Poetry Day

Today is the last formal day of classes, and Dr. Reed had us bring in poems that we liked, either from other poets or ones we wrote ourselves to share for Poetry Day. I really enjoyed getting the chance to share poetry with people, particularly if it's my own work, since I'm always open for criticism on my own works. There were some really wonderful poems that were read, especially the first Shel Silverstine poem. I loved how universally relatable it was and it's so true that when the light is turned out, everyone is essentially the same and we shouldn't be ashamed of our differences or try to demean others for theirs either. I also really loved the Johnny Cash/Nine Inch Nails lyrics that Patrick shared, because I love country music and even though I've heard many references to "Hurt" I never had the chance to listen to it, so I fired up my spotify account after class (yep, me trying to keep up with the trends lol) and searched for the song, and I swear it was freaking BEAUTIFUL. Every part of the lyrics were so haunting, and there's no other words for it either, it was just haunting.

Since Jordan and I are in the same creative writing class, I have to say I'm a bit biased towards her work over anyone else's because her poem about the rose tattoo was so like Hirshfield's in her choice of language. Although I loved her rose poem, I enjoyed her darker poems much more because the language is more gritty and that makes it more real in a way. It is true what she said about our class writing really morbid pieces, especially for our dramatic monologue unit.

I have thoroughly enjoyed this class and loved going to class with all of you guys. Good luck with everything, hope to see you around in the future. Good luck on finals :)

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

This past week, we just finished up our reading of T.S. Elliot's "The Love Song of J ALfred Prufrock" and James Joyce's "The Dead" which is the last reading for the term (yay...sorry Dr. Reed). The first time I read "J Alfred Prufrock" was winter term, during Dr. Brown's 20th poetry class and I did not take the time to read through it. I thought it was too confusing and only took the meaning at face value. After reading the poem again this term, I felt I understood the meaning a lot more, at least for certain stanzas. I also realized that this class had a completely different meaning than the one that our previous class had came up with. In the beginning stanza, we assumed that the speaker was going to visit a brothel, because of the line that says, "Streets that follow like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent." We also said that the speaker regrets growing old so fast and he asks, "Do I dare? Do I dare?" I took it as him asking do I dare to live my life before I have to die? He's testing himself and getting the courage to live life as he wants to. 

Joyce's "The Dead" was something that I would definitely have to reread in order to understand the plot. But I loved how he opened up with a comical line, "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet." I thought it was slightly unsettling when Gabriel came in and started asking her if there's any men in her life. When Gabriel's wife, Gretta was thinking about her first love and he mistook it as her thinking about him, I felt a little sorry for him, even though he was kind of arrogant and possessive towards her. Gabriel's possessive nature reminded me of a short story by Raymond Carver, called "Cathedral" about a man who feels threatened by his wife's close friendship with a blind man. In the beginning of the story, when he is recounting how his wife came to know the blind man, he was talking about her former fiancee, and he only refereed to the fiancee as "her childhood sweetheart" and said, "He was already her childhood sweetheart, what more does he want?". The very ending, where the snow was falling on the churchyard where Gretta's childhood sweetheart was buried, was like an added slap in the face to Gabriel, that even though he was married to Gretta and that Michael was dead, Michael still had Gretta's heart (or at least her thoughts). 

Kawabata's Snow Country

So I realized I haven't been doing much blogging lately...oops again, sorry Dr. Reed and whoever else reads this blog. Been busy, but I've found the time to squeeze in an entry about the two part story that we've had to read, called "Snow Country" by Kawabata Yasunari which, I have to admit is somewhat confusing. The story begins with a man, Shimamura, who goes into the country side out of pure boredom and meets a local geisha named Komako. They engage in a detached sort of relationship, which oftentimes frustrated me to no end. I think the whole class had trouble understanding the short story, particularly the ending when the author just left us hanging.

In the author's biography before the beginning of the story, there is a brief description between the country geisha and the city geisha, which helps to explain the difficult relationship between Shimamura and Komako. The geishas who work in the hot springs in the country are distantly related to the geishas who work in the cities, who often have a wider range of artistic capabilities and command more respect. The city geishas' reputation might amount to that of a fashion model's while the country geisha resigns themselves to entertain whoever traveled through the countryside.

I really do enjoy reading about turn of the century Japan and geisha culture, but I felt like I understood Higuchi Ichiyo's "Child's Pay" a lot better.

Dadie's The Hunter and the Boa

Originally I wasn't going to post about today's reading, I was saving that for Achebe's Things Fall Apart since it seemed like what a lot of other people were doing as well, but I just HAD to rant about the way Dadie ended his story...well, it was more like a parable than a story, kind of an Aesop's fable slant. If there's one thing I hate hate hate when I read it's cliffhangers (affectionately known as cliffies), the kind that makes you mull over it for hours on end thinking about what the character would have done. In The Hunter and the Boa, a poor hunter sets traps along the river every day with no results. Then, one of his traps catches a boa but the boa promises to make him a very rich man if he would let it go. The hunter lets the boa go and it gives him two gourds, telling him to throw one of them to the ground as soon as he gets home and keep the other one so he can understand the languages of everyone who live on earth. After the hunter followed the boa's instructions, he lived happily and was able to understand the dogs when they talk. By listening to what the dogs say, he was able to profit from various natural disasters and became very rich.

