation, the constraints that these poets use can yield very interesting results, for example, Mullen's "Mantra for a Classless Society" seemed to have a point, and it was analyzable, to some extent. On the other hand, "O 'Tis William" just seems like silly wordplay, and I find it almost impossible to delve into the poem's meaning or point at all, I'm just not interested!

Oulipo, and writing with constraints, represent some interesting concepts, and I like how these poets and authors tried to explore the language mathematically and systematically, but sometimes it just seems like they go over the top. The idea is interesting, (for example, the N+7 thing can produce some interesting results), but the actual product is not necessarily a literary triumph (Anyone can look through a dictionary and systematically change the words of a poem.

N+7: The most useless constraint ever?

So I read the inside cover of Sleeping with the Dictionary hoping that it would lend some clarity to Mullen’s incomprehensible poems (it didn’t), and in doing so I ran across the N+7 technique. The technique was pioneered by the Oulipo; and if Wikipedia is correct, it involves looking up each noun of a text in the dictionary, and replacing it with the noun seven entries after it. I figured I would give this a try, so I used Dickinson’s poem “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” in hopes that I could lighten the poem’s mood in the process. I also made it completely incomprehensible (is that a success?).


After great paintings, a formal fellatio comes --
The Nest Eggs sit ceremonious, like Tommy Guns --
The stiff Hearth questions was it He, that bore,
And Yoga, or Cerebral Cortex before?

The Fellows, mechanical, go round --
Of Ground Squirrels, or Aircraft, or Ought --
A Wooden weakfish
Regardless grown,
A Queen continental shelf, like a stop --

This is the Housefly of Leaf Mold --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing perspectives, recollect the Snowfall --
First -- Chinatown -- then Subalpine -- then the leviathan –


Of all constraints, the N+7 technique seems like the most ridiculous and pointless. What is the goal of this constraint? It doesn’t introduce anything truly original; it’s just a careless combination of an already good text and the dictionary. But at least it transformed Dickinson's poem into a slightly more entertaining read!

Poetry in Art, in Music

I was at a friend's house last night just chilling and hanging around. Some of the walls had paintings on them, done by one of the house mates, and one in particular caught my eye. My first thought when I looked at it was modernist. The correlation was striking to me; it just seemed to scream modernist. But why? How could a painting remind me of poetry? It's hard to articulate this because I can't really do justice to describing the painting, but I'll do my best. The painting was definitely abstract; that might have been one of the cues I took as a relation to modernist poetry. However, I could make out something. It seemed to be a lone eye, looking into what I could only guess was a small mirror, and behind the eye was an object I could not discern. It was as if this painting was just presenting something to me to be appreciated, and not necessarily something to be read too deeply into. It was not a conventional beauty, as of a landscape of a meadow with a stream or something of a more "romantic nature". It was just a beauty you could appreciate for its own - kind of hard to describe.

Additionally, a lot of the music I listen to reminds me of poetry, in particular modernist poetry (I listen to a lot of weird music). For example, this song by Mum, titled "We Have A Map of the Piano":

Please don't flow so fast
You little mountain hum
I'll take a bottle down to you

Please don't flow this fast
You hold a little hum
I'll bottle sounds of me for you

Please don't flow so fast
You little mountain din
I'll bottle piano sounds from you

Please don't flow so fast
You little mountain noise
I'll close my eyes and bite your tongue

If I were to to have read this in a poetry book, I would not blink for a second and think this actually wasn't a poem, but lyrics to a song. It just seems like something I would read from a more modernist poet. I really can't for the life of me discern what is actually being talked about here, and the title is strange to because nowhere is there a mention of a map in the lyrics. And why the deviation in form in the last line of the last stanza? What does all this mean? Ah, maybe I'll never know, and in that respect it just reminds me so much of modernist poetry. It is beautiful, but perhaps you're just not quite sure why.

18th century fairy tale Variant

After reading Mullen’s European Folk Tale Variant, I was surprised at how she could tell the folk tale in such a serious tone, as if Goldilocks committed a very serious crime. I guess breaking and entering into the bears’ house isn’t something that we should teach little children but the way Mullen tells this story is just hilarious. It reminds me of the poem that Williams wrote about eating plums, except he apologized for a seemingly serious situation in a light tone while Mullen told a light story in a grave tone. After reading the variant, I tried to come up with my own variation on a story.

Once upon a time, in a little town in the meadows lived a lonely lupine who knew nothing of the world’s evils. One day, a family of swine moved in to the forest not far from the meadow. Upon noticing the lone lupine, the King of the swine came up with a malicious plan. He sent his little swine soldiers to the meadow, and there they started their construction, their trap.

As they were building, the King went to the young lupine and told him of the little swine friends that would befriend this friendless lupine. Upon learning this, this naïve lupine went to find his new neighbors, bringing with him home baked cookies, hoping that he could make some friends. He walks along, and sees the first house, an unstable house made of dry stalks. He then walks up to the house and begins to knock on the door. Suddenly, a gust of wind comes from nowhere and blows the house down. Out from the house dashes a young swine who runs to the nearest house. The young lupine, bewildered by the swine’s action, decides to follow him to the next house. This house, like the one before, is also a little rickety and shaky but could withstand the wind. This time, the lupine successfully goes up and knocks on the door. But the house couldn’t withstand his knock and fell apart like the first house. This time, from the shambles, rushes out two swine. These swine dash toward the third house, which is made of red stone slabs.

So the lupine decides to visit the third house. After knocking on the door, a voice inside tells the lupine that the door is broken and that if the lupine wants to be friends with him, he should come in through the chimney like Santa Claus. Upon hearing this, the lupine becomes very excited because thinks he can finally make a friend. So he climbs the roof and too his dismay, he falls into a pot of boiling water and dies. And gathered around the pot, are the three little piglets, with napkins around their necks and forks in their hands.

The End

Are changes really necessary?

As the conventional wisdom goes: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

But the modernist and the Oulipo are anything but conventional; they defy the traditional style. The modernist focuses on the changes in semantics and the Oulipo on formalism. But are such changes really necessary?

Williams argues that as times changes, so do people’s ideas and perceptions. The associations that the people make from the olden times become anachronistic and those associations are unreal and inapplicable to people in different age-- Sounds perfectly rational to me.

As for the Oulipo, Lionnais questions tradition of repeating the same forms: “Must one adhere to the old tricks of the trade and obstinately refuse to imagine new possibilities? The partisans of the status quo don’t hesitate to answer in the affirmative” (Lipo: First Manifesto). The restrictions are no longer useful, hence, should not be placed. Formalism gives rise to meaning, and if it’s there for the sake of being there—well, it’s unnecessary. Again, perfectly rational.

So why are works from such school of thoughts so difficult to comprehend? We’ve been ingrained with the ideas of the traditionalists. We need those high sounding interpretation and those easier meters like the iambic pentameter. In that sense, the old associations and the old forms are NOT anachronistic, we’ve been learning them! Newness is destroying our ability to think! It is ironic how the modern poems are suppose adapt to the modern thinking, but when we think of poetry, we still refer back to Dickinson, Shakespeare, or even as far back as Homer.

So why change? It does break away from clichés and repetition of the old stuff. It does give depths to poetry when there’s actually meaning in form and in associations. But at what cost?

