Poem 4
To watch my video on Pizarnik (surreal narrative) and Mullen (poetic appropriation, please click on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qrTCjoW2Yw
THE SURREAL NARRATIVE
· Create a situation where people or forces of nature (wind, rain) or animals or plants or objects, etc. are doing impossible things, either to themselves or to others or with others.
· Decide on either a single narrative in the poem with a beginning, middle, end OR several narratives with only emotional tone or some other connection as the thread.
As Pizarnik does, you can explore your own emotions—externalizing them, never using “I.”
This will be easy for some of you: Manuel is inspired by horror and sci-fi movies and video games, Brianna wrote an ekphrastic poem about Kahlo that's close to a surreal narrative, and Janessa can make this fit her interest in creating poetry that inspires people to overcome their demons (a la role-play in psychotherapy).
There are probably 2 ways you can begin the poem:
· Start with an emotion or set of emotions—immediately translat it to a set of “characters” (perhaps non-human)
OR
· Start with the characters and “travel” to the emotions.
Write freely. Let bad stuff come out with the good, because you will edit later.
The poem should be 16 to 40 lines.
The poem should be 16 to 40 lines.
POETIC APPROPRIATION (A PARTICULAR KIND OF COLLAGE POEM)
This can be done in various ways, but for our purposes in this class:
· take no more than 2 sentences or fragments EACH from between 8 and 20 sources, including the internet, TV, movies, books, magazines, pamphlets.
· Build a poem of between 16 and 40 lines.
· Do not try to form a narrative from beginning to end but eventually figure out your own logic for organizing the sentences or fragments.
· You need to decide your own free verse structure: with or without enjambments and stanza or strophe breaks or visual patterning.
This is a useful way of developing the poem from beginning to end:
· Have your sources ready for you to look at them.
· Start surfing the sources for a sentence or fragment that interests you, and write down the first or first and second interesting sentences of each one, even if it doesn’t seem to relate to the previous one. At a certain point, you will see a subject matter emerge.
· Once you have a decent number of lines of poetry—but considerably longer than the poem you’ll eventually end up with, stop and eat or drink something.
· Look at the poem draft as a whole, and get rid of any sentences/fragments that you feel don’t fit with the rest. At this point, you may not be able to articulate a “subject matter,” but you have a sense that there might be some general context for all these lines, and trust that sense.
· Rearrange the order of the sentences/fragments so that they seem to flow and make sense in a way that isn’t linear but associative.
· Figure out the free verse structure: line lengths, enjambments or no enjambments, stanzas or strophes or no stanzas or strophes
· Come up with a title, unless that happened earlier.
I really enjoyed reading Alejandra Pizarnik's work. If I'm being honest, I didn't quite get the gist of the poem when I read it the first time. However, once I watched the video and you explained that she suffered from depression before suicide, it made a little more sense. I did notice however, that the translation of the poem might not have the same exact meaning! I'll explain why. You described that in original poem (English version), there are strong connotations of a voice being suppressed. This is true. In the English version of the poem, words like: "gagged grey" "desolate birds" "mutilated words" give a strong sense of a voice unheard. The voice unheard is most likely her but you also mentioned a "other". An alien voice that is suppressing her words. We are left to figure who or what this other voice is. However, in the Spanish version of this same poem, it seems as if this is answered. May I add that in my opinion the Spanish version of this poem is actually more visual than the English version. It almost even seems more literal than metaphorical. Although the poem is just a translation, there are certain word choices that are more powerful than the one in English. One example could be the last line of the poem: "the ill-fated, the owners of silence" here, "ill-fated" is defined as "destined to fail or bad luck" someone who is ill-fated might not have the best luck in life. However, in the Spanish version, the last line is: "los funestos, los duenos del silencio". Although this is technically the same line, I thought her word choice for translation was very interesting. She used the word "funestos" for "ill-fated" which isn't actually the same translation. A person who is "funesta" is someone who is filled with hate but also brings tragedy. They are similar in meaning but when reading the poem over, it seems as if the Spanish version of the poem is talking about class difference. Again, just an opinion but when reading the poem over, lines like "those dressed in rain" and "los vestidos de pajaro" don't mean the same exact thing. The exact translation for that line would be: "the dresses of bird" which wouldn't really make sense unless re-worded in a different way (which she does) but by rearranging words in a different order, you already give a poem a different meaning! In spanish, the image of "bird dresses" almost give an image of poverty. In a sense, the voices "unheard" or the voices being silenced are not her own, but the voices of her people. I assume the voices oppressed might be those of a lower class. But again, this might just be my opinion. I just thought that her word choice for translation was quite riveting. I also thought it was cool that you mentioned "lilac" was a trope for death. I was a bit confused on that factor. As far as the second poem by Haryette Mullen, I have read this poem before in another English class. This poem was a lot easier to understand but still very powerful in imagery. I thought it was cool that she used cliches to paint a bigger picture. As a writer, I sometimes struggle with cliches but this poet used cliches to her advantage. She used cliches to give the poem a whole different meaning.
