See Poem Collage blogpost for image list.

Elizabeth Bishop's poem, One Art, is a melancholy but resolved look at loss. Through her sadness, Bishop seems to advocate embracing loss and to practice handling loss as a way to cope with it. She says to "lose something everyday" such as door keys and then to gradually practice losing things that are more significant.

Information/ Images:
http://www.whileseated.org/photo/003244.shtml

http://news.bbc.co.uk

/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6685441.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6677057.stm

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/1413220

Images:
Noose
http://timesonline.typepad.com/times_tokyo_weblog/images/noose.jpg

School

Playlist
The playlist assignment was a really interesting way to begin the semester. At first I found describing and interpreting the songs to be a little intimidating. The project requires you to analyze a character in the same way that writing a paper requires and then translating that analysis into a different form. Learning to let go of purely concrete language and embracing tone, abstract ideas, and sound analysis was a process, but the end result was satisfying.

Unlike other short stories we've read this semester, Jimmy Yellow Hawk is told in a very conventional manner. In fact, I had a difficult time picking out a unique characteristic in the story's style to discuss. The traditional, straightforward style is quite appropriate for conveying a cultural lesson, and the story is about the use of story to do just that. Also, since the style is detail-oriented and literal, it seems more like a story you would hear told rather than one you would read yourself. With all the other available sources of entertainment- tv, internet, ipods, etc.

I really liked Catlin and his Indian Guide Approaching Buffalo Under White Wolf Skins, because it portrays the overwhelming vastness of the American West, especially as it would have been experienced in the mid to late 1800s. The landscape looks like the West goes on forever in one flat line, and even clouds are missing from the background. Yet the picture is not boring. The shadow in the bottom lefthand corner, and the "wolves" approaching the buffalo give an ominous, unpredictable quality to the land, and a great deal of this emotion is expressed with very little detail.

The three works that we discussed in class today all dealt with the influence of society on personal identity. The poem about Hard Rock was a strong example, and the story about Emily was a little more subtle. Understanding power dynamics, institutionalized racism, classism, and sexism, and the concept of society as both a group of individuals and something greater than the sum of it's parts are all difficult concepts to grasp.

Conversation Among the Ruins
by Sylvia Plath

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit
Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,

Campo's poem in which the speaker relates to a patient dying of AIDS was difficult to read. In some ways it reminded me of Earle's essay, because in between the discussion of his interactions with the patient and his feelings about those interactions, he describes the sterility and mechanical way that hospitals handle death. He describes the kitchen as "small, but serviceable and neat," the "spot...

Steve Earle's essay brilliantly captures the surreal, mechanical way in which killing a person for the sake of justice is treated in states that allow capital punishment. His writing style mimics the impersonal, matter-of-fact tone that he is describing. He writes chronologically, and many of his paragraphs begin with exact times.

"5:05 Rev. Brazile answers his cell phone and it's Fr. Walsh...
5:30 We enter the visitors' center across the street from the Walls unit" (p. 388).

Playlist
The playlist assignment was a really interesting way to begin the semester. At first I found describing and interpreting the songs to be a little intimidating. The project requires you to analyze a character in the same way that writing a paper requires and then translating that analysis into a different form. Learning to let go of purely concrete language and embracing tone, abstract ideas, and sound analysis was a process, but the end result was satisfying.

Sources:

Brooklyn Neighborhood at Night

Alps Landscape

V Sign

Buck

Haight-Ashbury Sign

I appreciated the accuracy with which the author depicts that strange period of childhood when suddenly nothing feels right but you cannot figure out why. I can remember feeling as if my mom had no idea who I was anymore and that the only way to deal with her was to "look right through her" as Oates described. The time is marked by boredom- a desire for meaning and importance- and when one cannot achieve these things, the next best experience is to dream about them. Oates references dreams quite a bit. She writes that Connie spent her time "dreaming about the boys she met.

A Playlist for Coriolanus

I liked Hardware. I especially liked how he compared his father and his father's tool box to a tour guide and translator and a foreign country. The way he quotes his father ("Pay attention and you'll learn a thing or two/ If you know the proper names of things you're never at a loss") makes it seem like it's his father, and not a personification of the tools, which suffer "with gruffness and disgust" at his incompetence. The poem also describes the way in which fathers can seem like foreign countries to both young boys and grown men.