Times are indeed changing, but it is more than just the evolution of poetry. The common stigma of modern poetry is poor and poets are not honored as greatly as Shakespeare. To the untrained ears, modern poetry is pretty much blabbering nonsense. The moderns delve into meaning differently from the traditional—and not many people are actually trained to undertake such an escapade.

However, it isn’t necessary that traditional poetry would fare any better. As times change, going to a theater to watch a play no longer is the supreme form of entertainment—entertainment is now wide and diverse. Poetry takes a back seat to what science can do—to create computers and televisions and others. Perhaps traditional poetry would catch less attention, but at least they would be spared of the ridicule from uninformed individuals.

So is it all necessary? It is ironic that Williams notes the exclusiveness of writers when they don’t follow conventional methods, yet the moderns exclude the readers from “difficult” reading material. The newness filters out those with passion for poetry and those don’t. Perhaps it is better this way.

Some strange ramblings

This week in class, we have been talking a lot about seemingly incomprehensible writing, as Harryette Mullen seems to demonstrate, and a lot about writing constraints, as seen in our reading about Oulipo. So I thought it would be interesting to try to come up with my own restraints and incomprehensible writing, similar to our free write on Wednesday. I have decided on a story to tell, the question is, can you figure out what the story is? This actually took a lot of time, since I had all these new constraints, and I didn't use the normal constraints, like grammar etc... And when you go against the normal, the almost no brainer constraints, you have to be conscious of the constraints at all times. This is what, I think, makes Mullen's writing so good, and interesting. It doesn't have to tell a story, or even make sense, it is just about experiencing the new constraints.
In my writing, some constraints that you should notice right away, are that every other word is a little scrambled, but if you think about it, it is scrambled uniformly... think back to third grade... and talking in a "new" language. Another constraint is that there are no complete sentences, just punctuation where a complete sentence would theoretically end, or to show expression. And the final constraint, I will leave to you to figure out, although I hope it would be fairly obvious. :)

Some strange ramblings
uTsideoay dark, idslay quiet,
oudlay!!! 4:40am!!!
arbagegay? heavy. leepsay,
sleep, leepsay. running,
oolcay, water, reathbay! must ebay
a, extnay scene. rolickingfay, horse, lephanteay
an-- beep! oneday dream. gHuay, bed, etway,
dry. oooay, paIn,
ffoay. feetS, lIStersbay. did ouyay
know, idn'tday. wondering, amplay,
brush, kayoay. More,
openaY. cold, onay, hot,
onay, cold. interWay,
summer, ahay. sweater, shirttay. grEen
acefay, harDeNs... Etway.
tingleS. igglegay. tap
aptay tap. iay love
ucylay. Don't iAseraY, tired. lasscay to.
arkday, light,
circles, glyuay. no asMay! lOst,
eRyvay, coNfuzled. asheslay,
none oobay. sING, andfordSAy
no lasscay. Grrrr. inkcAy,
ouch. ullenmay, what?
oooay, what, ahay, tv,
icenay. emmbarrasing,
wicetay no ay third, uchoay,
tumbling Gianay. clickeriay,
failed. rETtypay, homework,
omehay, no. Imetay, good,
eturnray, elephanTs?

Well I know what it says... do you? Here is a hint, the biggest hint is virtually the answer, which is in the unmentioned constraint.

Female Empowerment

Since we watched a video yesterday about yogurt and women getting targeted by the marketing people, I decided to look up other products that are targeting women. And these were some of the articles I ran across.



Tobacco industry targeting women
In this page, there is a picture of a woman in a superhero outfit, and the title reads, "We make Virginia Slims especially for women because they are biologically superior to men."

Pasted from : http://tobaccodocuments.org/pollay_ads/Virg16.18.html?ocr_position=hide_ocr


The second page that I found features a woman smoking a cigarette. She looks like she is a successful woman because of the atire that she is wearing ( formal business suit). The title for this picture reads, "Here's to women who can light their own cigarette."

Pasted from : http://tobaccodocuments.org/pollay_ads/Wins13.13.html?ocr_position=hide_ocr

The Cigarette companies do not want ot show that their product kills, but just wants to target women in a way that seems like they are being impowered by smoking. Is that fair?



The next place where I found women being targeted are cotton commercials.
From the article itself,

"Women buy over 80 percent of all apparel and home furnishings, and many of life's firsts happen to women between the ages of 18 and 34. They often get their first job and their first apartment, get married, have their first baby and buy their first house during this period,” Worsham says. “Each of these major events involves a heightened interest in learning new things and in purchasing textile products.”
The two new “Feel of Cotton” commercials, which premiered Presidents' Day weekend during the Olympics, feature people at work, and at play in a hotel setting, dressed in fashionable, dressy casual cotton clothing.
Using a real office and hotel, instead of a studio set, allows Cotton Incorporated to showcase a wide variety of different people all in the same kind of dressy casual cotton wear, and all dancing. Because clothing is a form of self-expression, the creators of the commercials pushed that idea of self-expression through dance."

Pasted from : http://westernfarmpress.com/mag/farming_feel_cotton_ads/


Why is this a problem? I actually saw similarities in things the yogurt lady said, and what this article was talking about. The main point of this article was that women are getting targeted by commercials because all the company wants to do is promote their products in such a way that women can automatically relate to it. People love being comfortable, and by portraying that women can wear comfortable clothes anywhere if they wear cotton, it is easy for women to fall victim to that mindset. I am not saying every women on th face of the earth would fall for this marketing scam, but if people can relate to something, that is more likely going to be in their mind, and even persuade them to buy cotton.


The list of products goes on an on. But my question is why women? Does society consider us weak that we can be exploited that easily? Whatever society thinks of women, I think we need to change the way we are viewed.

Question about Duncan

Consider “The Structure of Rime I,” by Robert Duncan, which has a “she,” named in this poem as “a woman who resembles the sentence” that the author is in the process of blindly reformatting. His conversation with this woman seems of an introspective bent; she speaks in response to his assertion that he is her “master, who [comes] to // serve.” Her words are italicized, not quoted, so we know the text stems from Duncan himself; her speech is repetitive, the sequence of rhetorical “Do I [not’s]” lead into the answer to her question “Why” do you not “take the actual world for granted.” There is a clear progression from speaker to speaker; first Duncan, then the woman, and so on, and she has the final say, focusing her tirade on his desecration of literary “Law.” “Rime II” is of a similar phrasing, but the woman vanishes; instead, we have the image of a “Lion” as a “Messenger,” but in this case Duncan shifts his focus to consider not the sentence but the source of the sentence. The final line, “the meaning of the music of the spheres” stems from the clearly dated notion that the heavens in their motion generated “music.”


The words and phrasing sound purposefully archaic. The man was writing in the 1960s, after the Modernists we’ve been reading, and yet he speaks with structure, with purpose, in words that promote the kind of “high-sounding” interpretation that Moore detested. I found it amazing that a post-Modernist writer could bring himself to give the reader even the semblance of a conclusion, a final defining thought. Yet, in “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow” that is exactly what he does. Duncan states “that is a place of first permission, // everlasting omen of what is,” bringing together the focus of “permission” and “eternal” places with the new, fully interpretable “omen of what is.” He even gives the reader structural landmarks, capitalizing the first word of each sentence – having sentences in the first place – it’s like he cares if the reader is following along. The poem itself, its setting and its thematic imagery, are meant to be decipherable; his modern perspective only comes into play through the references to “she,” the “Queen Under The Hill,” the only reference in the poem that is even partially indecipherable.


