I recently read Homer's The Odyssey translated by Robert Fitzgerald. I was astounded by the violence at the epic poem's end. Ulysses slaughters the suitors that have been courting his wife in his absence in the most relentless and unforgiving manner. I felt sympathy for the suitors, which are not, in any way, characters that Homer compels the reader to feel sympathy with (the suitors have stolen Odysseus' cattle and siphoned away the resources of his estate, while trying to convince Penelope that marrying one of them would be a good move). Then, Odysseus end up in a fight with many of the most prestigious families in Ithaka, because the suitors were members of these families, and Odysseus has murdered them in cold blood. Odysseus is ready to repeat the same kind of slaughter that the suitors experienced, when Athena, that motherly and caring friend of Odysseus, steps in at Zeus' urging to stop the battle.
Odysseus' bloodlust made me think about his possible post-traumatic stress from his years at war and all the traumatic incidents and deaths he witnessed while trying to get back home. Is Odysseus so used to reacting violently and without control, as being in battle can bring out in a soldier, that he is now unable, when provoked, to control his blood lust at home?
I talked to a friend of mine who is a classical scholar about the evidence of Odysseus having undiagnosed -- of course undiagnosed, because the term hadn't been invented -- post-traumatic stress, and he told me that scholars have examined this link. I am interested in finding out more about this connection between Homer and the phenomenon of post-traumatic stress.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Monday, September 12, 2011
A Good Personal Essay
I think a interesting personal essay has to include specific events and details from one's life that really paint a picture of the point the author is trying to make. In Sherman Alexie's essay Superman and Me. I enjoyed the description of how his father read and collected books. The way he describes all of the different types of books his father read and how they would be piled all over the house, even in places that you would not normally think, like in the bathroom, is evocative and tells me alot about the house Alexie grew up in. These kinds of unusual details stick out in the reader's mind. Also, the story of how he came to understand paragraphs was strikingly visual and showed how imaginative he was as a child. The way he understands paragraphs is not how they teach it in school, which reinforces the overall point of the narrative, which is that he had to be an individual in order break free from some of the constraints of his upbringing. In the other essay we read, The Story of My Body by Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ortiz Cofer tells a story with very concrete details in each section of the essay. The essay is broken up by different qualities of one's body, like "skin," "color," "size," etc. In the section title "Color" Ortiz Cofer tells the tale of when she went to a supermarket in the US. She desired a doll that had white skin and blonde curls which was different than her own olive skin and dark hair. The store owner makes some derogatory remarks to her about her race (Puerto Rican) being dirty. She includes a vivid detail of the owners blood stained butcher's apron and how it looked so dirty to her. In contrast, the only thing about her that she can see as dirty is her water-color stained hands. In the case of the owner, he appears uncivilized and disgusting, while the narrator is described as a imaginative and creative child. This little illustrate the point the writer makes in the narrative, that those who denigrate others on the basis of race, skin color, or how some looks, are really the ugly ones.
I think tone is also important to a personal essay as well. For the most part, I think it should be fairly informal, unless you are writing one for an application to a school or for a job. The Ortiz Cofer essay was a little more formal than the Alexie essay, because it did a little more telling than showing. At the end of the Ortiz Cofer essay she draws more conclusions about what her essay means than the more suggestive ending of Alexie's.
I think tone is also important to a personal essay as well. For the most part, I think it should be fairly informal, unless you are writing one for an application to a school or for a job. The Ortiz Cofer essay was a little more formal than the Alexie essay, because it did a little more telling than showing. At the end of the Ortiz Cofer essay she draws more conclusions about what her essay means than the more suggestive ending of Alexie's.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Writing 101-102
Hi Stretch folks. I saw that everyone in class has started a blog. I have a blog too, which I haven't updated in quite a while! If you look at my past postings, you will see that I was doing poetry book reviews on the blog. It was so promising back then when I started it, but then other writing projects, like my poems and thesis, got in the way. Oh well, the present is as good of a time as any to get things going again, right?
So I hope to revitalize my blog while I am interning in the Stretch class. I have perused a couple of the blogs that some of you students have posted. It looks like you are reviewing a sample blog that has been assigned. I think that would be a good way for me to understand how blogs usually work, and what makes a good blog. I have heard things like a good blog usually has posts of a certain length, as well as other guidelines. However, I find that it is better for me to be less critical of myself when I am first starting out on a project. Later, I can compare what I have done to other's work and find ways that I can improve on my own writing. Or I might want to incorporate a certain tone or technique that another writer uses for my own purposes, if it seems to fit.
