On War and Peace.

Once again, racism rears its ugly head. 

It was SO HARD to read Claude McKay. Not because his poetry was unconventional or confusing, nor did he use hard to understand metaphors. No, his poetry was hard to read because of the content, because I didn't want to have the emotions I had while reading his poetry. I didn't want to look at history in the face. But I did. I wish so much that Claude McKay was alive right now. I wish that he could see how far we've come as a Country, I wish he was here to encourage us to go even further. His poetry, especially "The Lynching" really got to me. Just to think about the violence that black people endured, and read it described in such a way as to provoke a violent emotion, it does something. It's terrifying. 

Then I read Maya Angelou's poetry. She's not ignorant to what happened, she's well aware of her ancestor's history. However, she is more removed from slavery than McKay is. She has the ability to see the hope despite the crushing weight of opposition, of wrongdoing. Her poetry, most of it, is more hopeful. In her poem "Million Man March" Angelou calls up an army. This army is meant to defend their heritage, but not by taking revenge on the white's who oppressed them. Rather, she commands:

"Let us come together and cleanse our souls,

Clap hands, let's leave the preening

And stop impostering our own history.

Clap hands, call the spirits back from the ledge,

Clap hands, let us invite joy into our conversation"

McKay's poem "If We Must Die" is also a call to arms. The tone of the two poems is entirely different, but both calling their people into action. Now the context of each of these poets is different as well, and I must take that into consideration. Angelou, though her context still has racism and its consequences around, is nothing like the time of the Civil Rights Movement. That being said, the facts remain. McKay knew he was going to die by defending his people, "So that our precious blood may not be shed in vain." He's riding into battle with a known fate: death. It is almost hopeless. 

Angelou's poem has a much different effect. She is giving more of a pep talk before the war, she is hopeful that if she changes their perspective, they "will rise" that they will understand why they should be hopeful. The end of her poem describes this feeling: "The ancestors remind us, despite the history of pain We are a going-on people who will rise again." They will forever remember these oppressive acts of violence, but they will not let those things define them. They will rise. 

If only McKay could see how his people have risen out of slavery, out of constant violent oppression.

Spring into the beauty of a hopeless world.

What a perfect Spring Day to read H.D!

Here is a poem dedicated to H.D (Dr. Seuss Style)

A Joyful occasion

By Deanna Ver Schneider

I could read H.D in a hammock on a beach

or in the mountains

on a peak

By the fountains

raining spring water,

In my house

where no one could bother

me. Oh my, thank you H.D.

For bringing back joy

to me in Poetry.

Now, I am not exactly suggesting that H.D's poetry is joyful, but rather that it brings joy to me because I thoroughly enjoy reading it. Maybe because I'm a cynical old hag, or possibly because it is a breath of fresh air coming out of T.S Eliot and Pound (who btw, are great but mind-numbing).

Today I want to start with the poem This is Not an Experiment by Pablo Saborío.

His poetry is quite depressing with conflicting imagery and feelings of tension. While I don't know that I would say this is imagist poetry, Saborio uses images, very abstract images, to get his emotion across. He uses images that conflict, "This is a shadow shedding its bone in a camouflage of change." Shadows don't have bones to shed... 

He also uses images that simply don't make a lick of sense, "This is a sister opening a drawer to hide a wonderful thing"

Throughout the poem, I am left hanging, hanging on to what should be coming next, an explanation. What wonderful thing? What perception?... I didn't realize I was hanging until the end of the poem when he draws a picture of someone hanging off of a cliff, ending almost hopelessly. 

"But above all,

this is another handclinging to the edgebefore the fall."

It was then, that it all made sense. 

H.D's poem, "Eurydice" was a picture of hopelessness for me. But, if there is such a thing, a beautiful hopelessness. With the myth of Eurydice  and Orpheus as a back drop (also a sign of good poetry according to Eliot), the poem struck some emotional cords. She is clearly angry and unforgiving to the one who looked back, to the man who put her back in her misery after promising to rescue her. The man who, because he couldn't help himself, sent her back to hell. Yeah, I'd be pissed off too. And H.D creates a world for her readers-- A black, lost, ruthless world that she is forever condemned to because of the arrogance of her lover. "How RUDE!" is an understatement. 