I don’t fully understand the literary regression; is Duncan trying to make a point or merely appease the average reader with 95%-decipherability? Is Duncan taking the opposite route of Williams, lulling us into a sense of complacence instead of provoking us into reading further? That sounds too paranoid; but ultimately, the older tone of his writing is what makes it stand out in the midst of the modern literature we have been reading, and knowing the reason behind his tone will greatly help me understand his poems.

As promised, a link to the video about yogurt that we discussed in class today.

The blinking cursor disease

Writing six to eight pages can be a frightening task. The beginning of my writing process usually begins with a staring contest with the infamous blinking cursor on my disturbingly blank laptop screen. Racing thoughts of my how I should embody my thoughts into words are usually marred by the overwhelming notion of writing a long six to eight pages of my defense of those thoughts.

To this day, I have difficulty starting a written piece. This isn’t only because of the length, even though that does contribute its own fear factor, but also because of my desire for my work to reflect my thought process…my ‘genius’. I know this sounds selfish and conceited, but I think that most people who want to succeed write selfishly. This perfectionist quality is a blessing and a curse. Although it takes me a long while before my fingers begin hitting the keyboard’s keys, I end up with something I’m proud of, and something others will appreciate just as much (every writer’s dream come true). It does not matter whether it’s a fear or writing a long paper or if its just a fear of putting something that you think wont reflect your clever ideas (OR probably both), starting to write has plagues many amateur writers. So the question remains: what’s the best way to start writing?

I answer with a vague, “depends on how you like to write and what you want your work to reflect.” However, the ability to begin writing begins with the writer’s courage to get past his/her own needs; in that, he/she should not be intimidated about hitting the ‘bulls-eye’ on their first shot. We do, after all, have revisions. I found that if I start my essay with random thoughts and putting down whatever comes to mind instead of writing and re-writing my first line several time, then it becomes much easier to piece my thoughts together and go over the aesthetics later (which is much easier to change than the coherence of an essay.)

This advice, while useful, is much harder than it sounds. Letting go of the mindset with which you want to write your essay and the mindset that you think will make your essay ‘good’ is a very difficult task. A writer has to learn what it means to write not for the sake of one’s own pride before he can actually write to give his/her ego a little boost. I’ve been told this a thousand times over, and I’ve only recently taken it into account; I always thought I would, in some way, compromise my essays worth. It’s most definitely a difficult thing to do, but I urge those who want an experiment to try to see if they can be more time-efficient and, perhaps, even more proud of what they write.

Done with Donne?

Not quite. I have a couple of comments and I am still wondering about how Donne is one of the Modernists' favorite poet.

Ever since T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” we have been reading modern poetry, almost nonstop. I have come to conclude that Modern poetry is very unique, abstract, and almost random or spontaneous at times. From Williams to Moore, and from Hughes to O’Hara, poetry has notably changed from our much earlier readings of Hopkins or Bryant. After reading Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara, we transitioned into reading John Donne, a more conventional writer, at least I thought so. Class discussion revealed to me that Donne was actually an inspiration to modernist writers. At first I thought how could that be? I thought that the Modernists were against the traditional forms and were in search of something new and refreshing, something entirely new and unique. After reading a couple of Donne’s poem, I felt pretty sure that those poems were pretty traditional. The topics were not as traditional as I thought because of the way he executed his work, but his use of language was.

The Modernists succeeded at bringing out new material in the literary field but at the same time, were still able to admire the work of Donne, seemingly the antithesis of Modernist work. It seems almost impossible, but a closer analysis at Donne’s techniques and style is able to lead a reader towards seeing Donne in a new light, perhaps the light in which Modernist writers saw Donne. Donne’s poems were love poems, though not straight forward, they can easily be identified as being love themed. It doesn’t seem like a topic that modernist writers would be interested in since most of what we’ve read that were part of the modern era focused on societal issues, death, and personal thoughts. From the modern poetry we have read, I couldn’t really grasp the main ideas of the poems. I rather enjoyed the fact that Donne’s poems were not filled with seemingly random comments with potential high sounding interpretations, but has high sounding interpretations that can be put up for discussion.

Even though I was confused about how the Modernists came to admire Donne, I tried to make sense of that possibility. In class, I tried to reason that out by saying that Donne seems a bit sarcastic. However, I now feel that he has somewhat of an insulting tone, which I took as sarcastic, that is extremely witty. The cleverness of his poems could possibly be the reason why the modernists admired his work. There are bits of humor throughout his poems even though the topic of love seems rather serious. “The Sun Rising” was amusing. Donne would sound as if he is insulting the sun for waking him. He even goes as far as undermining the Sun’s powerful rays by say that “[he] could eclipse and cloud them with a wink.” How bold!

The Obscurity of Poems

I have to admit, that when I first came into this class I guess I was what you call "naive" when it came to poetic interpretation. I had this preconception that, no matter how confounding or obscure a poem may seem to be at first, at the heart of it there was always simplicity and clear meaning. Then we hit the modernists: Moore, Eliot, and Williams. Their poems took obscurity to a whole new level. At least with Williams, a large portion of his poetry was laced with prose so we had a general sense of where he was going, but often with Moore and Eliot we just had vague, scattered fragments of ideas as to what they were talking about. My friend once asked me if we were reading poetry from the likes Dickenson, Frost, Poe, Keats, etc, but I told him that right now we were reading more modernist poetry. He asked me what that was like and I, in a somewhat cynically joking way, replied something along the lines of "modernist poetry is the art of taking the written English language and obsfucating it so as to be completely incomprehensible, and then calling it poetry." Obviously this is an exageration, but there were times when I felt that some lines were so nonsensical as to be almost arbitrarily written that way based on impulse alone.

While I was considering what poem(s) to choose for the last paper, I decided to read some of the introduction to The Waste Land. I found this, Eliot's view on The Waste Land towards the end of his life, rather interesting: "I think that in the early poems it was a question . . . of not being able to -- having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn't have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible. That type of obscurity comes when a poet is still at the stage of learning how to use language. you have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage . . . . In The Waste Land I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying."

It's a little shocking, although possibly not entirely surprising, that even Eliot himself admits he didn't bother to understand everything he was writing. While this by no means renders The Waste Land just an arbitrary work of nonsense, it does bring up the question of whether or not you can truly understand what the poet is intending to express (assuming that they first understand what they're trying to express!).

Assignment for Monday

Decide which text(s) you're going to use for your final paper. Select two passages you intend to discuss and say why they seem important.

Poem Compilations

So I've begun to notice something about my preferences in poetry. For some reason, I've grown a taste for these compilations of short poems that we've been assigned to read. But I wonder why I feel this way. I'm sure I'm not basing this preference on subject matter that the poem entails, or deeper meanings, or poetic crafts and techniques.

Looking at it, I'm mainly basing this preference on the style of the poem. And I've come to this conclusion: I am a fan of the short poems.

In today's reading (11/13), we had to read the "Loraine Niedecker Collected Works" of which contained numerous short (and at times very short) poems. And I found this particularly pleasing to read. So I've decided to investigate...