ReplyDeleteQuestions:
Delete1. I didn't quite understand why Pizanik's poem is considered a single narrative if there are two versions of it. From my understanding, a single narrative is defined as "limited exposure" to something. I guess I understand that she doesn't directly say "Hey! my poem is about depression!" but wouldn't the two versions together make a "whole" to paint a picture? I might be a bit confused on what this means.
2. For poem 3 due later today, would we email our poem to the same people as last time? Or are you putting us in different groups? If so, I am ready to send my poem three to my peers but I do not have their email yet. If it is the same people then I will send it during class time.
Melanie, your points about translation in the Pizarnik poem are extremely relevant, especially with regard to the last line. Indeed, your translation of "funestos" confirms my sense that the "others" are being referred to, because they are oppressive. If we take your interpretation of class conflict, "my voices" are those of the economically oppressed, and "the others" are the economically more privileged, and the "I" in the poem is singing to prevent them from singing. In most cases of political action, the oppressed are trying to be heard and are the ones prevented from "singing" by a social hegemony that privileges the dominant group. But for an individual who is a member of a marginalized class, it is necessary for her own voices to try to prevent the dominant class's voices from dominating her own mind, because they are naturally in her mind because of the mass media. It might be most satisfactory for us to acknowledge that both the political and psychological analysis COEXIST fairly equally in the poem, whether in the Spanish or English versions, and our selection of one over the other might merely indicate our personal preference.
DeleteTo respond to your first question, you interpret my statement about "two versions" as two actual narratives, but what I meant was that there are two interpretations of the sentence-structure in the poem that lead to opposite narratives, but each interpretation contains only one narrative. The two versions are incompatible and cannot "make a 'whole' to paint a picture." Today, we are engaged in a discussion of the interpretation of poetry that is much more germane to a class focused on literary analysis, such as ENG 102 or 270 (Intro to Poetry), but I am elaborating on this merely to show that poets a) can, if they choose, anticipate readers' process of meaning-making and create difficulties intentionally or facilitate meaning by stripping away ambiguity, and b) poets can engage with readers seeking meaning after the poem is in the world, or they can refuse to engage in such a dialogue. Some poets believe that their own pronouncements about their poems limits others' interpretation and is therefore bad, and other poets believe that their view is no more authoritative than any reader's, because they think that their unconscious intentions and the possibilities of language go beyond their conscious intentions.
In response to your second question, please stay in the same groups throughout the semester.
When is this due?
ReplyDeleteManuel, it's on the syllabus/course schedule, pp. 6 and 7. These are the next few classes:
DeleteWed. 4/22- HOMEWORK: Read Alejandra Pizarnik, “Rings of Ash” (example of Poem 4, topic 1 & and Harryette Mullen, "We Are Not Responsible" (example of poem 4, topic 2) and Kim Hyesoon, “Sand Woman” (example of poem 4, topic 1).
• 11:45-12:10- Go to the “Poem 4” post and use the web address to watch my YouTube video on Alejandra Pizarnik and Harryette Mullen’s poems and the surreal narrative and poetic appropriation assignment.
• 12:10-12:50- In the comments section of the “Poem 4” post, write your questions and remarks on Pizarnik and Mullen’s poems and the surreal narrative and the poetic appropriation and give your impressions of surreal narrative in Kim Hyesoon’s poem; we can all reply to each other during this phase.
• 12:50-1- On the “Poem 4” post, read the discussion of "Supplementary Exercises" in the Poetry Workshop Textbook.
• 1-1:45- You can do 1 of the supplementary exercises and paste it into the comments section of the “Poem 4” post, and we can comment on each other's results.
* Fri. 4/24- HOMEWORK: REVISION of POEM 3 DUE (putting both the original & revision in the body of an email)
• 1-1:20- In the comments section of the “Poem 4” post, ask questions or make comments about either the surreal narrative or the poetic appropriation. We can all respond to each other.
• 1:20-1:45- In the comments section of the “Poem 4” post, each student should write one sentence that did not originate with them. The sentence needs to have something to do with love or lust.
• 1:45-2:00- I will arrange the lines into a poem as quickly as possible, and if there's time left, we can comment in the comment section of "Poem 4."
* Wed. 4/29- HOMEWORK: Poem 4 DUE in the body of an email). Choose 1 of these options:
1) Write a surreal narrative poem of between 16 and 40 lines: the “story” must have several (literally) impossible events or situations or images. There should be at least 7 images and/or tropes in the poem. This poem may resemble a dream.
2) Write a poetic appropriation of between 16 and 40 lines consisting of other people’s sentences or fragments and none of your own phrases. You should take the poem from 8 to 20 sources, including: the internet, TV, radio, magazines, books, overheard conversations, what someone says to you. How you build a sense that the fragments and sentences belong together as a collage is up to you to figure out by trial and error. There should be at least 6 images and/or tropes in the poem.
NOTE: If you can’t be online between 11:45 and 12:05, you and your 2 peer-critiquing partners need to do this either earlier or later—but before the 9 pm deadline for the paper to be submitted to me in the body of an email.