Her images, unlike Saborio's, make logical sense (for the most part). She communicates her emotions through the language, and emphasizes it through the images. Saborio uses conflicting images to communicate his emotions. 

"before I am lost, hell must open like a red rose for the dead to pass." 

How can someone make hopelessness sound so beautiful?

Con Senses

I really do enjoy T.S Eliot. He is such a brilliant man. As I read his poetry though, I felt sorrowful, but not depressed (like I did at times with Frost). No, Eliot's poetry affects multiple emotions. In his poem "The Hollow Men" Eliot uses senses, mostly dominantly, sight. Near the beginning of the poem, he inserts almost abruptly, "Shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion;" What? How can you have shape without form or shades without color, or gesture without motion? Contradictions? Possibly.

eyes
eyes
eyes
voices
singing
images
lips
eyes
eyes
speech
sightless
eyes
Falls the Shadow
Falls the Shadow
Falls the Shadow
This is the way the World Ends
Bang
Whimper

Throughout the poem, the word "eyes" is referenced 6 times, with other allusions to sight and other senses addressed. Yet, at the end of the poem, Eliot presents three circumstances where "Falls the Shadow" meaning, theses are areas you can't SEE, you can't necessarily feel, you can't touch. To be honest, I don't know exactly what to do with this, but I feel like there is significance in this. Why would he want his reader to see and hear throughout the beginning of the poem and contrast it with the opposite? I'm not sure. As much as I enjoy his poetry, it is still quite ambiguous to me, a little bit over my head, where sometimes I feel an emotion, or significant thought and other times, such as here, I don't know what to think. Maybe I'm over-thinking.

I want to compare this poem to one by Deborah Ager. The title of the poem, "Alone" addresses her senses and uses them to paint a lonely picture. Rather than sight, she uses touch and smell.


Over the fence, the dead settle in
for a journey. Nine o'clock.
You are alone for the first time
today. Boys asleep. Husband out.

A beer bottle sweats in your hand,
and sea lavender clogs the air
with perfume. Think of yourself.
Your arms rest with nothing to do

after weeks spent attending to others.
Your thoughts turn to whether
butter will last the week, how much
longer the car can run on its partial tank of gas.


The last stanza in her poem is similar, though very different, to Eliot's. She turns to thoughts, untouchable and emotionless that contrast sharply with the stanza above. She is left alone with her thoughts. 

Eliot is left somewhere in the shadows. 

INTRUSION!

INTRUSION! Margaret Atwood is rudely intruding on my blog and I can't make her stop. If any tech-savy lads know how to get the unwanted words off my blog, please share your wisdom. I'm not too fond of the word "sh!t-kickers" being in the middle of an academic blog that has nothing to do with soccer or poop.

A Hobbit -ual Metaphor.

This basically describes how I felt the past two weeks concerning poetry.

Just think of yourself as Thorin and Azog as poetry.
Confident and courageous, only to be struck down and seemingly defeated.


Then, on other days I feel like Bilbo.
"YOU WILL NOT DEFEAT ME POETRY!"
But then I wave my sword aimlessly hoping for some good to come about it.

I hope you enjoyed the clip! Have a great break friends.

*All things are metaphors to LOTR/The Hobbit and are subject to severe dramatization.

Epic Proportions

Dude. Ezra Pound, chill out with all that anti-Semitism. You're making me a bit uncomfortable with all that degrading talk about Jews and women. You're quite the jerk ya know... Taylor Swift wrote a song about you (see above).

The great Ezra Pound was a little more than my little brain could handle all at once. I felt super dumb for not knowing all of the references and found it quite frustrating to have to stop and read three paragraphs of footnotes after every other line. But I was determined to enjoy Pound this week, to some extent at least. So I did a little research and found that I was not alone in my frustration with the Cantos. Even the famous poet William Carlos Williams had some concerns. In the New York Evening Post Literary Review he laments, "Pound has tried to communicate his poetry to us and failed. It is a tragedy, since he is our best poet" (www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ezra-pound).