When we eat food, we take it it in chunks. We take bites, small or large, but typically manageable bites. We go on to chew this food, where it is further broken down by enzymes within the saliva in our mouths. So by the time we swallow the food, we've converted it into components that is easy to digest.

I think this is a perfect analogy to my preference in poetry. I like my poetry in small, manageable chunks, that I can easily digest. When confronted with an entire watermelon ("Jerboa") and slices of watermelon ("Montage of a Dream Deferred") I would easily prefer the latter. It may just be a matter of taste, but I like my poems (and food) in comprehensible parts.

I find it helpful to have a pause in the text, with a point to stop and reflect on what I have just read. When the author gives us a point at which to separate ideas, we too are able to differentiate between ideas and information that we are given. We, as readers, are able to better analyze the text, and thus have a better understanding and experience of the poem as a whole.

I like slices, not whole pies :)

SA #10: Duncan

Write a paragraph describing Duncan's style. You may find it helpful to compare his style to O'Hara's, but this is not required.

Music as Poetry

As opposed to some people who listen to music for the overall sound, I’ve found that I focus on the lyrics. I often find the songs more satisfying than written poetry, because it’s as if the poet is reading his or her own work, with accompanying music to provide further entertainment and meaning. Most artists I would not consider poets (I don’t consider songs explicitly referring to sex, drugs, and rock & roll poetry), but occasionally there are a few meaningful and entertaining songs (those two adjectives rarely cross paths). I’ll mention Lucy in the “Sky with Diamonds” by the Beatles as an example because it seems everyone in our class is desperate for poetry that describes a drug trip (http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/beatles/lucy+in+the+sky+with+diamonds_10026681.html).
The subject of this blog post, however, is a much less famous song by Leonard Cohen, “Democracy.” The lyrics are too long to include, so I’ll just give a link: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/leonardcohen/democracy.html (Also the source for all the quotes). I’ve always pondered the meaning of this song, so I figured I would analyze it for my blog post. Here goes:
The song argues that democracy in the USA doesn’t actually exist. Cohen describes the country through homophobia, and class, gender, and racial inequalities (stanza 1 & 2), suggesting that America isn’t exactly they home of freedom and equality it’s played out to be. He mentions Tiananmen Square and “wars against disorder,” (stanza 1) which brings to mind tyrannical governments. Also, he repeats the line “Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.” to indicate that democracy isn’t yet present. He makes several religious allusions that possibly hint at America’s religious roots, and he states: “It’s coming through a crack in the wall;/ on a visionary flood of alcohol;/ from the staggering account/ of the Sermon on the Mount.” It seems as if Cohen might also be questioning the judgment of our founding fathers by introducing the idea of alcohol into the creation of the constitution.
The majority of the poem serves as a description of America’s current state of affairs from Cohen’s perspective, but the last stanza represents his opinion. He says “I love the country but I can’t stand the scene/…I’m junk but I’m still holding up/ this little wild bouquet:/ Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.” Even though he recognizes the turmoil within his country, he’s still patriotic and hopeful for the future.
The one downside I’ve noticed with artists like Leonard Cohen can be paralleled with that of Marianne Moore. While Moore’s originality and depth inhibits the clarity of her work, Cohen’s relative poetic abilities (with respect to other musical artists) hinders the catchiness of his music. For example, I don’t think this song could ever be as popular or catchy as Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl,” but I still prefer Cohen to that mind-numbing garbage!

beat poets

It may have been a minor discussion in class, but I also was unsure of what a beat poet was, so I did more research into it. Some of what I found was covered in class, but I figured I would just relay all the information that I got.

Beat poets originated in the 1940s in NYC and on the west coast, but San Francisco became the heart of it in the 1950s. The purpose of this new form of writing was to "changing consciousness and defying convention." It turns out that drugs, hallucinogenic ones, were often used by beat poets, and we know how our class enjoys discussing poets and drugs. Buddhism was also followed by many members of the beat generation.

One of the beat generations most famous works, Howl and Other Poems, was brought to court for its obscenity, though the judge ruled that the book was not obscene (upholding freedom of speech) and brought a lot of attention to the beat poets.
(http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5646)

It seems that many of the different periods of poetry, like the beat generation or the Harlem Renaissance etc, were in response to social turmoil and the writing was supposed to represent a defying of conventions.
This is definitely good for poetry. With all these writers continually "defying convention" we are sure to continue to get something new out of writing and poetry, not just the same old structure and topics. Good thing all (well, most) artists want to be different, we, the readers/viewers get something new every time. :)

Romantic? Cheesy?

In class the other day, we talked about how John Donne’s poems are very different from the poems we have been reading for the past few months. First of all, Donne’s poems are one of the few poems we’ve read that uses “thee” or “thou” instead of “you”, reminding me of Shakespeare. An interesting thing someone said (this might not be exact but is something along the lines) was how Donne’s poems are a break from reading about death or the modernist’s theories on literature. His poems are about love and his lovers and seem more sincere than the other poems we’ve been reading. In my opinion, his poems are a little cheesy, especially the one called “The Good-Morrow”.

When I read this poem, I pictured the poem as a love poem some person wrote for his girlfriend or person he admired. The poem can be deemed as pretty sincere but some parts of it are over sincere that I think it becomes fake. There are a few lines that makes me to think this.

1. “I wonder…what thou and I/ Did, till we loved?” (Lines1-2)-This question is pretty easy to answer, eat and sleep of course! Those things are pretty important, so is going to the bathroom.
2. “If ever any beauty I did see,/ Which I desired, and got, ‘twas but a dream of thee.” (Lines 6-7)-Wow your lover must be really flattered by your comment; I really hope she’s beautiful. I guess beauty really is in the eyes of the beholder.
3. “For love, all love of other sights controls” (Line 10)-if this line means that love controls what they see or if they only see each other then that’s a little scary. I would want to be able to see other things, other people.
4. “My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,” (Line 15)-Your face must be really small. This reminds me of those really cheesy and fake cartoons where the character’s eyes turn into heart shapes.
5. “If our two loves be one, or, thou and I/ Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.” (Line 20-21). There’s no such thing as immortality, not unless your freeze yourself. I don’t think they had that kind of technology back then.

So my point is, if you look at parts of the poem from this point of view, the poem is a little cheesy and fake. It really seems that Donne is trying to be romantic but is failing, pretty badly. This could have been considered romantic during his time, (imagine Shakespeare with his Romeo and Juliet) but if we read it now, its cheesy.

Why the sun?

On Friday our class discussed the poem "The Sun Rising" and why the speaker was addressing the sun about his love life. I am still not sure why the speaker was talking to the sun, but there are many theories. Personally I think he was annoyed about morning coming... I mean a lot of people hate morning, they would rather stay asleep in their dream world, or just skip right to the afternoon. So I think initially the speaker was just responding as a lot of us would by telling the sun to just go away. But as he began to talk to the sun, maybe he just kinda went with it, and continued the conversation as if with a person who would care enough to listen.

Another theory, one discussed in class, was that he has some insecurities, and feels the need to prove to the sun that he is better than the sun, and in talking "smack" to the sun which can not reply he may temporarily feel better about himself. This would make sense since he was trying to make himself look more powerful or better than the sun by saying, I can close my eyes and you no longer affect me, that is how little power you have. However I think there is a major flaw in that argument, for if the speaker was awakened by the sun, that must mean that the sun can penetrate at least somewhat through your eyelids, otherwise he would not have been wakened by the light. And it must have been the light because the sun does not make sound, although I suppose it would have made him too warm. But we still know that we can detect light even with our eyes closed.