11:45-12:05- Peer-critiquing of Poem 4:
• The critiquing partners will email each other and put the poem in the body of an email.
• They will read each other’s poems slowly and record their comments about the use of language, ability to do what the assignment is asking, the thematic effects of this exercise, and other features of style.
• Then each will make these comments to the other student poet in the body of a reply email.
• During this time, you can contact me with questions in the comments section of the “Poem 4” post.
• 12:05-12:35- 2 volunteers will send me their poems in the body of an email, I will post the poems on the “Poem 4” post (only for the duration of the class!) and I will write remarks about the poems and also reply to your remarks from the comments section.
• 12:35-12:55- Go to the “Publishing Poetry” post and read my expansion of the section on “Networking” in the Poetry Workshop Textbook.
• 12:55-1:45 In the comments section of the “Publishing Poetry” post, write your questions and remarks on poetry networking; we can all reply to each other during this phase.
Out of the three poems I mainly loved 'WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE'' because it comply to what is going on in society now. The other poem I liked even though it took me time to understand was 'sand women' . The only question I have is when you said ''If you understand the emotional tone and context then it really doesn't matter that it is not readable in a normal sense '' What did you exactly mean and does this mainly apply for poems that are more emotional ?
ReplyDeleteSupplement exercises(Slenderizing): Removing All the letter D's and words with it
Growing in a place
Pink Flower roots
White concrete skies
Life
Black Leaf's
Pink light as cotton candy but as cotton
Pot of soil as sand , hard as rock
Look far see less
Up close see more
no cracks , less brush strokes
Upfront full paint with missing strokes
Leaf's evaporate , exposed when seen
Roots slim as an pole
Flowers form of clouds
Full it takes up the space
love and sorrow color of emotions
leaving a light and mood
Giving hope but in a place
-Diamond.F
Diamond, what I mean by "readable in a normal sense" is that you can't translate the tropes and images into statements, saying "A means B"; you are not quite sure exactly what is being said, because you feel that the line or sentence is connected to a particular emotion. This applies to poems where the emotion is on the surface--for example, the tone is "screaming"--AND where emotion is under the surface.
DeleteWhat you did with the slenderizing exercise is to take a poem you already wrote and got rid of all the words with the letter d in it. I'm wondering if you felt that it changed the poem a lot to get rid of those words, or did it not make so much difference?
Sorry, my first sentence above should have read:
DeleteDiamond, what I mean by "readable in a normal sense" is that you can't translate the tropes and images into statements, saying "A means B"; you are not quite sure exactly what is being said; HOWEVER, you feel that the line or sentence is connected to a particular emotion so it doesn't matter that you can't translate the passage into a statement.
Hi Professor Fink,
DeleteAfter reading over your response to Diamond's question, I wanted to express how I learned something new today. As I reflected on it, I thought that word you used "readable sense" was very intriguing. I like how you brought out that emotional sensitivity is what should guide the reader in understanding the poem. The way I understand what you said is that as long as the reader is able to sense the poem, it doesn't matter if you can't translate the images and tropes into statements.
Also, when it comes to having an emotional base to your poem, which technique does that apply to? The surreal narrative or poetic appropriation?
Okay this is kinda of unrelated but what is up with Natsuko Hirata's poetry style?
ReplyDeleteManuel, it's not unrelated; I'm very happy you asked that question, especially if students do ask her questions. In fact, what I just explained to Diamond can apply to Hirata as well as Pizarnik and many other poets. Hirata is sometimes a surrealist--going beyond ordinary reality in developing a narrative--and she's sometimes telling a realistic story in extremely brief form, therefore leaving out transitions, etc. and forcing you to make guesses. If we have time today, I will give examples from the packet of her poems that I attached in an email to you. Anyway, Manuel, does that partly answer your question?
DeleteAlso another question about Rings Of Ash by Alejandra Pizarnik, what is her poem really talking about?
DeleteManuel, Pizarnik's poem is really talking about the speaker's deep fear that hellish depression will destroy her identity. But my simple paraphrase does not begin to represent the artistic richness of the poem.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Hirata, the blog formatting cannot reproduce the visual shapes of her poem, but frequently the visual element is connected to some aspect of the narrative or meditative element.
Here is a poem by Hirata, followed by a brief analysis by me:
The Late Summer
Though this
powerful season isn't over
and she’s still snuggling up to me, she brings
a cryptic bulletin with ragged ice.
To experience aspect of
"that time" and "that sense" enough,
quiet tables bearing fugitives shall spend time under sunshine.
The more sunshine,
the more shadow covers
this burned heart.
To makes sense of this narrative about the experience of late summer--the title thus indicating the subject matter- you first need to recognize that in the third line, "late summer" is represented as female ("she's" and "she") and that the "bulletin" of "ice" is a trope/image not only of a different weather pattern but an emotional experience like the "burned heart" at the end. But once these points are understandable, then I believe the rest of the poem becomes clearer emotionally--even if you can't exactly paraphrase it word for word.
Oh that makes sense, also where can I find the supplementary exercise? I have my workshop textbook with me and I can't find it.