So I hope to revitalize my blog while I am interning in the Stretch class. I have perused a couple of the blogs that some of you students have posted. It looks like you are reviewing a sample blog that has been assigned. I think that would be a good way for me to understand how blogs usually work, and what makes a good blog. I have heard things like a good blog usually has posts of a certain length, as well as other guidelines. However, I find that it is better for me to be less critical of myself when I am first starting out on a project. Later, I can compare what I have done to other's work and find ways that I can improve on my own writing. Or I might want to incorporate a certain tone or technique that another writer uses for my own purposes, if it seems to fit.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
How Long by Ron Padgett, Coffee House Press, 2011
Padgett floats among the flotsam and jetsam of the Metaphysical Poets in this comically tragic volume of poems. He evokes Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, and Sir John Suckling, as well as his favorite modernist poets in many of these poems which take on death, fate, the ephemeral, love, and lifelong precociousness. On the topic of the Grim Reaper, Padgett charts the resolutions and perspectives that people develop around The End. In “The Death Deal” the speaker comes to a resolution on his obsession of how his death will occur:
I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.
The last line of this quote, which is also the last line of the poem, shifts the reader in an unexpected and comical direction at the last moment.
Padgett often speaks of coming at things from an “angle,” as he does in “The Coat Hanger” when he writes,
What Did Whitman say? “This is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.” With him that was very
almost true. Me I am at an angle,
but when I stand up straight as the lines in that station,
I see, before the fog rolls in, the tracks that take us all across ourselves,
metaphorical fog thicker that real fog,
just as barking is thicker than a dog,
though the dog is clearing up too, like a sky
whose translucence is arriving as metaphors depart
and I start the day as a man for the first time again.
In sections like these the reader experiences Padgett’s playful gestures which speak to important philosophical questions about how human beings (not just artists and poets) perceive the world. Padgett’s tone is often conversational and understated in a way that makes some of the hard questions his poems ask more palatable, allowing us to go and have a nice “lunch” afterwards.
In the poem “How Long”, which the book is named for, the speaker delves into the nature of identity, and specifically what is the poet’s identity in relation to his or her work. The poem begins with the lines, “How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China[.]” “How Long” is a place that is both spatial as well as temporal, where the speaker can see himself as having a solid identity. The poem describes the desire to shed the self in favor of being, and does so in a blues form, as in “…has that evening train been gone? / How long, how long, baby, how long?” The “train” is whatever means you use to leave that old sense of self to venture out into the unknown. However, Padgett’s poems are not just about ideas, and in this poem, as he does throughout the whole book for the most part, he has a masterful grasp of the line break, as in lines like
Let me know
if you ever change your mind
about leaving, leaving me behind
or at least tell yourself on that train
winding its way through the mountains of How Much Province
This book by Ron Padgett is filled with many gems, and is at times deceptively clear and conversational. In a poem like “The Great Wall” the poem uses rather straightforward language to meditate on history, duration, and time in terms of the political-historical as well as the speaker’s everyday life. Padgett in this book walks deftly along the top of the wall that separates the grave and the comic, life and death, self and selflessness, and the simple from the complex.
I’m oddly almost cheered
by the thought
that I might find out
in the not too distant future.
Now for lunch.
The last line of this quote, which is also the last line of the poem, shifts the reader in an unexpected and comical direction at the last moment.
Padgett often speaks of coming at things from an “angle,” as he does in “The Coat Hanger” when he writes,
What Did Whitman say? “This is no book;
Who touches this touches a man.” With him that was very
almost true. Me I am at an angle,
but when I stand up straight as the lines in that station,
I see, before the fog rolls in, the tracks that take us all across ourselves,
metaphorical fog thicker that real fog,
just as barking is thicker than a dog,
though the dog is clearing up too, like a sky
whose translucence is arriving as metaphors depart
and I start the day as a man for the first time again.
In sections like these the reader experiences Padgett’s playful gestures which speak to important philosophical questions about how human beings (not just artists and poets) perceive the world. Padgett’s tone is often conversational and understated in a way that makes some of the hard questions his poems ask more palatable, allowing us to go and have a nice “lunch” afterwards.
