Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Sign Inventory, Week 6

Poem: “Amusing Our Daughters” by Carolyn Kizer

1. The first line of the poem uses negative uses of the language to represent a positive position.
2. The poem seems to use the recursive image of bundled daughters twice, which perhaps evokes an underlying image of restriction.
3. The semiotics of food and eating shifts within the poem and evokes a domestic act in both cases.
4. The second stanza seems to indicate a static state of being with the repetition of the phrase “nothing happens.”
5. The negation of loss becomes blurred by the static as well as positive language in this piece.
6. The first stanza shifts the context of defining people as a group by being “people one meets, not people one cares for,” “and with my brother poets, go visit you brother,” “Here come your guests!” and “a swarm of strangers.”
7. The poem creates a certain peripheral view of the pastoral in the first and last stanza.
8. The poem seems to portray the daughters in a peripheral and almost systematic way through lines such as “We waken and count our daughters,” and “Nothing occurs, though we are aware you have three daughters who last year had four.”
9. The poem uses negative space created by numbering the subject’s daughters and noting on the missing fourth daughter.
10. The use of the collective in the first stanza seems to connote to a certain strategy where the individual becomes a minute figure.

Improv, Week 6

Poem: “A View” by Mona Van Duyn

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy—
But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father—
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

Revision:

Looking through the glassed black wall, I see my father’s name there. An epigraph, but perhaps not. Strange how my gaze becomes the wall between us, as I simulate the breathe of his breathe. I notice turning out from that gravestone, how my tainted figure shines on the edges as if the wick burned, always on my left side. I see the reflection of the figures behind me waving, blank faces crowding and distorting that black reflection. Eyes drilling through, yet the name chipped there never moved. They were like a madness called down on my head. Everything moves backwards, always backwards as each reflected figure turned to leave until I remained, otherworldly as my father might have been before the wick faded and no reflection remained.

Calisthenics, Week 6

Object Study: Math Compass

Calculations in reverse, in a constant V.
The point of a half pencil always in the state
of wearing down, never pointed at the equation,
the obtuse look in your eye at its half circle
musings. The flick of the wrist constructing
pi again and again, much like swirls of cream
in coffee, cigarette smoking intangibles,
or the clock ticking still. Acute was what
you were looking for, the angle turning
in, constricting numerical forms, utterances
of the Pythagorean Theorem, going backward
always backward as if your unbirth could rename
the womb. You could always number every
person you met, yet could not remember
the names, every name of a first kiss, the last
smile of your grandmother, the slanted glance
of a spiteful lover; always turning, turning
to a point, back to pi, the never ending story.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 6

1. This week as sucked slightly more than average.
Conversation
2. This is either going to be an awesome idea or a very bad idea.
Conversation
3. I remember thinking, This had better be damned serious. Once I saw their faces, I regretted my wish.
World War Z, Max Brooks
4. The facts were out; it was now a question of who would believe them.
World War Z, Max Brooks

Response to Michael Brown's Free Write, Week 5

The greasy pole segments your body
dividing into disjointed scorpion tails.
Venomous poison under lights
Neon gas causes morals to rot and bloat

Water can't wash away memories,
hands under the tap, scrubbing
at Georgia riverstones, carrying them
away until they are smooth pebbles,
small pills to swallow and be full.

When water fills the cup, it becomes the cup
when it fills a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
When if fills the teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Water can flow, or it can crash,
grind and drown and weigh down your pockets,
keeping you here and washing you away.

Every night, a shower isn't enough,
too green tiles with dirty grout isn't enough;
Perfumed soap, the smell of lilacs and sweet pea and cucumber melon isn't enough
to drown you out.

This draft seems to shift into the more elusive in its execution, yet certain strategies evoked here could still be applied in future drafts. For example, the third stanza seems to use tautophrases to convey meaning in which a phrase repeats an idea in the same words. Also, such repetition could be twisted within the language to convey new ways of looking at an object without becoming too redundant.