DeleteIt's on p. 8.
DeleteStill can't find it on both pages. One has a poem by Louise Bennett and a story from Langston Hughes.
DeleteManuel, you are looking at the syllabus, not the textbook. Here, I'll copy and paste it:
DeleteSUPPLEMENTARY EXERCISES
These exercises, among others, are helpful in getting poets to break out of their habits of language and expand their imagination and perhaps also their vocabulary.
Creating a blank: If you don’t like a word in a draft of a poem you have written, erase the word and put a blank. Then randomly put your finger somewhere in the dictionary or some other book and see what word it lands on. Do this random procedure until you have a word that works in the poem.
N + 7: Google “N + 7” and you will find the “Spoonbill Generator.” You can take a poetic text of your own that you are not yet satisfied with—perhaps the surreal narrative assignment—and the generator will convert every noun in your text in succession into the next 15 nouns in the dictionary: in other words, N+1 is the first redoing of your text, N+2 is the second, N+3 is the third, and N+15 is the last. For example, if a line in your poem is: “I am a good ice cream boy,”
N+1 will be “I am a good iceberg crease boycott,” N+7 will be “I am a good identification creditor brag,” and N+15 will be “I am a good idler crematorium branch.” Through this process, if you find a phrase or whole line to be expressive enough for your poem, you can use it. (The Oulipo group in France used N+7 to write poems; they did not change the results of their experiment.)
Homophonic translation: “Translate” a passage from a language you don’t know into English by rendering how the original words sound in English.
Slenderizing: This Oulipo exercise involves taking the finished draft of a poem, choosing a particular letter of the alphabet, and getting rid of every word that has that letter. See how much of the poem still makes sense to you or, indeed, if part of the poem is improved. Whereas the Oulipo practitioners would leave the experiment the way it is, you can keep revising until you get the poem you want.
Lipogram: In this Oulipo procedure, unlike slenderizing, you decide before even writing the poem that you won’t use a particular letter of the alphabet.
There are techniques with varying names in which you change one word into another,. David Morice in The Dictionary of Wordplay (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2001) defines “beheadment” as “the removal of the first letter of a word to create a new word” and he gives the transformation of “climb” to “limb” as an example (31). “Curtailment” is removing “the last letter of a word to make a new word”—for example, “pine” to “pin” (54). “Deletion” is “a word formed by deleting a letter from the interior of another word,” as in the transformation of “friend” to “fiend” (55). He defines “adjacent letter switch” as “a transposal in which two letters next to each other in a word change places to form another word” (3); one example is “scared” and “sacred.” A “spoonerism” is “an unintentional transposition of sounds in words” (196), such as saying “This torn has a good caste” instead of “This corn has a good taste.”
One thing a poet can do, as Theodore Weiss, my first creative writing professor in college, taught me, is to figure out what words s/he is using a lot in poems, make a list of them, and avoid using them for a year or so.
Hi Professor Fink,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed learning about both forms of poetry. I was particularly fascinated with Alejandra Pizarnik's "Rings of Ash". I thought that her imagery was very powerful. I like when she said:
"It's my voices that are singing
so the others can't sing".
I thought these two lines helped to convey the psychological struggle one experiences when suffering with a mental illness. I could visualize her struggle in battling depression. I also enjoyed learning about this style of poetry because it gave me a new technique for writing poems to help me express deep and personal emotions and feelings.
I also enjoyed learning about poetic appropriation a version of collage poetry because as a poet, I've recently developed the goal of wanting to use my poetry as a way to express social empathy. Social empathy is about understanding people's life experiences as a way to understand structural inequalities and how they have impacted their lives. As a result, I like how this technique of poetry requires that we do research on phrases that we would like to use. I feel this technique would fit very well in implementing the goal of wanting to use my poetry to express social empathy.
I saw your email before class and the reason I haven't done anything yet is because I thought it was extra credit and because I was busy taking care of my mother, I didn't have time to do it but, if you would like us to complete it, please let me know where I should go to find their poetry and I'll read
it.
Also, is there anything else you'd like us to do today for class?
Janessa, I appreciate your analysis of Pizarnik's poem. Appropriative collage poetry can facilitate social empathy, but not for a single person with a single intersectional subject position but rather for numerous briefly quoted individuals with different subject positions. You are juxtaposing different manifestations of challenges traceable to structural inequalities. The reader is then given the opportunity to make sense of those juxtapositions. Sociopolitical poetry is one of the dominant modes of our current time; I ask, though, that one consider the poetry in the poetry and not only the politics, because one could create a political collage poem of obvious or cliched lines, but I find that effective political poetry contains highly charged language (whether beautiful or ugly or neither) that does not merely reinforce prior understand of sociopolitical contexts.
DeleteIn my email, my concern was to know whether people want to do the questions for the poets, and I'm sensing that you do. Tom Beckett's excerpt is in the syllabus. I sent an email with Hirata's poems in a Word attachment toward the beginning of April.
The last part of today's class involves picking one of the supplementary exercises on p. 8 of the Poetry Workshop Textbook.