In class we talked a lot about what the speaker was saying, and why. For example, we decided that the speaker was in his own little world, and the sun was interrupting him, so he said look, if your not going to go away, revolve around us, because we are the world. We would try to address why the sun? but end up talking about why what he said instead. I don't think that we ever really reached a conclusion on why he chose the sun to talk to instead of his lover or a friend. I think he was really talking to himself in a sense, talking out loud about his feelings in a way that doesn't make him vulnerable. If he talked to a real person about his relationship or the world he created, he becomes more vulnerable to criticism etc... but if he talks to something that doesn't respond, the worst that could happen is that he stares into the sun too long and is temporarily blind. This relates also to the idea that he has insecurities, and why he has to prove his worth to the sun. If he is that insecure of course he won't want to talk to an actual person that responds to what he says.

So I think that the speaker is speaking to the sun for the simple reasons that he is initially just annoyed with it for disturbing him, but also because he seems to be an insecure person that wouldn't talk about any of the things he says with a real person, nor who could prove his worth to anything that can respond. So the sun is a convenient opponent, that is already on his mind and that doesn't respond.

O'Hara: O'Fun

Imagine yourself a couple of years from now (or even now) taking a sip of coffee or biting into a sandwich at your favorite cafe. What would you be doing? Reading a book, perhaps? Or would you be watching the world around you? Frank O'Hara does just that. In Lunch Poems, O'Hara writes many poems about his life and the life around him. It could be about traveling or just about some of the people and places he knows in Manhattan. Unfortunately, the settings of the poems seem to vary a lot, and not always "lunch" time. I wonder if he writes the poems or thinks about them during lunch. Either way, his poetry seems to be very personal--like I said in class, a diary. Although I could not understand about 30 of his 37 poems, O'Hara is not afraid to write what is on his mind. For example, he seems to be really interested in an actress named Lana Turner and references to her a couple of times throughout the book. There is even a full poem devoted to her and her collapse.

What do I like about O'Hara? I can totally see myself being in his situation. I would not necessarily write confusing poems like him, but the process he goes through. I can see myself in a couple of years finding a favorite cafe or mini-market and the ponder about life's questions and the world for hours on end. If only the day had a little more time. I don't know if I would actually write poetry, but I know I would jot things down. Actually, I have done it a couple times now. I would gather some food at Pat Brown's or Ramona's and find a nice place to sit and relax.

Then all these thoughts pop into my mind:
- Where did he get those shoes?
- What kind of building is Wurster?
- How is my mom doing?
- Self: when are you going to do your homework?

Sometimes I would get to some deep questions:
- What is my purpose on earth? (This has gotten somewhat annoying now)
- If Jesus were here today, how would people act differently? Why?
- What could I be doing to help make this world better?

I know, it's pretty random at times, but I just like thinking about certain things in my life. I wonder if O'Hara feels the same. His style of writing and choice of topics seem to be over my head, but I wonder if some of the things that pop in my mind may be a little bizarre to him. It would be nice to ask him a couple of questions:
- Where do you get your ideas from?
- How would you describe your style of poetry?
- What's your motivation or your reasons for writing these lunch poems?

I highly doubt O'Hara would write such things for income, but I also don't think it's simply for enjoyment. In my opinion, I think O'Hara has a deeper reason for his poetry. Maybe he is searching for a message in his life, a sign to tell him where to go.

So I ask you again, imagine yourself thinking about life, the people and events around you. What would you think about? What would you do? Let's say you had some free time for a couple of hours, but you were alone. Would you write Lunch poems?

Are Idioms Empty Associations?

Williams bashes traditionalists for making empty associations such as the color of the sky to the emotion, but aren’t all of us making similar associations when we use idioms in our daily conversations? Do we lack originality and have to borrow cliché phrases?

Consider this sentence: Marley kicked the bucket.

So he kicked the bucket. Was it full? Was it empty? Did he make a mess? Oh, he died… what?

I cannot begin to fathom where this idiom comes from, but it makes no sense to me. Yet, I still find it acceptable and have probably used it once or twice. How is the action of kicking the bucket dying? How can an overturned bucket mean exactly the same as dead as a doornail?

Now, consider the following sentences:

It’s a dog-eat-dog world. (I have not even attended a dogfight; I can’t imagine what a dog eating another dog would look like).

No use crying over spilt milk. (As a child, I did not like milk. I would be overjoyed to NOT drink milk, so why would I cry?)

So what? Get over it. (Climb out of “depression”? Ha, that’s clever).

You’re in over your head. (That’s unpleasant. Am I talking to a drowning person? If so, that person technically can’t hear me, since sound waves travel through air, and s/he seems to be in some kind of liquid).

Keep an eye on him. (I wish I can perceive two visual fields instead of one).

Break a leg. (Sure, but I don’t want to be charged for assault).

When in Rome, do as Romans do. (Sorry, can’t speak Italian. Wish I can, though).

All right, let’s do this. It’s sink or swim time. (I would rather float than do either of those. I suppose I’m dead weight on a team.)

What? That was completely out of the blue. (Out of the blue sky? Out of the blue ocean? Out of the Bluetooth Wi-Fi range? Hum).

So I plagiarize. I lack imagination—good thing I’m not a poet.

The Election...

So I couldn't really think of anything relating to poetry to write about, mostly because of all the excitement of the election I guess...So I am going to write about the election! yay...

I have to admit I was really pessimistic about the election, I had this feeling that McCain was going to win (no offense if any of you are McCain supporters....?), and I didn't want to get my hopes up like I did the last two elections. I was a little (ok, A LOT) surprised when, all of a sudden after a commercial break ABC declared that Obama was going to win. I thought that it was going to take all night to declare a winner, and I was also surprised at how much of a landslide he won by.

Anyways, although I have never particularly liked McCain, I thought that his concession speech was so gracious and amazing and it actually seemed like he meant it. (By the way, have you guys ever noticed how whenever the audience starts yelling hateful remarks about Obama, McCain has always told them to stop and quiet down, whereas Sarah Palin just laughs and smiles? Ugh!)

Listening to Obama's acceptance speech was so inspiring and I was so proud of America watching his speech and all his supporters. In my ethnic studies class just last week, our GSI told us that he was speaking to a black man who lived during the Civil Rights Movement, and he said that never in his lifetime did he think that he would live to see a black president. (Much like Obama's story about the old woman who cast her vote for him)

I recently saw a post card on postsecret.com (I'm sure some of you guys know what that is), and it made me a little sad and a little worried:



(Including the part that is cut off, it says "It's only a matter of time..." I hope that this is expressing a concern and not a threat...

OH MY GOD

Im sorrybut I have to write this
OBAMA IS OUR PRESIDENT!!!!

Interested in film?

The San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, which runs every March, has just started a Student Delegate program. Whether or not you're interested in committing to an intense schedule of watching films and meeting directors etc., I highly recommend the festival. They screen films at the PFA here on campus as well as at various locations in the city. It's a good opportunity to see new independent films from the United States and several Asian countries.