Monday, September 27, 2010

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 5

1. Californians invented the concept of lifestyle. This alone warrants their doom.
White Noise, Don DeLillo
2. Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn…They are taking pictures of taking pictures.
White Noise, Don DeLillo
3. I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give precious texture to life, a sense of definition?
White Noise, Don DeLillo
4. The Definitive Guide to What to Do If Your Eyeball Pops Out
gawker.com

Free Write, Week 5

Improv: “The Night Mirror” by John Hollander

Looking at her face showed the same guise,
a vertical panel of teeth not yet grown.
The child’s knowledge of the Grand Canyon
and its nightmares does not glimpse so easily
upon her face. She sits as if on a Windsor chair
brightened by faux sunlight, scrambling to tell
me something but all that came were gutturals
and half knowing smiles. The ledge of her crib
was where she lingered, spying the unknown
world to colonize as the pale window moonlighted
as her heaven. The mirror she gazed through, through
her simulacrum but unaware that its reflection
was not of another. Welling from within she did
not fear it’s nightly gaze upon her closet. She
always knew what it was before as her lids
closed, unhinged by the soft side of her pillow.

Sign Inventory, Week 5

Poem: “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” by Richard Hugo

1. The element of time span reverberates throughout the poem, shifting from one era to the next.
2. The “you” in the poem seems to act as a static agent as his or her voice becomes muted throughout the piece until the last stanza shows slight agency, but only because the speaker states what the “you” says.
3. The third stanza repeats question after question as a building block before the last stanza.
4. The last stanza remains ambiguous to the answering of the questions in the third stanza.
5. The term “silver” repeats throughout the poem in several different contexts, perhaps making a shift in meaning with the repetitive shift in the time frame.
6. The time spans mentioned before seem to create a general sense of time while the only specific date given is 1907.
7. The poem presents certain phrases and words, such as “last,” “only,” “resolves,” etc. that provide the illusion of permanence within the context.
8. The poem seems to convey the indistinct sense of places, such as the churches, jail, mill etc. yet twists such general areas with the specific names of places, such as Butte and Philipsburg.
9. The second stanza seems to shift back and forth between images of urban and pastoral sense of place.
10. The poem seems to make a perspective shift from the image of the church in the first stanza to questioning the church in the third stanza.

Improv, Week 5

Poem: “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Revision: Advice to the Prophetess at the He & She Hair Salon

You speak of Mrs. Tiller living in sin with her lovers when her husband is away. You speak of her son, the rapscallion, who stalks still at the dive bar, The Junction every Thursday as he drinks to himself and his only companion, the Ferrari. His wheels on heels so to speak. You pinpoint every hair on poor Ms. Decker’s lip, never forgetting the tsk before whispering spinster with your eyes upturned. You tell stories that are not stories. Fragments I say. Truth you reply.

What should we be without these things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask, I say, ask what it means to remember your own birth, think back and remember the womb and wonder still whether thoughts so lofty and wise simulate Mrs. Tiller’s pink toes as a child so new. Or young Johnny with his Ferrari, such a fleeting thought to the history of playground swings and sitting always alone in sandbox castles. Your words will fail us, under the scrutiny of each quick shear of the bangs, paid in full and the echo of steps leaving behind discontent words.

Calisthenics, Week 5

In-class exercise:

We are ten and the art virtue at the High couldn’t trace our primal quiet. We were Italian, profuse and lavish, venting our literature in an ill terrain. Memories of Iran multiply in quotes above our heads, a belly past, too contrite and urban as our apartment. Inferior genius roams as our fathers attack alternatives of money and music. Every mile we walked at the High memorializes quaint numbers as we regain the dawn of a Dali. We tote the love insignia a petite virulence we always accorded, an impenetrable tainted animus, a calisthenic in the making.

Pedagogy Forum, Week 4

I found that by discussing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” perhaps how a poem is read could and should be an important element to teaching creative writing. The implication of students reading poetry out loud as well as listening to other poets read their own poetry becomes an art in and of itself, which adds to the process of understanding and indicating the several processes one takes to write and teach poetry. Having an eye and ear for the language of each poem, perhaps, heightens the student’s ability to apply certain phonemic strategies to their own writing as well.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Response to Zac Cooper's Free Write, Week 4

I found the recursive use of the language in this free write working quite well for a beginning draft, though I would suggest that repetition should be used with reserve so as not to let it completely control the content of future drafts. A way to approach a revision of this draft would be to pull and expand from interesting images and then, perhaps, apply the repetition to those images in a subtle manner, which I find to be a useful practice. Sometimes with a draft such as this, you look at each repetition and pull from what draws the most interest. You may find just that one phrase or utterance works the most efficiently in which case you do this exercise again with perhaps a similar triggering subject until you’ve constructed enough interesting language to start thinking about a more concrete poem.