We are not alone. But nevertheless, his poetry made it big, so there must be something awesome about it. Maybe its Epic. As in, the poem fits into the epic genre. But this epic, unlike others, is not shackled by any one place, generation, or person but is omniscient. (and maybe epic in the 21st century definition of the word too, but that's a bit more subjective.)

Pound pounds absolute power permanently into our permeable brain pattern. 

That was fun and has nothing to do with what follows... :) 

In Canto XLV Pound directly attacks the Jews and their use of usury. He compares and contrasts all of the good things that came about "not by usura" and depicts "usura" as a force that "blunteth the needle in the maid's hand/ and stoppeth the spinner's cunning." I can't help but be reminded of Shakespeare's comedy The Merchant of Venice whereby a Jew by the name of Shylock is known for his usury and bad character. Through this play, Shakespeare plays with the stigma that Jews are inferior and Christians are superior. He subtly suggests that maybe a deeper inspection of motives is needed to get a clearer picture of the differences-- that Christians aren't any better than Jews. Pound must have overlooked that part. Anyway, the way Pound contrasts what happens when usury is not used verses when it is used makes this poem stand out. Rather than just saying "when usury isn't involved we have Duccio, Pier della Francesca, etc" he contrasts the good things directly with the absence of usury-- "Not by usura St. Trophime/ not by usura Saint Hilaire."

Is/Not, a poem by Margaret Atwood takes a similar idea of comparison and contrast and applies it beautifully.

"Love is not a profession

genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry

the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor

you are not my cure,

nobody has that

power, you are merely a fellow/traveller

Give up this medical concern,

buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger

and permit me mine

which needs neither

your approval nor your suprise

which does not need to be made legal

which is not against a disease

but against you,

which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,

which needs instead

to be said and said.

Permit me the present tense"

While content vastly differs between the poems, the conduit by which they communicate has some similarities worth noting. Atwood even incorporates the use of absence in her poem by not saying what love/sex is, but only what is it not. Both could have said it differently, but chose to say it through comparison and contrast to make you think and feel the tension between the objects of the poem. A tension of Epic Proportions...

lame joke.

A typical restraint

Better late than never, right?

Paul Lawrence Dunbar is a poet who was only one generation removed from slavery. As his poetry often reflects, slavery affected his perspective and presuppositions despite it never directly touching him. Just by reading "We Wear the Mask," "When Malindy Sings," "Sympathy" and "The Haunted Oak" I felt a range of emotions. While "When Malindy Sings" was my favorite of the four, I am focusing on "Sympathy." The picture that is painted in our minds is one of a bird in cage, who can see his freedom, but can't quite get there. The bird "beats his wing till its blood is red on the cruel bars; For he must fly back to his perch and cling" (Dunbar 8-9). The restraint of the cage causes the bird agony, and the readers to sympathize. Most everyone has been restrained in one way or another and can understand what Dunbar is getting at. The repetition of the line "I know why the caged bird sings" adds to the brevity of the poem. And the contrast of freedom and a cage, of sadness and of joy, makes it easier for the reader to sympathize with the bird. The weight is heavy. The weight of knowing how much torture that slaves went through in order to just get a taste of freedom is relentless. It changes people. 

Restraints change people. And the people eventually change the restraints. Aaron Belz makes a more lighthearted poem about restraints, although he uses the word constraint. "You Can't Pick Your Friend's Nose" takes the idea of restraint and shows how people change them based on morals and nature. While Dunbar makes us feel like we are restrained, Belz helps us see the outside perspective of restraints and the causes of them. The lightheartedness continues throughout the poem, but at the end of  it, you are left asking a question about the bigger picture: "Why are they changing?" Belz playfully uses a common phrase "You can't pick your friends nose" to ask a deep question, the same way Dunbar uses the common idea of a caged bird to evoke a deep emotion --Sympathy.