Purpose:

The aim of the SFIAAFF Student Delegate Program is to engage students with Asian and Asian American cinema, as well as to cultivate future generations of scholars, artists, administrators and activists who are invested in the field of Asian American Media.

Opportunities:

Students who are chosen to participate in the Student Delegate Program will have the opportunity for plenty of interaction with the 2009 SFIAAFF, including meeting with filmmakers, attending screenings, events and panels, and writing a blog and article for the festival website.

Schedule:

The Student Delegate Program runs March 12-22, 2009, with an Orientation meeting on March 7 and post-festival meeting on March 28.

Applying:

Applicants from all fields are encouraged to apply, from film majors to non-film majors - in fact, the most important qualities that SFIAAFF seeks in its program applicants are a love for film and a desire to share and cultivate that passion, and the the ability to interact with other students and festival guests. Because there are
only 6 spots available, applicants must fully commit to a rigorous program of screenings and discussions.

Deadlines:

The deadline to apply for this program is DECEMBER 31, 2008.

Contact:

For more information on either the program, CAAM, or SFIAAFF, please visit our website at www.asianamericanmedia.org, e-mail Geraldine Ah-Sue at gahsue(at)asianamericanmedia(dot)org or Christine Kwon at christine(at)asianamericanmedia(dot)org.

Weird thoughts

Since the beginning of this class, we have read a lot of poetry, and I mean A LOT of it. And whenever we read any poem, I have always wondered if all the poems that we read were converted into movies, how would that go? Does anyone ever get a movie playing in their head whether it is funny or serious whenever we read something in class? Well I do, and I just thought I should share some of my movie ideas.
Upon a Spider catching a Fly
This is what I pictured throughout the poem, a little tiny fly crying his eyes out because he is stuck in a spider web, and a spider trying to calm the fly down sitting right next to the fly, and for some reason, I always imagined the spider drinking coffee (Yes weird I know). And then out of no where, I pictured a giant cage falling on top of the fly and the spider and squishing them both (SAD :’[ ) and having the magical music playing in the background.

The Wasteland
For this one, I pictured one person who can like teleport to different places, and he is in his room playing with his teleportation skills, and he like accidently ends up in all the different narrations that we see in The Wasteland. And I kind of made it like Dante’s Inferno where Dante learns various lessons when he passes through Hell. So our teleporter learns different lessons from all the different narrators.

Finally Lunch Poems
My last movie is just a guy in the picture, and he is just sitting there on a bench in Central Park in Manhattan, and everything that he sees, he writes down. But as soon as he writes one thought, he gets a vision (like you know those crazy future/past vision people) and the visions are all the deep thinking ideas that most people would not want to think about. And everything that does not make sense in the poem is like his vision so nobody except for him understands it.

Yes I am very weird and I don’t know how I came up with all these ideas. I hope you like it though and leave me some comments.

Understanding Poetry

To understand a work (of art, of literature, of music) one must first tap into the mind of the author (in our case) and realize his/her motivations in writing what he/she did. As readers, we must appreciate what was going on in their lives to try to understand what the author wanted us to understand, instead of proposing ideas that have little proof of validity. I mean things like location (when they wrote it), mood, political and societal situation. Most of the works we read, and I venture to say most written works are just a projection of human emotion. Human emotion is under the influence of all the things of life: the weather, where we are when we write, whether we have a tasty snack next to us when we write…, I suppose it can be said that it is the puppet of life.
Let me explain. Getting in the mindset of the author, and by that I mean imagining that we live in their time and write where they write, gives the reader great power in trying to understand the authors message. For example, knowing that Emily Dickinson lived most of her life locked in her room, writing her poetry there (according to Wikipedia), I would guess that she was an emotional wreck, or at very least mentally or emotionally skewed. Thus, her poetry must be a projection of her emotional state…her poetry deals a lot with death and distress.
I write this blog not to discuss Emily Dickinson’s bedroom life…, but to relate it somehow to our current reading assignment: Frank O’Hara’s Lunch poems. It seems the consensus has been that they random, confusing, boring. Maybe this is because readers don’t understand what Williams message is in his collection of poetry that seems to be about nothing. Or maybe I’m entirely wrong, and people do understand, but just don’t like it very much. Either way, I’m going to try to piece the things together.
What do we know about O’Hara? He wrote these poems while outside on the (what I can only assume) noisy streets of New York during lunchtime. We also read his poetry immediately following our selections of modernist poetry. Based on his style, I would assume that he took after modernistic style.
This is all I know of O’Hara. These factors suggest that O’Hara found meaning in every day, mundane, things. It can be said that he found banality interesting. Perhaps he decided to write about these banal events because he thinks that people have forgotten how to see beauty in them. Perhaps that is O’Hara’s message: to find beauty in what people have made seem ugly with time.

Some more thoughts on Williams

Here’s an interesting tidbit that popped up online; it’s part of an interview with a prize-winning poet who talks about William Carlos Williams, at least briefly.


“… I remember someone saying that there are four jobs of the writer.
One is to say what happened, and one is to critique what happens in the world, and one is to imagine new things, and I think the fourth was, to make an interesting object. And, it's true, I think that probably that work of imagination is just as important as saying what is, though, there's a whole literature in the 20th Century -- especially the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and maybe William Carlos Williams, that argues that saying "what is," is itself an act of imagination.”


The article made me aware of a major assumption I’ve built into my reading of Williams’ poetry; I read Spring and All expecting that in responding to Eliot he would break from Eliot’s incomprehensible style. I read modern poetry just as anticipated by Williams’ in his introduction; I am part of the mob to whom the plagiarists of reality speak. I want poetry explained to me – there is enough confusion in the world and I am not yet so disillusioned that Williams and Eliot make sense to me.


Is that the crux of the problem? Is it that modern poetry arose into an era of disillusionment and its relevance or clarity has been marred by the intervening years? I feel like before I even pick up a poem I am being asked to assume it is good – because it has been read before and rated acceptable by other readers. How can this be justified? Poetry is supposed to speak to me, and yes, on the one hand perhaps I have not yet been taught how to listen, but it is also possible that maybe the poems are just not relevant anymore. How can poems built to be incomprehensible clarify my worldview? Isn’t it possible to be clear AND thought-provoking?


Maybe the problem is that I expect too much of modern poetry; there are four jobs for poets, according to the poet interviewed; they must “say what happened,” “critique what happens in the world,” “imagine new things,” and “make an interesting object.” Williams sweeps the third category, but he doesn’t really delve into the past or future, leaving those realms to reality, to the plagiarists. Are the four jobs mutually exclusive? Does a great poet necessarily have to optimize around all of them?


This idea that Williams’ has, that reality is a copy, and that new ideas come only from outside reality – it seems so arrogant to me. So many of the advances in bioengineering are founded on nature – on understanding a previously unknown signaling pathway, designed by natural, real processes, and the like. We cannot truly progress past reality until we understand the reality we are in; otherwise, where is our reference point for originality? I refer instead to the idea of imagination as simply tangent to reality – there can be a common point of intersection between a new idea and the copy-cat world of reality, but given a large enough interval of, say, time, we find that the new idea is no longer simply a copy of the copy; instead, it has diverged.