While the mind sleeps atop cushions a soldier mingles
across a bar. The bars across his uniform
spawn from screaming , so says the media.
A soldiering mind searching for cushions, for sleep
to bar the truth. Yet the truth does not matter
for those screaming, searching for what matters.
They all sleep. In a spawning ground
for mediated minds. And
their screams become mingled, the truth
barred from media, screaming cushioned lies
to uniformed minds

Free Write, Week 4

Improv: “Door to the River” by Mark Doty

He means, I think, there’s an out,

built of these fistfuls of yellows.
Means, I think, there’s a door,

in this passionate and hard-won
approximation, in this rough push

and lemon smear, this difficulty,

there’s—what? In the meadows,
yesterday, great heavy presences

of the trees thinking, rimmed

around the perimeter of the field:
pendulous, weighted trees

here to be emerald pull
and resistance, suspended

their given hour, the meadow arranging itself

into this huge composition which invites
and resists at once, the world’s hung

surface: aren’t we always wanting
to push beyond it, as if behind the scrim

--old lure and spur, old promise—

lay…The bright core
breathing? Why can’t you just

love sheer play, these forms’
dynamic irresolutions

on the surface of the day?

These trees only seem still,
fixed their hour in the rush

and suction from that gate:
can’t you just walk between the yellow

word field and the green word door
and not demand to penetrate

the primed and stubborn scrim
toward some clarity beyond forms?

Written in a sidewalks new cement:
Be happy it’s really all you have.

Happiness? Our possession
is yellow and green, dialectic

occupying the meadows,

arranging for us this moment
and the next (I’m not afraid

to die, I’m afraid to continue
in this tumult of collisions

and vanishing),
the ocher word
meadow, the green word door.
Listen,
there’s a door in these yellow handfuls,
these wild strokes
Haven’t you walked

into something like happiness but larger?
Just yesterday, inside the meadow’s

goldenrod perimeter,
near evening, in the stubble-grass,

eye-level with furled umbles
of wild carrot, chains of burr

and burdock and the clovers’ half dry blooms,

I pressed my stomach against
the warm surface of the field,

sunlight drowsing and slanting
toward us while the dogs and I

lay easy and with no need to be
anywhere. We heard a woman calling,

in a European accent, German maybe, her dog,

her chocolate Lab, who was mousing
with great patience and dedication, and she

with her patience and dedication
was calling Jackie, Jackie without urgency

because she knew Jackie would come.

That’s when I went through
the door. It was her voice,

the name pronounced softly
over and over and above the tender

yellow scent of the grass and the hurry

of intimately related and endlessly
varied yellows, the sunflowers’

golden insistences, little violet
spiking in the eyes of asters

sparking the whole field into something

like a quivering although entirely still,
and still my two curled companions

not sleeping but like me

alert and perhaps also poised
at an instance when the whole ceaseless

push and tumble arrived at some
balance and there was no lack, nothing

missing from the world,
and for the duration of that sheen

—during which you know
this moment of equipoise

is more movement of light

and flesh and grass passing through
the corridor, the world’s mild maw

of dynamic motion—
Jackie, she said, Jackie, yellow word,

and for that astonished instant

hung on the other side, permitted
entrance to the steep

core of things you think
of course this is what death

will be. Fine.

Revision:
I think he means the emerald figures, the trees who won
over the lawyers from Birmingham, Alabama.
We never look at the lemon smeared sunsets the same way.
Arranging themselves, those dogwoods and pine,
as if suspended by earthen glory, a composition written,
the pendulum of their bodies always reminded
him of their solemn promise. How else would death
call us he would ask as we passed through the
door of two arching branches that clung to our arms.
Simulacrum is a yellow word I tell him. It’s green
he would reply. As children we wrote our names
on the sidewalk next to imprinted hands that were
not our own, though we claimed them to be. The city
lights always lingered on our eyes back then, a golden
insistence. Now, we strip heads of grass from a nearby meadow,
though some refused to bend to a will other than their own.
Happiness was never a color to us, but a whimper
of a Whippoorwill. That is how death calls us I tell him. Fine.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Sign Inventory, Week 4

