San Fran Beats

This week's readings took us into one of my favorite eras of poetry: The Beats. Theorist Judith Butler is asserts that gender is performative in nature, a concept which I believe extends to the ways in which all identity is created. With their emphasis on public performance and the counter culture nature of their poetry, The Beats can certainly be seen as the place where identity was most radically experimented with up to that point in American history. The Beats used their poetry, and the way they lived their lives, to explore alternative perspectives on drug use, sexuality, religion, and ways to confront authority. One of my favorite aspects of the Beat era was the way in which they appropriated certain Buddhist concepts to form a uniquely American-Buddhist ascetic, a process which mirrors many Westerner's first encounters with Buddhist ideas. Allen Ginsberg provides a striking example of this process in that his first references to Buddhism are often superficial or show an affinity for the concept without the benefit of careful study or practice.

Ginsberg was forced to confront a shaking of his ideals, however, when he encountered the cut-up method of his friend William S. Burroughs. Burroughs would take print and cut the text into pieces and then reassemble the parts into a new whole. Ginsberg was stunned by the removal of subject matter and authorial intent practiced by his friend, and this new idea haunted him for quite some time. On Friday, July 13^th 1962 Ginsberg writes, “Everything random still, as any cut-up. Burroughs it's already a year still haunting me. I slept all afternoon & when I woke up I thought it was morning, I didn't know where I was. I had no name for India.” Ginsberg, still haunted by the cut-up method a year later, could not handle the evacuation of the author from the work. Ginsberg then decided to travel to India and study under many gurus in order to achieve a deeper spiritual understanding of his consciousness and how to continue with his poetry. He writes that “nobody can seriously go on passionately concerned with effects however seeming-real they be, when he knows inside all his visions & truths are empty, finally.”

This crisis was the impetus for a new approach to poetry and new vision of consciousness for Ginsberg. He began to play with the sound that words make rather than the meaning. In one of his later poems, “Hum Bom” the mantra HUM BOM is played with and changed to become whom bomb. Although there is referential meaning within the poem, the poem is meant to act as a manta on the vibratory level. This poem, as most of his later work, can be read as an effort to transcend the usual implications of language and produce a state of consciousness in his readers. Although much of his later work failed to garner the attention of his earlier pieces, I am impressed by Ginsberg's willingness to take poetry and the question of representation as far as he could.

Third

and all that

Shaking your money maker
In the land of why not:
Natural male enhancement,
And getting rich quick
is
Breaking free from the pack.

And all that, “Drill baby, drill!”
drill baby drill baby drill baby ß (a mantra few wanted to chant)

burrowing infant

hole making newborn

holy failed abortion

Permit me: in these phony reports--
And increase your PayPal!

Click here; is an opportunity--
All here!

Friends: Licensed love pills--
I gave them.


























Although I thought this poem would be the easiest to write, I found it very hard to give the up the effort to create representational meaning and let the text work on its own level. I tried a few poems with some of the pattern generators but was unhappy with the completely nonsensical result. I thought about editing them into slightly more cohesive units of meaning but gave up that project in an effort to find text that I was exposed to in my surroundings.
The first half of the poem is all TV commercial advertising which I somehow sit through apparently on a daily basis, hearing but not listening. This text must work its way into the subconscious by lulling the audience into a stupor. By taking these quotes out of context and placing them within the context of the poem the inane claims made by corporations to improve your lifestyle become silly and trite. The heavy rhetoric behind these words is evacuated and mocked by cutting and pasting them together to show how outlandish such claims really are. These are advertisements, not for things themselves, but for lifestyles and ideas which really have nothing to do with the product. Just as language is frustrated in expressing meaning, these products claim to deliver something that they never can.
Language is also explored as a kind of meme or a sound bite that can be used to influence the public. The cry of “Drill Baby, Drill,” uttered by Giuliani at the Republican National Convention, attempted to influence Americans by giving them an easily chantable phrase meant to take over the mind on the level of language. It is noted parenthetically that this manta failed to gain public acceptance in an effort to step outside the text and cause the reader to question her/his relationship to the piece in the same way that Hejinian asks the reader, “are your fingers in the margin.”
I also experimented with Homolinguistic translation by playing with the words drill baby. Drill baby becomes hole making newborn becomes holy failed abortion, and of course the idea of a drill baby is itself a play on the original utterance. The silliness, absurdity and offensiveness of this move is a definite nod to the Flarf movement in which intentionally bad poetry is produced.
The last few lines are all found text from a spam generator which again demonstrate the lengths advertisers will go in asserting that their products are a panacea for the ills of everyday life. The irony is that these claims to fulfill all desire, delivered through the medium of language, cause more suffering by fostering the idea that an end to suffering can be had at a price. Such desire feeding only goes to create more desire, and by recontextualizing the language of advertising this poem seeks to undermine the foundation upon which the rhetoric of advertising is founded.