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/insider/entertainment/jan-june08/hass_05-05.html

Just about a week ago, we began our reading and analysis on a collection of Langston Hughes’ poems Montage of a Dream Deferred. I read it and could not see the relationship between all the poems. The only exception was with the poem “Warning” and “Warning: Augmented,” which seems very much obvious. I hadn’t a clue what to look for, everything seemed so scattered. However, when a cinematic montage was introduced, I went back to the collection of poems and reread it to try to see if there was some kind of chronological order that would provide the same effects of a cinematic montage. I rather liked that the concept of a cinematic montage of brought up. I’ve watched many movies and never really noticed the common use of a montage. I never thought much of those scenes and its significance, just knowing that progress for the character being depicted was made and the passage of time was occurring. It’s funny how cinematic montage was brought up in relation to literature.

During my reread of Hughes’ collection, I kept in mind the montage that I was looking for and tried to make connections. I am not sure whether I was purposely making up those connections to a montage because that was what I was looking for, but I began to notice it. I felt as if these poems were about a single person’s experience, even though there are more than one voice in quite a few of the poems. It seems to follow a person’s life. We discussed in class about the Harlem Renaissance of roughly the 1920s. That was the time period, if I recall correctly, known as the Progressive Era? Things were beginning to change and an important topic was equality. Montage of a Dream Deferred starts off with probably a description of the move up North after the American Civil War. As I continued to read the poems, I noticed that many topics were in some kind of order; I thought perhaps modeling after the events of the Progressive era. The poems then lead up to the final poems “World War II.” It made a little bit more sense in thinking about the montage in this collection of poems, but I still have doubts.

Because I was still a bit doubtful of my conclusion, I thought there would be a possibility of the montage applied to just the individual poems. “Deferred” was the specific poem I looked to, in order to find the montage effect. This poem did indeed, elicit a sort of scene-after-scene effect of different people’s stories. These lines describing the different people were quick and a reader with montage in mind, can definitely picture a cinematic montage occurring as the reading continued.

What is and What Isn't Poetry?

As the semester has gone by, the nature of the poetry we've been reading has changed. For the first month we read what I would consider more "conventional" poetry (more on the definition of conventional later), from Hopkins and Dickinson to Traherne and Bryant. Then we hit the great wall that is "The Waste Land". From there on, the poetry we read seemed to take a marked shift in content and style, to the world of the modernists. Lately, we've been reading poetry that have to do more with everyday things in life, as in "Montage of a Dream Deferred" and "Lunch Poems".

"Lunch Poems" in particular seems to break from the more traditional style of poetic writing. We've seen prose before in poetry, like in William's "Spring and All", but that was distinctly separated from his poems disperesed throughout the work. Reading "Lunch Poems", on the other hand, seems to me almost like an episodic story written without regards to grammar or punctuation, a conflation of poetry and prose. It's like reading someone's diary or blog post, in which they kind of just stream their thoughts, but O'Hara adds some poetic flair that kind of makes you contemplate whether what you're reading is poetry or prose. Take, for instance, Personal Poem (32), in which O'Hara describes walking around at lunchtime, passing places and describing seemingly arbitrary, random details like his musings on wanting to be a construction worker, a person getting clubbed outside a club, and a lady soliciting money "for a terrible disease" (i'll leave the interpretation up to the jury but I'm actually inclined to agree with Harry that she's a postitute because that is what I initially thought too and it's not so far fetched an interpretation because sexuality is constantly talked about throughout "Lunch Poems"). In any case, this "poem" doesn't really read like a conventional poem, but then again it's not prose; it's more like just a written stream of thoughts and observations strung together without proper English punctuation and grammar.

So is this poetry? What really is "conventional" poetry? I guess, to me, it is really just my subjective conception of what I consider poetry to be, from my experience reading it in middle and high school. I had never read modernist poetry or beyond, so poetry to me was the the romantics and Victorians. The poems we've been reading lately are obviously very different. So what is considered poetry? Can it just be any written piece that simply doesn't adhere to the rules of English grammar and punctuation? Is it really like that old adage, "poetry is anything you want it to be"?

Choosing an R1B

I thought I'd let you all know that you can find course descriptions for the R1B courses on offer on individual department web sites:

• English


• Rhetoric (descriptions are not yet up)


• Comparative Literature


• Gender and Women's Studies (it looks like there's only one section)


• College Writing

Several other humanities departments also offer R1B (or variants thereof that will fill the R&C requirement), like French, Scandinavian, German, Spanish & Portuguese, and History of Art.


I also wanted to mention that Robin Blaser will be reading for Lunch Poems (in the library) on Nov. 6. He'll also be doing a conversation with Robert Hass on Nov. 5 (Wednesday). Blaser was part of the "Berkeley Renaissance," along with poets like Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. We'll be reading poems by Robert Duncan soon, as well as poems by Robert Hass! Check it out.

Did O'Hara's parents let him go to the movies?

As I was reading Lunch Poems, my mind began to wander, and for some reason I kept thinking about what O’Hara’s parents would think of his poetry. It seems as though of all the occupations parents dream of their kids undertaking, such as practicing medicine or law, writing poetry is never on the list. I’m guessing O’Hara’s parents weren’t too thrilled about the idea, either. But to exacerbate the situation, his poetry is confusing and does not live up to the classic image of poetry: there’s no rhyme scheme or apparent structure. If you were to read it aloud, it wouldn’t even sound like poetry; it would sound like one huge run-on sentence. To all but the poetically inclined, his poems would seem talentless and worthless. I doubt his parents understood or appreciated his poetry at all. To prove my point, I will ask you to read the following example as if you were O’Hara’s parents; read this as if this was your (adult) son’s work:

Wouldn’t it be funny
if The Finger had designed us
to shit just once a week?

all week long we’d get fatter
and fatter and then on Sunday morning
while everyone’s in church
ploop!

I do have an appreciation for poetry, yet even I cannot help but question the value of this poem! Imagine what his parents thought! I do not mean to insult O’Hara’s style of poetry (maybe just this poem); I simply intend to ponder the kind of relationship O’Hara had with his parents.
The obvious poem to mention in this post would be “Ave Maria.” Unfortunately for me, we already talked about this poem in class, so I don’t want to be redundant. However, I do want to point out that all of O’Hara’s poetry seems to have a personal quality, and so it would not be unreasonable to say that he might be voicing some of his inner childhood angst in “Ave Maria.” This could be another indicator of possible family tension.
Of course, I could just google Frank O’Hara and find out the facts, rather than making presumptions based on his poetry. But there’s a risk in doing so: I might discover I’m completely wrong. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just stick to my theories.
After all, ignorance IS bliss.

Warning: occasional coarse language & adult content/not suitable for younger audiences

So I've been going through this week's reading assignment (week 10) of Lunch Poems. And it's pretty routine for me, I've noticed by now, that it's complicated literature and nothing really clicks in my mind immediately. We were asked in class to make a list of observations about the first poem, "Music." And from there, we went on to discuss our observations and later analyze the text.

I thought this would be a rather useful process to derive meaning from the rest of the poems, so I started making observations of what I was reading as I went along. This felt like a good way to start in trying to comprehend the readings, as I am not yet comfortable enough with the collection to further analyze the text. So in my observation, I realized that, yes these are indeed written from the perspective of lunchgoers, hence the name Lunch Poems.

I then came to notice something else...