Poem: “Revision” by Carl Phillips

1. The recursive image of erasure appears several times in the poem, yet ends with the idea of recognition.
2. The poem begins with a question of identity and ends with the speaker calling the subject to speak first in which he will answer.
3. The recursive dynamic between naming and namelessness appears several times throughout the poem.
4. The only time a “you” appears is at the end of the poem.
5. The poem makes several lengthy asides dealing with pastoral images of leaves and the wind.
6. The recursivity of concrete, pastoral images, such a “leaves,” “wind,” and “river” are often paired with more abstract concepts, such as the “mind,” “trust,” “belief,” etc.
7. The poem seems to bookend with the “my” in the beginning of the poem and the “you” at the end of the poem in which the middle section of the poem seems to connect the two figures with the speaker’s directive discourse with the “people.”
8. The poem seems to utilize the indecisive usage of language through, for example, the question in the beginning where the speaker uses “or,” “neither,” and “possibly” among others.
9. The effect of time in this poem seems to indicate the trope longevity within the language as the speaker often refers to “long hours,” “time in its direction,” “the days,” “forever after,” “afternoon,” and “ending.”
10. The language of seems to shift from the static existence of the speaker to the active existence of the pastoral.

Monday, September 13, 2010

Improv, Week 4

Poem: “My Father’s Back” by Edward Hirsch

There's an early memory that I carry around
In my mind
like an old photography in my wallet,
little graying and faded, a picture
That I don't much like
but nonetheless keep,
Fingering it now and then like a sore tooth,
Knowing it there,
not needing to see it anymore....

The sun slants down on the shingled roof.
The wind breathes in the needled pines.
And I am lying in the grass on my third birthday,
Red-faced and watchful
but not squalling yet,
Not yet rashed or hived up
from eating the wrong food
Or touching the wrong plant,
my father's leaving.

A moment before he was holding me up
Like a new trophy, and I was a toddler
With my face in the clouds,
spinning arund
With a head full of stars,
getting so dizzy.
A moment before I was squealing with joy
In the tilt-a-whirl of his arms,
Drifting asleep in the cavern of his chest....

I remember waking up to the twin peaks
Of his shoulders moving away, a shirt clinging
To his massive body,
a mountain receding.
I remember the giant distance between us:
A drop or two rain, a sheen on the lawn,
And then I was sitting up
in the grainy half-light
Of a man walking away from his family.

I don't know why we go over the old hurts
Again and again in our minds, the false starts
And true beginnings
of a world we call the past,
As if it could tell us who we are now,
Or were, or might have been....
It's drizzling.
A car door slams, just once, and he's gone.
Tiny pools of water glisten on the street.



Revision:
There’s a photograph I keep, little known illusion of what was. Remembering that chimera of my family standing together like the paper dolls I used to cut out of stationary paper, bits of our address still peeking out from their feet. The photo fades each time I hold it. I never liked how we smiled anyway. It was my birthday then. You could see the towered cake in the back and Spike the Boston Terrier trying to escape from my sister’s grasp. My mother was never photogenic, her eyes always droop at the sight of a camera. Looking back at how my father could never look at us straight in the eye, his back always turned from us. He left soon after this picture was taken. We knew his back was always turned at us, at our mother. I still keep the picture and remember how to never have my back turned, nor my eyes averted from my reflection.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Calisthenics, Week 4

In class calisthenics:

The mocking light of a streetlamp gazes on these flowers still kempt in a sunflower vase, It was the moon that hit your eyes as if the residue of a stagnant light throbbed and echoed through our bed where the two thin lines never pursed and the steely moonlight caught the edge of the mirror. I only love the grace my mother’s touch as the low hum of your abated breathe and the saturation of blood and non-adolescence premised our union, a trolley and its track could not undo the two words escaping your lips. You fear my whip of a nightingale’s feather, of a parade of churchgoers that silences us into quarantine. The paternal no longer rises against the bed of asphalt. Made unwise and swallowing the juiced hue as the prick of my nail upon the orange that is not. Shallow with sweat , with that ring on your finger, a warm bed never awaited us.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 4

Junkyard Quotes, Week 4
1. You have to systematically create confusion, it sets creativity free. Everything that is contradictory creates life.
Salvador Dali
2. Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dali
3. Mr. Belding autographed my baby!
facebook status, Lindy
4. Soldiers are given 3 stress cards.
random conversation

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Pedagogy Forum, Week 3

After discussing issues of pedagogy with a professor and how to implement professional skills within the classroom, a few highlights on how to do so under the umbrella of creative writing became a bit more clear. One considerable aspect includes the very act of critiquing a student's draft in the workshop setting. I believe that creating a balance between encouraging the writing and providing productive criticism becomes a skill that can be applied to other tasks in the academic and teaching workforce as it builds one's ability to perceive what needs to be encouraged and what needs to be applied when certain habitual mistakes are made. Being delicately aware of a student's progress through such a mode of thinking could provide the experience needed to encourage and enforce effective teaching.