November 10th Blog Effort

This weeks readings took us deep into the mystifying territory of the language poets. These poets are not interested in using language to represent something real, but rather look at language as a living, functioning world. One of the most fascinating language poets, Lyn Hejinian, writes that “language is an order of reality itself and not a mere mediating medium.” Hejinian prefers to play with the reader’s desire to find meaning by writing in a style which at first looks like a narrative but which actually frustrates the effort to take away a simple reading. This technique defamiliarizes the reader right at the point where things should start to make sense. The poems take on a life of their own and begin to talk about their process of creating meaning on the meta-narrative level. In “My Life,” for example, Hejinian asks, “Were we seeing a pattern or merely an appearance of small white sailboats on the bay,” and “Why would anyone find astrology interesting when it is possible to learn about astronomy.” These statements question the processes in which people look for the meaning behind things rather than looking at the thing itself. People who look at the stars or sailboats and search for the meaning behind these occurrences miss out on the beauty of the actual objects. For Hejinian language is the same: the beauty is to be found in the sounds of the words themselves and in the way they relate to one another. Although the poem is entitled “My Life” Hejinian does not privilege herself within her text. The German button inventor and aging magician are brought up with no correlation made to the narrative about her life. As the poem itself states, she follows “the progress of ideas” in a process “full of surprises and unexpected correlations.” Hejinian’s seemingly random process refuses to give any idea more weight than another and can be seen as disrupting the hierarchy than defines most endeavors in language.
Language poets are also interested in breaking the forth wall and catching the reader looking, which further disrupts the way meaning is usually created. The reader would often like to imagine that the writer is the one crating the meaning and the reader is a passively taking it all in. Hejinian disrupts this relationship by addressing the reader directly, as in such passages as, “Are you fingers in the margin.” By addressing the role the reader plays, even by simply holding the text, Hejinian brings the reader into the equation and forces him or her to think about how meaning is being created. Although Hejinian has written the poem the reader is the one who is left to “assemble all of the relatives.” Hejinian shows that she is aware of this with another question: “Where is my honey running.” Both a play on the sounds words make and a question in the form of a statement, this quote perfectly sums up Hejinian’s ideas about how language functions and the way poetry can create meaning.

Blog for November 2nd

One of the poets that we have studied this week who most challenges the way that language can represent reality is John Ashbery. His poem “The Instruction Manual” has, like most of his poems, little to do with the title itself. Instead the reader is treated to a free flowing, almost stream of consciousness, look at an imagined view of the city of Guadalajara. The instruction manual, rather than providing the material for the poem, becomes the inspiration for the piece only in that the author is escaping the drudgery of having to write the dreaded manual. It is fascinating then that words become his escape for words, bringing to mind the idea that poetry somehow seeks to escape language’s limitations through language itself. The writer is working “under the press” of the manual; his efforts at seeing Guadalajara are an escape from the reality situation. The reader is drawn into the poem through Ashbery’s amazing use of detail and taken for a tour of the city. The narrator introduces characters, invents little intrigues between them, and shows the reader all the best vistas. Towards the end he states, “How limited, but how complete withal, has been our experience of Guadalajara.” Although entirely fictitious, the reader gets the sense that she/he has experienced the city more deeply than an actual visit could afford. The author, through his imagination, has painted a picture more lasting than any memory. Language, in this case, has the power to represent imagination rather than the reality of the instruction manual.