I had a typo at the end of the first paragraph--. . . prior understanding of sociopolitical contexts.
DeleteThis post is by Aliyah:
ReplyDeleteAfter reading all three poems i can say they were all confusing yet very interesting to read. Surreal poetry focuses on a lot of imagery, and it is cool that it mostly comes from the subconscious. With that being said, almost anything can happen. I like that Pizarnik has both the English and Spanish translation. I think they were used for different audiences, those who spoke English and those who spoke Spanish. Although he wasn’t the one who did the translation, i believe he knew someday somehow it would be translated. Translations lose the original meaning as well as feeling of what was being said. My favorite part of the poem is,
And at night, always,
a tribe of mutilated words
looks for refuge in my throat,
so that they won’t sing—
the ill-fated, the owners of silence.
I like that the poet used “mutilated” and “refuge” It conveys a very strong message.
I really enjoyed reading Mullens poem. She highlighted so many controversial issues that are overlooked by many. This poem can still be read today and the audience can pinpoint exactly how it reflects modern day society. It makes me wonder, what was the response after she released this poem? How did the public/ government officials react, Or was there even a reaction?
I had to read Hyesoon’s poem over and over. It didn’t make much sense to me because i noticed 2-3 different perspectives in the poem, but i guess that is the point. I feel like the poet was trying to highlight love in this poem. The poem states:
“ When he left they say she didn’t eat or sleep. She didn’t die
although she kept her eyes shut
kept her breath held”
I believe the poem is saying that Although she didn’t physically die, a piece of her died when he left. She waited and waited with her eyes closed and her mouth shut for his return, but he never did. I feel as though the author was comparing herself to the sand women towards the end, and how she followed her in every dream because they were a reflection of each other.
- Aliyah Brown
Aliyah, I appreciate your points about "Rings of Ash," but Pizarnik was a woman, not a man.
DeleteMullen's poem was in a book of hers, and her readers probably reacted favorably to the poem, but we don't know if ANY of her readers were public officials. We don't have the data. All we have are book reviews of Sleeping with the Dictionary, which came out in 2002.
Regarding Kim's poem, I think you're right to see "death" as metaphorical. It might involve patriarchal culture trying to kill a woman's spirit.
What I put on N+7
ReplyDeleteearnings ago you stood on these groundsheets:
Tall and covered in features and scallywags with drachmas of you everywhere.
But your kindness's ruling came to an endeavour and only the bonfires are leftist.
Now here I am with your bulb blockages and a system asking a questionnaire;
Should I bring you backbencher?
We hush our plank with chemistries and numerals, a ward was even started because of a dullard.
We created mirrors, plains, weathers, and tech you wished you had.
Should I bring you backbencher?
What would you do if you walked? Will you be a mirror or an abortionist?
We don’t know much about your racehorse only through speech.
What will you bring? Will you bring lifeguard or deb? We didn’t how you worked;
Will you die in our envoy or will you ruling the daylight again?
We think ourselves goddaughters but we are Prometheus and you might be our punnet.
Should I bring you backbencher?
I see two gabardines that are very possible as I look at your egghead;
One of lifeguard where you grow alongside your kindness, healthy and plenty
Yet there is one where you sprig deb and killing the credits we swore to protect
A worrier that is now shaped by both new and old,
Should I bring you backbencher?
Manuel, this is remarkably surrealistic, as I would expect with this technique! The sentence, "Will you be a mirror or an abortionist?" is rather amazing!
DeleteSomeone who performs this operation has the choice either to let the poem stand as it is in all its glorious incoherence (as the originators of N+7 did) or to take a bunch of lines that seem to work best and also make changes of words and phrases to create whatever level of coherence you want from the eventual poem.
My Supplementary Exercise:
ReplyDeleteI want to use a slight version of David Morice's "spoonerism" for my poem entitled: "When My World Is Hurt.
Here is my original draft:
When My World Is Hurt
Words are a recurring,
of tongues that bit me with
the knowing of it's teeth.
Faces are the salt, added
to the wounds that sting me with
the sharp stare of its eyes.
Memories are the binge watching,
of a tragedy show constructed by the
sullenness of its thoughts.
Sighs are the heated flames,
of a fire ignited by the burning
anger of its breaths.
Prayers are the cries for help,
from a heart, lost, scrambling within
its own footsteps searching for air. By Janessa Graham
Here is the version of it done with spoonerism:
My World Is Hurt When
Recurring words are a,
tongue that bit me with
the teeth of it's knawing.
Added, are the salt faces
to wounds that sting me with
the eyes of its sharp stare.
Binge watching are the memories,
constructed of a tragedy shows by the
thoughts of its sullenness.
Heated flames are the sighs,
of fire ignited by a burning
the anger of its breaths.
Cries for help are the prayers,
a heart, lost within from scrambling
for air searching its own footsteps. By Janessa Graham.
When you can, please give me your feedback. I appreciate trying out this supplemental exercise because it gave me a new way to look at structuring phases and words while writing poetry.