Response to Jeff Roper's Improv, Week 3

There was an amaranthine oak
That had to tower fort-y feet
climb down, a small dare, fear

froze me in
time, as movement proved
impossible, persuasion,

both, from the peer
perhaps mostly,
stranger, his anger.

A-Shudder in
time. I step laboriously from
fort-branch towards, tree-branch.

The moment, the body
leaving surfaces, knows
its falling

into the air, still it
fumbles for grounding
wrestling space.

I have thought, since, of
how foolish—and I know now
to resist it, was futile yet

stepping, on air
upon air, I hoped on
that impossible and last wish

of finding a branch along
the way, to sustain me.
I will die, and I cannot

rest on how it’s possible,
not possible, so
young-minds, trust, scramble

stupidly. Not the soul
to think on now, unnatural
prayer, which is for life.

For with age comes wisdom,
a true sense of time,
but youth believes, amaranthine.

The improvisation seems to function as a reminiscence of a childhood memory that shifts between the perspective of the child to the perspective of an adult. What I found interesting about this piece was the response to it after Jeff wrote it. The shift from adolescence to adulthood could be an interesting way to create a juggling act in this draft as the memory of the speaker and the actually thoughts of the child could mingle with each other, creating a kind of liminal space from what is actually occurring to what the speaker remembers of the event. Doing so could create an interesting juggling act between the two which could then be combined and blurred near the end of the poem. Also, some the language could be expanded through showing the abstractions in the work, instead of telling with such words as "fear froze me,"impossible," "persuasion," and perhaps the idea of futility could be expanded as well.

Free Write, Week 3

Impov: “Voices from the Other World” by James Merrill

Presently at our touch the teacup stirred,
Then circled lazily about
From A to Z. The first voice heard
(If they are voices, these mute spellers-out)
Was that of an engineer

Originally from Cologne.
Dead in his 22nd year
Of cholera in Cairo, he had KNOWN
NO HAPPINESS. He once met Goethe, though.
Goethe had told him: PERSEVERE.

Our blind hound whined. With that, a horde
Of voices gathered above the Ouija board,
Some childish and, you might say, blurred
By sleep; one little boy
Named Will, reluctant possibly in a ruff

Like a large-lidded page out of El Greco, pulled
Back the arras for that next voice,
Cold and portentous: ALL IS LOST.
FLEE THIS HOUSE. OTTO VON THURN UND TAXIS.
OBEY. YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.

Frightened, we stopped; but tossed
Till sunrise striped the rumpled sheets with gold.
Each night since then, the moon waxes,
Small insects flit round a cold torch
We light, that sends them pattering to the porch . . .

But no real Sign. New voices come,
Dictate addresses, begging us to write;
Some warn of lives misspent, and all of doom
In way’s that so exhilarate
We are sleeping sound of late.

Last night the teacup shattered in a rage.
Indeed, we have grown nonchalant
Towards the other world. In the gloom here,
our elbows on the cleared
Table, we talk and smoke, pleased to be stirred

Rather by buzzings in the jasmine, by the drone
Of our own voices and poor blind Rover’s wheeze,
Than by those clamoring overhead,
Obsessed or piteous, for a commitment
We still have wit to postpone

Because, once looked at lit
By the cold reflections of the dead
Risen extinct but irresistible,
Our lives have never seemed more full, more real,
Nor the full moon more quick to chill.

Revision:
The new voices echo, lost loved ones chime
at the coffins steady slide.
The white walls reverberating
every whisper of who he once was: a carpenter
husband to two wives, father of children
too young to know the unbeating, theno-breathe
receding into the body that lay there. Once the music
procession ceases its lowly hum, the echoes still
resonating against that pillar, that line
of pews squealing from each shift of body,
the bodily collective and the silentcough.
Would he reminisce with Goethe or perhaps
Foucault in the world ahead? Or wonder still
how the bated breathe of every nail he hammered
through his adolescent years could bring back
the resemblance of his unblinking eye.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Sign Inventory, Week 3

Poem: “The Assassination” by Donald Justice
pg. 202 of Contemporary American Poetry