In the poem “How Long”, which the book is named for, the speaker delves into the nature of identity, and specifically what is the poet’s identity in relation to his or her work. The poem begins with the lines, “How long do you want to go on being the person you think you are? / How Long, a city in China[.]” “How Long” is a place that is both spatial as well as temporal, where the speaker can see himself as having a solid identity. The poem describes the desire to shed the self in favor of being, and does so in a blues form, as in “…has that evening train been gone? / How long, how long, baby, how long?” The “train” is whatever means you use to leave that old sense of self to venture out into the unknown. However, Padgett’s poems are not just about ideas, and in this poem, as he does throughout the whole book for the most part, he has a masterful grasp of the line break, as in lines like
Let me know
if you ever change your mind
about leaving, leaving me behind
or at least tell yourself on that train
winding its way through the mountains of How Much Province
This book by Ron Padgett is filled with many gems, and is at times deceptively clear and conversational. In a poem like “The Great Wall” the poem uses rather straightforward language to meditate on history, duration, and time in terms of the political-historical as well as the speaker’s everyday life. Padgett in this book walks deftly along the top of the wall that separates the grave and the comic, life and death, self and selflessness, and the simple from the complex.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
The Wasteland and Other Poems by John Beer
John Beer’s new book of poetry, The Wasteland and Other Poems, which came out in 2010 from Canarium books, begins with a quote from the Japanese-English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro that reads, “I obeyed the instructions as best I could, though the powerful gusts made it difficult to maintain a suitably genial expression on my face.” This book does begin by following the instructions set out by iconic poets like T. S. Eliot, but as we see right away Beer puts a procedural, and absurdist, spin on things. We recognize Beer’s inventiveness in the first section called the “Sound of Water Over Rock”. This idea of the music of water dripping on a rock comes right out of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, but in Beer’s poem it becomes an opportunity for a conceptual-procedural poem: we are given 7-word lines consisting of every variation and combination of the words “drip” and “drop.” Right away the reader senses this poem will tauntingly challenge Eliot’s intellectual elitism, as well as push on from Modernism to Post-modernism, harkening back to the absurd repetitions of Samuel Beckett’s novel Watt.
The book tries on a number of, what it terms, “guises”. We have the guises of T. S. Eliot, the political poet, the surrealist-dream poet, etc., as well as different cloaks like the prose poem, the sonnet, the heroic couplet, and the free-verse poem. In the section “V. Death to Poetry” of “The Waste Land”, the speaker narrates a walk by Orpheus through the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. He walks past all of the stereotypes of modern urban society, the “anarchist kids”, Urdu-speaking cabdrivers, and underground “jazz stars”, and the speaker realizes they are not in Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or even an original poem. In instances like these, Beer seems to be saying that his poetry cannot represent the world or make a final judgment on it, but that poetry can only allow the world to sing its song through the poet.
The book is divided up into sections that are both self-contained sets of poems and parts that contribute to the book as a whole. The section “Sonnets to Morpheus” continues the dialogue on the nature of representation in poetry and the poet’s inability to represent even himself or herself, as the speaker explains
Can you really
breathe yourself into existence, touch the world,
and still leave a path for another to see?
Nobody told you to come here. There’s nobody here.
The sections “The Perfumed Crypt or Four Quartets in Eight Bits” and “Mary, the Color Scientist” contribute with discussions on aesthetics and beauty, which are topics that come up throughout the book.
John Beer’s “The Wasteland and Other Poems” takes on the ambitious task of parodying and satirizing T. S. Eliot’s monumental poem. Eliot’s poem is a work that most readers who are interested in poetry know thoroughly and intimately. Beer succeeds in finding new ways to address this poem by setting it in new places and incorporating a wider array of cultural artifacts than Eliot did - artifacts ranging from the rock band The Pixies to Barnes and Noble to Wittgenstein. However, at times, the book becomes a little too abstract and conceptual and loses its lyricism and musicality. In section 11 of “Theses of Failure”, which reads
Philosophers have only interpreted the world.
The point is too change it.
It will not be changed.
We get a pedantic and, to my mind, less interesting conceptual statement. Poetry, for me, is more powerful when in explores the concrete and brings us to meaning through that exploration. However, on the whole, the book was challenging, thought-provoking, aesthetically pleasing, and hilarious at times.
The book tries on a number of, what it terms, “guises”. We have the guises of T. S. Eliot, the political poet, the surrealist-dream poet, etc., as well as different cloaks like the prose poem, the sonnet, the heroic couplet, and the free-verse poem. In the section “V. Death to Poetry” of “The Waste Land”, the speaker narrates a walk by Orpheus through the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago. He walks past all of the stereotypes of modern urban society, the “anarchist kids”, Urdu-speaking cabdrivers, and underground “jazz stars”, and the speaker realizes they are not in Eliot’s “The Wasteland” or even an original poem. In instances like these, Beer seems to be saying that his poetry cannot represent the world or make a final judgment on it, but that poetry can only allow the world to sing its song through the poet.