Janessa, I think that some of the revised lines work better than others, and for poets who want to create the best possible poem out of the exercise, it's important to keep only the changes that work to produce fresh meaning without going against the overall intention of the poem. These are examples of what I think works well:
Deletethe title change
the teeth of its knowing
Added are the salt faces
constructed of a tragedy show (not shows)
thoughts of sullenness (but leave out its)
Heated flames of the sighs
and I'm not sure about the last line.
The other changes don't work; they just seem random or awkward.
SURREAL NARRATIVE - Rings of Ash plays with color in a darkand doleful way. Pizarnik utilizes colors like black and gray to illustrate her own lamentation. in lines like, "gagged grey in the dawn", "in the rain like desolate birds" and "smaller black suns". Her perspective is darkened by her own trauma, a common symptom brought on by melancholia. This poem is so surreal, it almost paints depression as a supernatural entity from a weeping other-world. Identically, Pizarnik curates a theme of dismemberment violence and mortuary resignation. For example, we she uses, words like, "breaking", "gagged", "division" and "mutilated", their is an allusion of tearing. Perhaps, the speaker is suggesting an irrevocable separation from her mind and body or from her soul and mind. This poem is powerful because it has elicits visceral reaction and knocks the air out of your chest with it's unflinching brutality. Rings of Ash denotes a type of violence that we often inflict on ourselves, the wounds other cannot perceive, see or feel. I liked this poem but it is clinically heartbreaking, knowing the speaker is held in a permanent stasis, drowning in the pool of her own undoing. As someone who had mental health issues, this poem surely hits home where in places it shouldn't.
ReplyDeletePOETIC APPROPRIATION - This poem, "We Are Not Responsible" is an anarchic emblem and is rebellious in nature. To me, it sounds like a fist in the face of society, a hate letter to the government office, a kick to mouth of toothless authority. Probably not the writer's intention but it's what I felt was conveyed when reading. There is a callousness to the speaker's tone, a nonchalance, as if they could care less about what happens to the public It sounds like something you'd overhear a politician saying to their collages, whispering "You have no rights we are bound to respect". "We Are Not Responsible" reeks of flagrant discrimination. In particular the line, "We refuse the right to refuse service to anyone" reminds me of capitalism, business-like greed, our faltering healthcare system and that one story about a wedding cake company who refused to make a cake for a gay couple. Not to mention the transgender child who was thrown out of catholic school for merely existing. Free speech should not ever condone hate speech. An just because you have a platform doesn't mean you're right.
I like the piecing together process, the scavenging of resources, common in poetic appropriation poetry but surrealism is definitely more in my wheelhouse, both art-wise and poetry wise.
Although this is not ENG 289, you raise an important point for critical theory. When you speak, re Mullen's poem, of "a callousness to the speaker's tone, a nonchalance," after comparing the poem to "a fist in the face of society," you raise the issue in (politically charged) collage poetry of what the Russian Marxist critical theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, whose theory of dialogism involves the simultaneous presence of conflicting ideologies in literature and culture in general, calls "double-voiced discourse," what involves the ironic as opposed to straightforward mouthing of a discourse that one opposes. Mullen's poem is almost 100% double-voiced discourse; other collage poets, including at times, Mullen herself, mix lines of double-voiced discourse with units of discourse that reflects (or could reflect) their ideology, and the reader is then made to confront confictual dialogism directly and figure out where they stand in all this. Another word Bakhtin uses is heteroglossia-- from the Greek derivation, differences of interpretation.
DeleteI took that course! Never heard of the theorist, Mikhail though. But yes, I think a kind of "double consciousness" is common in literature, different kinds of writing and poetry because humankind is so diverse and complex. We don't have one, unwavering opinion nor do we always feel one singular emotion, all of our thoughts are always on a string-like spectrum, balancing. constantly conflicting, a weird kind of contradiction. This poem offers and conveys more than one kind of perspective.
DeleteI also found Kim Hyesoon's "Sand Woman" very interesting. Something I took note of is when she said at the end:
ReplyDelete"The woman followed me in every dream
and her shut eyes would open in a flash.
Under her eyelids it was deeper, wider than the desert's night sky".
These lines made me think about what Kim wants us to know about her from reading this poem. Those lines gave me the impression that she was talking about how she carries with her the impacts of a past traumatic experience. I think the title could also shed light into the meaning of this poem because this title of "Sand Woman" has some pun to it in that it could be a symbol of a double-meaning in regards to a woman who is still standing but buried deep beneath the surface at the same time. In addition, we could also say the title expresses a paradox and I think that's what Kim may have wanted us to pick up on. She wanted us to pick up on the fact that even though she is still standing, there is still a part of her buried that she struggles to express or confront.
Janessa, this is a persuasive psychological reading of Kim's poem. Your idea of doubleness or self-division relates to what Brianna was just saying about the psychological trauma represented in Pizarnik's poem.
DeleteI agree with you Jan. I think the sand woman is the speaker's trauma incarnate.
DeleteHi Professor,
ReplyDeleteMy first question in regards to Natsuko Hirata's poetry is what genre of poetry does he write?