Ashbery again shows himself to be concerned with language’s ability to communicate meaning in his poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons.” He writes, “Look at it talking to you” and suddenly the poem has a life of its own. This poem is trying to communicate with the reader but is frustrated: “You miss each other.” No matter how “plain” a “level” the poem speaks on you can not know what the author is really thinking and feeling. The poem can not be understood because it is working within a “system of them.” These words can only be read in relation to all other words. Meaning is created by the reader. There is no master signifier, the poem is “without proof, open ended.” Things are only connected by and, and, and. This poem is trying to get somewhere, to say something that can not be said. Everything is constantly changing, and writing or observing simply causes more change. The “you,” the reader of the poem exists only to “tease” the writer into writing and then vanishes or changes his/her attitude. By reading this poem the poem is changed. And yet at the end of the poem, somehow, throughout all these changes and frustrations the author is set down beside the reader. The means by which the author has attempted to address his subject has become that subject. As in “The Instruction Manual,” poetry is able to use language to overcome the limitations of language through the transformative power of the imagination.

Second Model

Lunchtime in Vermillion

Dismal prospects for eating out in Vermillion,
so many restaurants have burned, or closed.
And I’m missing old Marge, with her little dinner,
her gravely voice and perpetual unfiltered cigarette
hanging from her lips. Her place burned, but she survived,
reopened, only to die later from old age.

So I go to our only remaining Asian eatery--
lunch buffet at Chae’s. Opens at 11:00.
Or do I sup on the finery at McDonalds?
The Big Mac and fries the TV wants you to buy.

No! I’m really making Raman at home,
except that I hate the MSG and in the end just
wind up eating a bowl of Grapenuts.

And now I’m in the Wal-Mart parking lot,
and I’m staring at an old man in a pickup
who is staring at a young man walking,
walking along with no arms, and I’m wondering
why this old man is so drawn in by the sight of something
different. Wondering why the old in this town have never left.
Wondering which of the three of us is the real freak.

With this poem I attempted to mimic the work of Frank O’Hara’s lunch poems. I did some research for this one by actually going out to Chae’s for some lunch and then driving around the town looking for more ideas.
Having the poem set in Vermillion, rather than New York City, affords one an entirely different perspective. Here, rather than the bustle of the big city, the poet is struck with the overwhelming sense of space. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that I grew up here and then went away for ten years, but for me Vermillion is imbued with a sense of loss. The poem starts out talking about Marge, an old women who had a diner that served the best calzones. Marge herself was a real character and I miss her and her wonderful food quite often. Remembering her in the poem definitely ties in with O’Hara’s habit of mentioning old friends within his poetry. I think this technique works well in this type of poem because it gives the reader a sense of what is happening in the moment. The author is reminded of past friends by being in a certain place. The poem can then be read as almost a stream of consciousness poem, a where I am now and what I am thinking type of poem.
I also used the “connected by a series of and, and, and” technique in an effort to capture the random nature of O’Hara’s lunch poems. There is no real plot or theme as much as a representation of what I did and was thinking in the moment. This technique, in keeping with O’Hara’s ideas about personism, gives the reader a look into what the author is thinking without going into as much background detail as a confessional poet might. There is a real sense of motion, a sense that life is ever changing and here’s what’s happening right now. The poem then becomes more conversational in nature.
The mention of everyday or pop culture items was also used in an effort to model O’Hara’s poems. I may have gone a little over the top here with the inclusion of McDonalds, the Big Mac and Wal-Mart, but I really like looking at these references. If everything is art, and I believe that to be true, then the poet must not make distinctions between what is valuable and what is not. Nature is beautiful, but we all probably spend more time in Wal-Mart than out on the trail. O’Hara was interested in describing what was around him at the time and so was I. By making reference to specific times and places the reader is drawn into the poem by details to which he or she can relate. This is a poetry for the people.
In an effort to capture the enthusiasm that O’Hara was known to display I even tried to pull off an exclamation point. I would defend the use of this punctuation by saying that it marked an emphatic rejection of the overall shittiness of the McDonalds food and a desire to shun all eating establishments for a meal at home. Although perhaps not a usual thing to do, the “!” was an attempt to further model the poem after the great works of O’Hara’s lunch time poems.