1. The poem highlights recursive elements in the language evoking through the first word of each line, such as “It,” “We,” “Now” and “Here” then breaks the chain of recursivity at the end of the first and second stanza.
2. The poem seems to play with the agency of the language between the static and the active as it often uses such verbs as “begins,” courses,” “mounts,” etc., but shifts with “to be” verbs throughout.
3. The subject of the poem shifts from the “we” in the first stanza to the “I” in the last stanza.
4. The subject of “It” in the poem shifts from active to passive agency as the first stanza implies its individual activity as it “courses” and “mounts” until the “We” becomes “involved with the surge.” The second stanza uses passive voice as the “It” is being acted upon rather than evoking the active agent.
5. The only distinctive characters in the poem are the woman selling carnations and the man in a straw hat.
6. The only seeming sense of the speaker addressing the subject or subjects occurs in the last line of the poem when the speaker states, “Look, we are dancing.”
7. Nearly every line formulates as a full statement, yet the poem seems to subvert such a recursive element at the end of each stanza until the last stanza completely subverts it.
8. The verb usage for “It” seems to shift from the first to the second stanza in the first stanza, “It begins,” “It courses” and “It mounts” while in the second stanza the verbs “burst” and “running” seems to evoke a speedier agency.
9. The last four lines of the poem seem to blur the lines of what “It” connotes to as the speaker introduces the ballroom and the orchestra.
10. All throughout the poem, “It” seems to actively move through the transformation of the verbs, yet in the last stanza, “It” goes through the act of confinement when it shelters itself.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Improv, Week 3

Poem: “Thoughts on One’s Head” by William Meredith

A person is very self-conscious about his head.
It makes one nervous just to know it is cast
In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead
The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last.

We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is,
Than to the interesting and involute interior:
The Fissure of Rolando and such queer places
Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria.

The things that go on there! Erotic movies are shown
To anyone not accompanied by an adult.
The marquee out front maintains a superior tone:
Documentaries on Sharks and The Japanese Tea Cult.

The fronts of some heads are extravagantly pretty.
These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops
About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city.
The female head is mounted on rococo props.

Judgment is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums
Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning;
This is the first place everybody comes
With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning.

This particular head, to my certain knowledge
Has been taught to read and write, make love and money,
Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college,
And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny.

It was further taught to know and to eschew
Error and sin, which it does erratically.
This is the place the soul calls home just now.
One dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.


Revision:

The self conscious hum, a quizzical glance at the big toe
and wondering still, what its purpose may lead. Does death
call to you so nonchalantly? Casting the eye upon its bulbous
mass, a disfigured finger would have sufficed. Rarely are
you able to play majestically on the piano with such gusto,
always in the way, always. You stubbed your toe just two
days ago and cursed its existence when the toe, in fact, was
always meant for stubbing and cursing. We pay so much attention
to its blank gaze. Remember when you were so young and you
thought your father a sadistic torturer?
Every time your tooth was loose, he would tie the thinnest
string upon that same toe, tie the other end to your tooth
and make you giggle with his good buddy grace until
you pulled the tooth out in one quick swipe. What was
so wrong with that you asked? You could doll it up. French
tips I say. You retort with such vehemence, that judgment
day will come and we will all be buried in silhouetted shoes,
hiding, always hiding, the reason why we could never see
the one error of our bodies, that one flaw to our forming.

Calisthenics, Week 3

Experimental Lexical Accretion:

Who grew up bent over a chess board?
Why you did as you pondered your neighbor
undressing her crimson self across your window.

Who grew up so poor they had to take the place of bait in a mouse trap?
It was Lindsay who always sat across from us at the cafeteria,
her sweater covered in sauce as if she painted it on herself.

Who began to grieve for awkwardness and ignorance?
The cop that stopped your sister, he never knew what was coming
as her pale lips whispered nothing before her eyes rolled back for the last time.

Who looks for something that’s been there every day of your life?
Her grandmother, always searching, searching for the bottle caps,
the linen, and the eyes of her cats as if they could bring everything back.

Who went to the Irish Pub in New Orleans, Louisiana?
Why I believe we did as we drank the bourbon of our youth away,
saturating in the coastal swagger, the bitter tides of questions with no answers.

Junkyard Quotes 1-4, Week 3

1. What we feel isn't important. It's utterly unimportant. The only question is what we do. If people like you don't learn from what happened to people like me, then what the hell is the point of anything?
Film, The Reader
2. The notion of secrecy is central to western literature. You may say, the whole idea of character is defined by people holding specific information which for various reasons, sometimes perverse, sometimes noble, they are determined not to disclose.
Film, The Reader
3. I keep thinking about this river somewhere, with the water moving really fast. And these two people in the water, trying to hold onto each other, holding on as hard as they can, but in the end it's just too much. The current's too strong. They've got to let go, drift apart.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
4. Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go