I also noticed that in the poem entitled: "The Shot", Natsuko started his first line off with no caps. Why do you think that is? What technique might he have been trying to express and what might have been his purpose in doing that?
Hirata is a woman. The sub genre of many of her poems is surrealistic narrative, but at times one might detect collage or catalogue elements. I would be hesitant to say that all of her poems fit a single sub-genre.
DeleteWhen I copied and pasted "The Shot," somehow I lost the first two lines; I will resend the file to everyone:
The Shot
Every daybreak,
you who are
hitting the targets.
The celestial sphere
of brittle cells,
frost fell in
the well-spent wilderness.
Lustrous solitude.
The diamond conviction
flows into the Grand Canal.
I am
within the splash.
As a supplementary exercise, I did the Creating-a-blank process. In this process, you underline words you don’t favor in your poem’s draft, put your finger randomly on a word in an arbitrary book, and see what word it lands on. I used my poem 3 draft and played along with the first 4 lines. I used Sylvia Plath’s Collection of Poems to find new words. This is what I got:
ReplyDeleteDRAFT - Upon a blanch pillow, a pellucid crystal.
Milk-livered and colorless, clear as sap liquid.
Cobweb stiletto, sharp knife of diaphanous silk.
Kamikaze pearl.
EXERCISE - Upon a blanch pillow, a pellucid fire.
Milk-livered and voiceless, clear as sap sea.
Cobweb stiletto, sharp heart of diaphanous silk.
Kamikaze star.
In the end, the words "crystal" changed to fire "colorless" changed to voiceless, "liquid" changed to sea, "knife" changed to heart and "pearl" changed to star. Overall, finding the new words was really fun. I like both versions equally, like two separate children.
Yes, Brianna, "two separate children" is entirely apt for this context! (And I know because I have two actual children.)
DeleteSand Woman by Kim Hyesoon is elegiac as well. Several lines portray a certain kind of death, an operation of mummification, a vivisection while still alive. To me, the woman in the poem represents ALL women, like a sick kind of metaphorical proxy. How society captures women, to cut and reconfigure as they like. The lines, "people came and took her", "fingers came in at her from all directions" and "under her eyelids, it was deeper". There is a Sybil-like, foresight about her, like she holds all the secrets and, pain deep inside of her sand body. In fact, the woman probably is not a woman at all. Perhaps, she is a manifestation of a piece of land, a desert maybe. It is common for people to refer to objects or places as women. Consider, Mother Earth. Maybe The sand woman is a human version of war. This poem haunts, for sure. It has a surgical fantasy about it, like in the lines, "A woman was lifted form the sand", "she was perfectly intact, not even a split hair." It is eerily uncanny and comforting in tandem. But it also seems sad, like there is a perpetual longing buried in the sand somewhere.
ReplyDeleteHello Professor Fink,
ReplyDeleteThank you for letting me know Natsuko was a woman. I apologize for my mistake in the previous post. Another question I have is about Natsuko Hirata's "The Final Place" poem. My first question is what do you call that particular format she wrote her poem in? Secondly, I noticed that at the end of her poems, it tells us that her poem was published in Otoliths. What is the Otoliths? Is that a particular magazine? Also, I found this particular line interesting:
"When we were
cats or waves
at a building landing
Venus drew a bow".
What do you think she may have been trying to say there? I like Natsuko Hirata's style. I feel she has a very unique style that is inspiring.
Janessa, there are 3 basic formats: verse (poetic lines, usually left-justified), prose-poetry in paragraphs (which we will stay away from in this course, because poets first need practice in free-verse, etc.), and visual poetry, which is also called concrete poetry or shaped poetry. Hirata writes in verse and visual poetry (or viz po, as some whimsically call it).
DeleteOtoliths is a really good e-zine. Mark Young, the editor, is a superb experimental poet from New Zealand who lives in Australia.
Perhaps, in "The Final Place," the speaker and those in her group are imagined as cats or waves to create a set of opposite characteristics, because "cats" suggest a kind of reserve yet "waves" indicate fluidity and flexibility. It indicates that people act differently at different times. "At a building landing" indicates that the cats and waves reach a limit, beyond which they cannot go. "Venus" of course is not the one who usually "shoots" people to fall in love; it's her son Cupid. The poet made this switch deliberately, I'm sure. Mine, of course, is only one reading.
So far, we have several great questions for the poets from Brianna and Erika. I'm sure you will have a good one for Hirata, Janessa!
Hello again Professor,
ReplyDeleteI just read one of Tom Beckett's poems entitled: "This Poem". As I read it, I thought it was a collage poem because the lines he wrote were creating images and feelings unrelated to each other. I felt it was a collage of thoughts, words, and feelings as well as images and tropes.
My first question is what strengths do you see in Tom Beckett's poetry that you would encourage us to incorporate in our writing?
My second question is what do you feel was the purpose of Tom Beckett writing this poem?
Also, I found out what the Otoliths is as I was looking up Tom Beckett's poetry. The Otoliths is a magazine of many e-things. Therefore, you can disregard my other question in regards to Natsuko Hirata's poetry.