This is fairly modern poetry, and with modern poetry comes modern language and modern uses of language. From what we've read in class, and what i've read before taking this class, I've never run in to this use of language (well, not in poetry). The language I speak of is, well, not necessarily vulgar but more over the top then what I normally encounter in poetry. I've compiled a list of the above mentioned language (as well as a few odd and weird ones just for kicks), so you be the judge.

- "Shit on the soup. let it burn." (page 7)
- "full of fat people who cough as at a movie they eat each other's dandruff in the flickering glare" (11)
- everything on page 27
- "we don't do much ourselves but fuck and think" (30-31)
- "I was made in the image of a sissy truck driver" (31)
- "you don't get crabs that way" (40)
- "you aren't so popular in China though they fuck too (42)
- "that's the meaning of fertility hard and moist and moaning (43)
- "since arriving in Barcelona I can freely shit" (48)
- "subways are only fun when you're feeling sexy" (50)

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm offended by all this (I think some of it is pretty funny :] ). But as I mentioned earlier, this language hasn't really surfaced much in the literature that I've encountered, so I just find it strange. Did this jump out at anyone else? I found it really interesting that this be integrated into these poems.

SA #9: O'Hara

How does Frank O'Hara's style differ from that of Langston Hughes? Be specific.

Help is available

So first of all, let me start out by saying that whenever we have an assignment due for English RA1 class, I usually do not do it until the night before (yeah that is not a good idea). But for some reason the thought of a five to six paged essay made me change my ways which is really interesting because procrastination was my favorite thing since who knows when. Well, our last assignment, the “short” five to six paged essay (“short” should not be the term used to describe that essay) was my first real non-procrastinating assignment, and I was surprised by the result at the end.
So I knew about this essay a long time ago, but did not really bother to work on it, until I actually read the assignment from our course reader. that is when I knew I had to stop being lazy and start working on the first draft. So a little over five days before the assignment was due, I sat infront of my computer ready to being the essay. But when I was about to start writing, my mind went completely blank and that reflected on my paper. After starting at the computer screen for about 30 minutes, I knew I needed help on the essay, and my best source was our teacher.
Then my next task was to set up an appointment date with her, and after two days of waiting (one day before the actual assignment was due), I went to 400 wheeler, and started talking to Natalia about the essay. And even though I had almost three pages typed up the night before, after my discussion with Natalia (a very long discussion indeed that lasted almost two hours), I had a better idea about what to write, and that night (Thursday night), I wrote the last two pages, made some changes and was ready to read the essay to my classmates.
But when I listened to my fellow classmates’ essays, I was so afraid of reading my essay because I knew it was nothing compared to their (yeah that made me feel bad). But my group did not care about the fact that I didn’t want to read my essay, so I was forced to read it. And to my surprise, they told me a lot of positive things about my essay, and gave me tons of ideas on how to make the essay better (THANK YOU SO MUCH). I was so happy after we were done doing the peer revision because I got so many good pointers on how to develop my essay to make it better.
So the point of me rambling about my essay writing process is the fact that if anyone ever gets stuck or is having a hard time with an assignment, I think the best idea is to go get help. I know everyone tells you to go get help, but trust me, it does help when you can understand something after someone explains it to you (at least it does for me). So everyone should make some effort to get help if they are ever stuck on anything. I am not saying, bombard Natalia with two hour discussion session (Opps) but if anything does not make sense, you should always make use of all the resources provided to you.

IN CONCLUSION, IF I CAN GO GET HELP, SO CAN YOU!!!!

Writing about Moore and Nature

So when I was preparing to write the short analytical essay, I didn't think I needed to start until Thursday afternoon, because it was a short analytical essay. And I guess "don't assume", but I figured it would be like 3-4 pages like the rest of the papers had been.... well... I looked at the syllabus and saw that it was supposed to be 5-6 pages, and got a little scared because it was Thursday night and the paper was due in the morning. So I realize I should always start my papers earlier than that, but I forgot about it during the week, esp. since we didn't talk about it in class because we got so deep into our discussions. So anyway in my frantic attempts to crank out 6 comprehensible pages by morning I read over Moore's Poem the Octopus, and highlighted a bunch of quotes to use in my paper. Starting the paper was definitely the hardest part, because I didn't exactly know how to define nature, esp. since it is such a broad topic, and many of the definitions fit the poem... So I eventually picked a few definitions and began writing. I came up with a few ideas of what nature could be defined as but they don't really make sense by themselves and it was hard to pick one to write about.

One definition was the earth and all of it's inhabitants, the objects that make up the world. This definition is hard to explain because we see a tree and say that it is IN nature not that it is nature, but if it is in nature, what is nature? the tree is in the world, is the world nature? And also we say that the forest is nature, etc.. some environments etc.. we call nature, we call the forest a part of nature, but what is the entire nature. And if the forest made up of trees is a part of nature than aren't the trees a part of nature not just in nature..... So you see it is hard to define nature and explain it just on the surface level, the "easiest" part of nature to define has already become really complicated. (try writing about that at 2am... I know I did that to myself... :) )

Another definition of nature is that is is an entity that is a part of the earth and watches over 'nature' or the plants and animals and environments... mother nature. That it is something with feeling and ability to make decisions and have emotions. But this doesn't really make sense either, how can a tree cry? But it is a common idea that nature is and entity with its own decisions and emotions, it is often described in mythology and storytelling, as something like a person.

Yet another definition of nature is the balance between good and evil, and imaginative and reality. People often talk of nature in terms of good vs. evil. and sometimes even describe it as human nature as our instinctive survival skills that is blind to morals.

There are so many aspects of nature and so many definitions it is hard just to narrow it down, an then you through in Moore's work "an octopus" and it could be representing almost any one of these definitions, which makes it hard to write a paper on which one it could be representing.

Writing methods

I noticed after reading many of the blog posts that a lot of us talk about our methods for writing essays so I thought I’d share some of my writing experience.

When we first learn to write essays, we were always told to brainstorm ideas of what we want to write about, usually drawing one of those diagrams that I don’t really remember the name of. We usually write out our thesis in the middle circle and then from there, we add our “concrete details” and our analysis to it. So because I was taught this way, this was how I would start my essays; formulate a thesis then start from there. But soon, I found out that sometimes my thesis is flawed and isn’t even supported enough by the text. When that happens, I usually have to change my thesis and pretty much rewrite and rethink my whole paper. Besides doing this, I jot down phrases and words that might be appropriate for my paper so that I don’t have to go look in a thesaurus for other words. I also keep a list of transitions that I can use to help my paper flow.

That was my first method, but after a while, I got tired of rewriting pretty much my whole essay and decided to change my strategy. I would start my paper with coming up with textual evidence that relates to my topic and then formulating my thesis based on the evidence I find. This way, I don’t have to worry about my argument not being backed up by the text. But this limits my writing a little because I may ignore the rest of the text. This worked for the papers I had to write during high school but now, I’m using a combination of the two methods. First, I read the prompt and get a general idea of what I might want to talk about in my paper and look for evidence from there. Second, I write (with a pencil, I find that I’m more efficient when I actually write down things rather than just staring blankly at that the blinking cursor on my computer screen) a general outline of my essay including my thesis and the textual evidence I find and jotting down phrases and words that pop up in my mind on the side. Then I actually type/write my essay and hope that everything works well. If it doesn’t, then I just continue with my essay and fix the rest later.

I guess I will keep using this method until I find a better one.