Sixth Blog

After reading some of the more form based, heavy poetry of the confessionals, the poetry of Frank O’Hara has been like a breath of fresh air. The New York poets reference, and have been compared to, such abstract expressionist painters as Pollack, Chirico, and Frank. When one compares the spontaneous, in the moment style of painting to the style of poetry that the New York school used, the relation becomes quite apparent. In this painting of a she wolf by Pollack, the similarities in style become quite apparent:


The abstract expressionists, both in painting and poetry, are interested in conveying feeling without necessarily making very obvious facsimiles of the subject matter. One gets the feeling that the reader is given an impression of what is in the artist’s mind more than an image that everyone can easily identify. In the poetry of Frank O’Hara t reader is shown the impressions that the author has as he goes throughout his lunch break. O’Hara does not spell out exactly why he is feeling the way that he is, but rather spells his mind out on the page with abandon.

Many of the abstract expressionists’ paintings are not of any identifiable image at all, but are connected by each stroke’s relationship to the other as in this Pollack painting:


This technique is similar to the random connections made in the New York school’s poetry where the only connection is that of and, and, and. O’Hara’s poems especially flow along a course in which the only structure is the movement of O’Hara through the city. Connections are made as O’Hara sees familiar places or meets with people that he knows. This paratactic method makes the reader a part of the process and lends the pieces a lightheartedness that makes these works fun to read.

The abstract expressionists are also similar to the New York school poets in that they used a form of painting called action painting. They would often listen to music and fling paint onto the canvass in an effort to capture the action of their work in paint. O’Hara’s work was often jotted down quickly on his lunch break, lending his poems the same feeling of action and being in the moment. The reader can almost see O’Hara at work when reading his work.

The relationship between painter and poet is directly addressed by O’Hara in his poem “Why I Am Not A Painter.” O’Hara starts this poem out by mentioning that he would rather be a painter, but he is not. But throughout the course of the poem O’Hara points to the fact that he and painter Mike Goldberg are really involved in the same process of expression. They both start with an ideas, sardines for the painter and orange for the poet, and write or paint about them rather than attempting to represent them literally. In the end O’Hara has twelve poems called Oranges that don’t mention oranges at all, and here is a copy of Goldberg’s Sardines:

5th Blog: about Covey

It was a pleasure to hear Bruce Covey read his work in class and at the reading. Poetry really is best read out loud, and by its author. Some of the poems that struck me the most were “14 Kung Fu Climaxes,” and the one about the president’s non-declaration of war.
Through the use of genre, fragmentary narrative, and list making, Covey’s “14 Kung Fu Climaxes” functions as an exploration of language and perspective, as well as being quite humorous. Setting the poem in the well known genre of Kung Fu movies lends the poem an air of playfulness, cashing in on the many melodramatic scenes viewers have become accustomed to in such films. The finality and seriousness of the plot is undermined by no less than fourteen different endings for this poem. The lines all start with the phrase “That’s when” or “And that’s when,” adding to the poem’s fragmentary character. The events all take place within an known context, singular blips within the general context of the genre. There is a general plot movement at work within the poem, fragmented as it may be. In the first stanza both the narrator and his lover die, presumably shot by a common foe. Here, the love interest is spoken of in the third person. By the middle of the poem the narrator is fighting with “you,” or the person to whom the poem is written, which the reader might presume to be the love interest. By the end of the poem, through all the killing and dieing, the narrator is again with his “beautiful lover,” watching it all unfold on television, “beamed into eternity.” By dismantling the narrative and reassembling it in little bits, Covey reexamines the way meaning is created and interpreted.
Form is used in the poem “Declaration” to look at language from a different, more distant, perspective. By breaking down the president’s remarks by syllable, and then sorting the syllable groups alphabetically, Covey subverts the words intended meaning and gives the reader a more general perspective into the themes of the address. I was left with the sensation of seeing a bar graph that shows the points the speech writer was trying to drive home: terror, retaliation and other emotionally charged ideas. This format would be interesting to use in examining any politically charged text to examine general trends and moves made by the author.
In all the poems Covey exhibits a relationship with language that is both playful and thoughtful in its deconstruction. In his poem “Ra Ra” Covey says, “How happy I would be to mow these characters/Cut off the top halves of all these letters.” By mangling the original meaning of the text, and reassembling the pieces in a new manner Covey encourages the reader to create his or her own universe within the general context of the material we are surrounded by in our lives. In Covey’s world, the ever changing nature of our existence becomes an opportunity to play with meaning and take what you will from the endless possibilities of the void. Or, as William Blake said, “Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man’s.”

The fourth in a series of blogs about poetry

While walking to school the other day, I spied a cat crawling into a dumpster, presumably looking for a bite to eat and I was reminded of Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour.” It really dawned on me in that moment that Lowell was showing how perspective influences every factor of human thinking and behavior. Lowell’s skunks were ready to stand up and fight for their treasure--something that humans had cast aside as garbage. This revelation helped me to understand the shift in perspective pointed to by Bonnie Costello in her essay “Elizabeth Bishop’s Impersonal Personal.” Costello points out that critics often limit their focus to the biographical correlations between texts and their authors and fail to look beyond these details and toward the direction the author is suggesting. Of course the author must use language and some kind of identifiable circumstances in an effort to convey meaning to the reader, but Bishop was always eager to avoid making the clearly autobiographical revelations of the confessional poets. Bishop instead seeks to embody the voice of society as a whole, and to portray the individual as a fragmented being who is often in conflict with various aspects of the self. Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck” is explored in this essay, not as a “map of Rich’s failed marriage and husband’s suicide,” although this may be one reading of the poem, but rather as a “journey into the unconscious” in which conventional meaning and identifications are broken down and re examined. Costello points out that this is a journey that can not be made “voyeuristically or vicariously” but must be made by the readers themselves. Although the details of Rich’s life may be of great interest to the reader, they do not help us go to the place that the poet would take us--to the loss of the ego and into the realm of the unconscious.
By seeking to step outside of the self and into the unconscious, Elizabeth Bishop establishes what Costello refers to as an “emergent perspective. In this model the author, while writing within the limits of language and identity, gives voice to the “unfulfilled aspirations” of his or her society. This model is very similar to the Buddhist idea of independent origination. Since, in Buddhist thought, there is no independent origination, the self is seen as a result of all the factors leading up to its creation. The self is a text which has been written just as a poem. The image of texts caste off in a museum in the essay is a striking image of the futility in trying to establish meaning from cast off relics. In Buddhism, as well as this model of poetry, the details of the self are something to be dis-identified with in an effort to create a space in which the reader may explore a truer or more complete self. Like Rich, and those cats in the dumpster, we must dive deep and deconstruct those concepts of I/me, he/she and emerge with a new model in which the self refuses to be written in another’s voice.