The book is divided up into sections that are both self-contained sets of poems and parts that contribute to the book as a whole. The section “Sonnets to Morpheus” continues the dialogue on the nature of representation in poetry and the poet’s inability to represent even himself or herself, as the speaker explains
Can you really
breathe yourself into existence, touch the world,
and still leave a path for another to see?
Nobody told you to come here. There’s nobody here.
The sections “The Perfumed Crypt or Four Quartets in Eight Bits” and “Mary, the Color Scientist” contribute with discussions on aesthetics and beauty, which are topics that come up throughout the book.
John Beer’s “The Wasteland and Other Poems” takes on the ambitious task of parodying and satirizing T. S. Eliot’s monumental poem. Eliot’s poem is a work that most readers who are interested in poetry know thoroughly and intimately. Beer succeeds in finding new ways to address this poem by setting it in new places and incorporating a wider array of cultural artifacts than Eliot did - artifacts ranging from the rock band The Pixies to Barnes and Noble to Wittgenstein. However, at times, the book becomes a little too abstract and conceptual and loses its lyricism and musicality. In section 11 of “Theses of Failure”, which reads
Philosophers have only interpreted the world.
The point is too change it.
It will not be changed.
We get a pedantic and, to my mind, less interesting conceptual statement. Poetry, for me, is more powerful when in explores the concrete and brings us to meaning through that exploration. However, on the whole, the book was challenging, thought-provoking, aesthetically pleasing, and hilarious at times.
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
That This by Susan Howe
Susan Howe’s latest book published in 2010 by New Directions points us toward experiencing the contradiction between “feelings and thoughts”, “sounds and objects”. To accomplish this Howe tells us the story of her emotions, as well as records her associative philosophical musings, while grieving the death of her partner the philosopher Peter Hare. At the same time, she stitches in quotes from Sarah Edwards’s reaction to her famous husband Jonathan Edwards's death during the 18th century in New England. The book is divided up into three distinct sections: the first called “The Disappearance Approach” is in prose and includes Howe’s memories surrounding her husband’s death; the second are collages of cut-up sections of the diary of Hannah Edwards Whetmore (Jonathan’s younger sister) called “Frolic Architecture”. The collages were done with scissors, invisible tape and a photocopier. Each page is like a word sculpture. Each sculpture gives one the full experience of a poem in its conciseness, ambiguity, and strange affect. Howe’s method takes an unexciting (though Howe I suspect would vehemently disagree with me) eighteenth century diary entry and transforms it into a visually edifying and linguistically complex object. The last section “That This”, named after the book’s title, for the most part is comprised of couplets, though there are a couple formal deviations. This section has various mediations on presence and absence, lightness and darkness
Day is a type when visible
objects change then put
on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed
One is brought into the experience of losing a loved partner through the visual, which in this case includes poetic form as well as poetic image. Howe is truly a poet of expansive formal and philosophical range of which this book is an apt example. That she will come out with another moving and challenging book, I am quite sure.
Day is a type when visible
objects change then put
on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed
One is brought into the experience of losing a loved partner through the visual, which in this case includes poetic form as well as poetic image. Howe is truly a poet of expansive formal and philosophical range of which this book is an apt example. That she will come out with another moving and challenging book, I am quite sure.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
The Network by Jena Osman
The title of the first section of The Network, "The Knot", is entirely appropriate because the book is a knotting together of seemingly disparate strands of historical, social and cultural knowledge. The book luxuriantly wades through a discussion of Osman's poetics, the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, the iconic nature of The Joker, the Franklin Artic exposition, and the volcanic American financial system. Osman's exploration and teezing-out of language in the book is a direct manifestion of her poetic method, which she lays out in the opening pages: "I follow Cecilia Vicuna's instruction to use an etymological dictionary: "'To enter words in order to see.'" She charts the etymology of certain terms like Security, Credit, Money, and Peace which have nearly lost all meaning in the American idiom, in order to create a multiplicity of meanings. By her method she begins to unravel the roots of our current economic and social woes. The Network combines documentary, prose, conceptual and lyrical poetry and applies them to subjects that should be examined in-depth in our media, but never are. The result is an revelatory experience on the part of the reader, which refutes W. H. Auden's notion that "poetry makes nothing happen." With this book one feels that the techtonic plates of language have shifted in unexpected and influential ways.
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