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.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
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:
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:
Sunday, October 12, 2008
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.”
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.”
Sunday, October 5, 2008
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