Response to Modeling Poem

OK, it seems extravagant to analyze my own work so extensively but here it goes. Once I saw a one of those new cars called the “Crossfire” but it looked like Crotchfire for a second. I thought this was a hilarious phrase and as it conveyed a sense of urgency and dealt with light it would make a fine title. I tried to compose the poem in four line stanzas with some enjambment and half rhymes in order to emulate the writings of Lowell, Sexton, and Plath who come between the more formalistic New Critics and the more experimental poets. I also attempted to have a clear speaker who was interested in conveying some kind of meaning to the reader, while still operating in the vague language of poetics. The poem is devoid of any obvious references to classical literature due but rather speaks from my own views and experience. I also tried to keep the language as simple as possible to avoid sounding too formal.
As far as subject matter goes I really only had a few images in mind that I wanted to convey to the reader. I feel the poem worked as a confessional because it dealt with ideas and images that were personal and of a somewhat disturbing nature. I wanted to provide a sense of being somewhat alienated from society and family, as perhaps someone born into something which he didn‘t particularly desire. Growing up I had reoccurring dreams of being outside the house looking in at my family. Unable to enter the home, these dreams often left me feeling as if I was not part of my own family life. I have also often felt, as I’m sure most have, limited by the types forced on me by conditions of birth. I also wanted to allude to the desire to forget the facts with which one is faced. For me, the bottle is a symbol of man’s desire to operate in darkness. I also attempted to contrast that darkness with a sense of light. It has been on my mind much lately that fireplace of old has been replaced by the television of our day. While camping, a fire becomes humanity’s source of light, warmth, and comfort. The fire, for me, is that which is formless, that from which all form springs while remaining itself the stuff of possibilities. I think of poetry as an attempt to mediate between the realms of form and formlessness--to extract some kind of meaning while remaining unbound by any confining and limiting forms.
I also, towards the end, wanted to vaguely reference my brother’s deaths. Having witnessed by brother’s drowning early in life, and another brother’s death later in life, I have often felt as if I too did not belong here. The pressure to “be” something or “do” with a life that could have been as easily taken away has, as often as not, made me not want to do anything at all. I have felt, with Plath, that desire to join with the departed and a certain anger at being left here alone to muddle through the mess with the rest of the miserable bastards.

First Modling Poem

Crotchfire

To know him is to prevail,
To have a place in power.
I turned away at the gate,
or perhaps was turned away.

Today, a dusty bottle drowns
half remembered dreams
of standing outside at night
looking at my childhood home.

Window squares of happy light
Steady bulb and TV glow,
Pointing back to that long gone day
When formless flame illuminates.

And looking towards that formless realm
Where all that’s created breaks down,
I’m often wishing that I had drown,
Like brothers who are dead and gone.

Blog the Third

This week saw us move into some poetry that, I felt, went even father in trying to break down old systems of meaning and explore new ones. Both Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich seem to want to use their poetry to challenge the masculine dominated system and find a place where women have a stronger voice. While both are excellent poets, I personally found Olds to be more successful in her endeavor as she was able to reevaluate and deconstruct the idea male/female without reinforcing the dichotomy by appearing as biased.
By pointing out the contradictory nature of masculine sexuality and power in such poems as “The Pope’s Penis,” olds shows us the way in which the Patriarchal order puts itself at odds with the nature of the body, or that which is natural. In her poem “Once,” Olds again explores male sexuality through the image of her father’s nakedness. The poem is striking in it’s lack of the very organ which one might expect to most stick out, as it were, in a description of male nudity. Instead we are treated, or subjected, to a view that invokes the yawnic, rather than phallic, aspects of the male form. Rather than vilifying the masculine Olds invites the reader explore the ways in which gender distinctions break down, or the way that they subjugate both genders.
Rich, from my perspective, seemed interested in some of the same moves as Olds but without the ability to start anew. In her essay that we read for class she spoke of the need to move past the anger towards men and create a new space for women’s voices. One gets the feeling that this was perhaps the great struggle of Rich’s life. She also speaks of males as being part of “the system of sexual oppression” simply because of their maleness. While such sweeping statements might fly under the banner of first wave feminism, many queer theorists might point out the ways in which all subjects fail their gender categories.