I would never tell a poet to incorporate the particular strengths of a poet into their writing.You need to be "arrested" (emotionally, aesthetically) by a poet's strengths through reading her/him/them, and it will come out in the poetry, and if it comes out well, the editing process will keep it, whereas if it doesn't work, editing will remove it. You can always do exercises copying the specific accomplishment of a poet, but each exercise might or might not produce a good poem, though it may provide a fragment or various fragments that can be recontextualized and placed into another poem that began a different way.
DeleteI'm glad you're asking me and not Tom Beckett about his purpose in writing "This Poem," onwhich I will do a Youtube lecture for poem 6 that will be posted in about a week. No poet I've ever interviewed and few very poets I've met can tolerate a direct question about the purpose of a poem. Perhaps an indirect question about some identifiable component of the poem would help. And when many good poets sit down (or stand up) to write a poem, they don't think, "Ah, I'm going to write a poem about the Coronavirus"--not unless language that connects with the Coronavirus enters their minds. Language generally precedes an absolute demarcation of subject matter. Why? If you start with exactly what you want to say, the result is usually cliched or propagandistic or seemingly forced verbiage. I believe that nineteenth century poet Stephane Mallarme said something like this to the painter Paul Cezanne, but I don't have time to check the reference; it might have been another painter or sculptor. Such poetry of forced statement often features strong emotion without much subtlety or evidence of careful word choice, and I would argue that good poetry combines these elements rather than excluding one. I will acknowledge that OCCASIONALLY, thorough pre-determination of what one wants to say produces a good poem, but this is unusual and probably due to tremendous luck.
I believe that poetry involves the discovery of what one wants to say by the end of the poem through the exploration of language, and there are also some poets who have a philosophical reason for the desire to avoid saying anything.
A fine exercise for writing an intentionally bad poem is knowing exactly what you want to say.
You may not have any questions about how to do Poem 4, the surreal narrative or the poetic appropriation, or comments, for that matter, so we can move straight to our poetic appropriation collaborative poem. You may think, "This is ridiculous: how can we have any thematic unity if all of our appropriative sentences come from different sources?!?" Well, it might be interested to see what unexpected thematic or linguistic connections come up, BUT, if you really want thematic unity, then I invite someone to suggest a very general theme. We'll go with the first person who thinks of something.
ReplyDeletePoem sentence:
ReplyDeleteYou stay silent but your eyes speak the truth.
That's really good, Manuel. I think our subject matter has been established for us!
DeletePoem sentences for collaborative poem:
ReplyDeleteIf the sun had eyes, they'd look like yours.
Your lunar pull gives me vertigo.
Feeling very soft like I'm made out of clay.
I am your plastic toy.
You feel like heroin, you make me do anything.
Petal soft, rock hard.
They're all good. Let me take the first, and you can use the rest in case you need to for Poem 4.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteJan: My Contributing Thought-
ReplyDeleteYour spirit hymns even when life barks.
Well, I tried doing the poetic appropriation poem using Instagram captions like last week and I had trouble. I wanted to challenge myself because I've done surreal poetry in past and knew that route would be easier but the poetic appropriation was truly challenging. It is very hard to find lines, paste them together and have them flow naturally. I decided in the end to do the surreal narrative but I still have the copy of the poetic appropriation just in guess I change my mind later. I think it takes massive skill to be able to pull it off effectively.
ReplyDeleteBrianna, it may take massive skill, but I do believe that massive practice by those who find this poetic mode worthwhile allows inherent skill to bloom. Could you articulate the nature of the specific trouble you had with the Instagram appropriation?
DeleteIt is very dense and to me seems like too many ideas or a mouthful. It doesn't have an organic flow like it should have. Not very, poetic. The lines are of interest on their own but together, they lack control.
DeleteFor collab poem:
ReplyDelete"Lightening strikes every time you move"
Good one. From a song, Melanie?
DeleteHere is another idea, you are free to choose either one:
ReplyDeleteLove conquers while lust succumbs.
Well, Janessa, that's good too, but let's stick with the first.
DeleteAnyone who didn't contribute yet to the poem can do so by 5 pm tomorrow, and then I'll add any asynchronous sentences and then see if I need to rearrange the sentences for greater poetic effect.
ReplyDeletefor the POETIC APPROPRIATION poem does it have to rhyme?
ReplyDeleteand with the use of our different sources would we have to include where we got our sources from?
- Via Olivia
DeleteThe poetic appropriation does not have to rhyme.
ReplyDeleteYou don't have to reveal your sources, as you would in ENG 101 or 102.
Already online, where's the publishing poetry page?
ReplyDeleteThe publishing poetry page is before poem 4 and poem 3 on the blog.
DeleteProf Fink,
ReplyDeleteIn context of poetry, would it be grammatically correct to put a question mark after a rhetorical question or leave it as a statement with no comma, period or punctuation mark?
Example: Blank does not have blank, why do I
Either can work, but if you're going to put NO punctuation, then there should be a consistency of sentences and clauses without periods.
Delete