Blog Two: Sexton &Plath

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath follow Lowell nicely as both can be seen to build on the tradition of the confessional poet while making forays into new ways of exploring meaning. Plath can be seen as following the tradition of some of the more canonical poets of the past with her use of literary reference and apparent desire to be accepted into the cannon. At the same time her subject matter and tone set her apart as a new voice of the times. Plath’s use of language to create her own meaning marked her as a poet more interested in conveying truth than in entertaining the general public than in entering conversation with an academic elite.
Sexton took her poetry even farther into the realm of the public sphere by making her poetry accessible to the general public by using subject matter that was of general knowledge at the time. Her references to Jello and other pop culture references, as well as her rather more straightforward language has made her one of the most well read poets of our time.
One of the most interesting aspects of Sexton’s writing is her use of multiple perspectives within her poetry. As described in the essay we read by Karen Alkalay, “The Dream Life of Ms. Dog: Anne Sexton’s Revolutinoary Use of Pop Culture“, in her classic poem “Hurry Up Please, It’s Time,” Sexton begins the poem in the voice of her as an exhibitionist and child like figure exploring her sexuality. The poem also speaks as poor Anne who is depressed and perhaps house ridden. She also gives voice to a character called Ms. Dog who seems to be Sexton’s daring and adventurous side. The character Skeezix also makes an appearance as a kind of intermediary between the internal and external worlds. This multiplicity of characters is truly unusual when most poems include one, or a much more limited, perspective.

First Blogging Assignment

The most significant aspect of poetry which we have discussed so far, in my mind, is the relationship between form and content. Poetry seems to be the place in which the use of the language (form) really collides and pushes up against what he poet is trying to say. It’s fascinating to see that as the rigid forms of poetry began to break up, poets began to write about material that was less traditional as well. Or did the form loosen in response to the new material covered? Either way you look at it, in the material we are now covering we can see the poets pushing up against the limits language, and beginning to play with those limits. It was interesting to read Tate’s reaction to Lowell’s “new” style of free verse and confessional material and realize that to Tate this was not poetry at all. Looking back at the influence that “Life Studies” had on the movement at the time is a testament to staying true to the aesthetic which you feel best reflects what you are trying to say.

Another significant move made by the poets we are now studying, as opposed to more traditional poets, is the inclusion of the author’s own voice and perspective within the work. The poem we read by Tate was written in some kind of universal, almost disembodied voice, and was concerned about the history of literature and art as much or more than what was going on around him at the time. The effect of such poems leaves the reader feeling as if they had attended some kind of lecture on the merits of “high art” and are included or excluded based on their ability to read these predefined set of codes. I noticed in our groups that so many more interpretations were able to be arrived at from the works of Lowell. One gets the feeling that every reader is able to take from the poem his or her own ideas, and to me that’s really what art is all about.

One reading that I was able to take away from the poem “Skunk Hour” by Lowell turned out to be based on class or hierarchal position. The poem seems to generally work on a kind of zooming in effect, in which we start out looking at the island and its various inhabitants, middle up on the author driving his car up the hills, and finish with a look at some skunks ravishing a garbage pail. For me, the poem seemed to be speaking of class layers as it moves from the upper crust, the heiress with old money, to the next level down, the L. L. Bean wearing millionaire with his new money. Then the middle class is introduced in the form of the lobsterman who now has the millionaire’s boat. The author presents himself as cut off from the rest of the human inhabitants of the island, watching the others playing at love, but himself in hell. He IS hell. The author’s only refuge seems to be the skunks that he sees scavenging around for “a bite to eat.” The only form of resolution seems to be in the fact that these, the lowest of all the island’s creatures, will not scare. It seems significant that it is this lowest level of society, where one must feast on the garbage of others, from which Lowell takes his solace. Perhaps the author is pointing out our common struggle for survival, and the follies that come from thinking that one has more than another.

It will be interesting to watch as language continues to be stretched and broken in the effort to convey meaning, to step beyond the realm of form and touch upon that which is formless. One can not help but feel that these verses and ideas are simply language at play in the fields of endless possibilities.

First Blog EVER

I wonder at the origins of the word "blog."

It's a funny kind of word.

"A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

And now I know.

Ahhhh . . . the joys of internet.