 Ten years later, the dogs were talking and they said the hunter will die if he doesn't return the second gourd to the boa, thus forfeiting the ability to understand the language of everyone on earth. Furthermore, he will lose all the riches and be even poorer than before but he will have his life. The hunter is then put into a torturous position and tries to decide among the lesser evil all the while being tormented by the happy sounds of his family and the dogs teases him, aware that the hunter can understand animal speak, and they repeat, "What's wrong with your master? Does he know that he's going to die?" 

The fable ends with an open ended question, asking the reader what they would do if the tables were turned.  I have to wonder if anyone would really be able to choose between two equally important decisions. 

Child's Play

While reading the biography of Higuchi Ichiyo alongside to her short fiction Child's Play, I found her life span to be unbelievably short and limited by gender expectations of 19th century Japan. Because she was female, society prevented her from receiving a well rounded westernized education like most middle class male writers. Ichiyo, who was forced to withdraw from grade school at the urging of her mother who argued that it was impractical for a girl to continue with schooling, was enrolled in a poetic conservatory by her father. Ichiyo became the sole breadwinner for her mother and younger sister following the death of her father when she was 17 and moved the family to the outskirts of Tokyo's red light district in 1893. She became pupil to fellow writer Nakarai Tosui, who was the inspiration behind her literary diary, "In the Shade of Spring Leaves" (1891-1896). Although her story Umoregi was the breakthrough story that won over the literary world, her 1895 work Child's Play, or Growing up, was considered her best work. I gather that the story came from her own experiences living on the edge of the red light district running a small shop in the alleys.

The story was very depressing to me, as if the children were all doomed to fall into the trap of determinism, where they were destined to end up with the same miserable fates as their families (Shota ended up being a pawnbroker like his dad, Midori a prostitute like her sister). After Midori was publicly humiliated by Chokichi, she "broke her pencils and threw away her ink; she would spend her time playing with her real friends." (1821). The story got a little hard to follow the more I read into it, but on page 1833, the part of the song that Shota sings reflects Midori's fate:

                 "Growing up,
                      She plays among the butterflies
                      and flowers.
                  But she turns sixteen,
                  and all she knows
                  is work and sorrow."

After Midori became a prostitute, her whole personality changed too. She was once very outgoing and considered Shota her best friend. By the end of the story, she no longer spoke to Shota and she grew quiet, never going out to play with her friends again. The process of growing up took away her innocence and she ends up behaving like someone half her age.

Meeting Ms. Hirshfield

This past Thursday, May 29, I got to meet Jane Hirshfield as a requirement for my Poetry of the Sacred class, and also for my creative writing workshop. Hirshfield wrote a lot of the books which we are using in class currently, and also served as translator for many poems we read in Poetry of the Sacred. I honestly did not expect her to be so approachable; judging by the photos on her book covers, she seemed to be friendly yet aloof. When I stopped to talk to her following the morning meeting, she was very down to earth and honest. I was very curious to know if she had any doubts regarding the quality of her poetry, and if she was ever surprised by the reaction of the public to her poems.There were many occasions where I thought my poetry wasn't as good as they could have been, yet people who read them always praise me on how good they are. It reassured me to know that someone who is as well known as she is still has insecurities regarding the quality of her poems, and has been plagued by writer's block many times. I also enjoyed seeing her read her poems to the audience that night, and it made me realize how much I enjoyed spoken poetry as well as written poetry. When a member of the audience asked her, what advice do you give young people who are writers, Hirshfield said something that stayed with me long after the evening ended, "Always leave your window open a little more than you're comfortable with."

I love Pablo Neruda. 我爱巴勃罗·聂鲁达. Me encanta Pablo Neruda

Oh Neruda...if only you were still on this earth, I would write and tell you how much I have enjoyed reading your gorgeous poetry, sometimes in its original language.

That's right, we got into Neruda today!! (well...on March 13, I know it's late; still playing catch up, cut me some slack here please). I read his poem Ode to a Tomato in my Spanish III class my junior year, as well as another one of his Spanish poems last term. "Tonight I can Write..." is my favorite, even though it has a melancholy undertone. Neruda describes his lover as something fleeting that he lost, and he debates back and forth whether he really loved her or not. Even his description of the night sky is melancholy and depressing, 'The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

Neruda's later poems show a more defined sense of self awareness and of the world around him. Walking Around and I'm Explaining a Few Things described a more political undertone to his poetry. In the Walking Around, Neruda is "tired of being a man" going to the movies "all shrivelled up, impenetrable". The imagery that he uses, such as the cobblers' shops smelling of vinegar and the birds the color of sulphur and the intestines are very intense and describes dead things, which is what he is becoming the longer he stays in the city.

Neruda's poem I'm Explaining a Few Things describes to readers why he has stopped writing about things beauty. During his time as a consul in Spain, the Spanish Civil war broke out in 1936. Neruda wrote in his poem that instead of finding things of beauty to write about, the streets of Spain were filled with the blood of the dead children and all the houses were burning. In the last stanza, he repeats "come and see the blood on the streets" as a way to force the reader to realizing there were more important matters than beauty and philosophy.

Feminist theory in Storni's poetry

So earlier this week, we discussed feminist theories and ideas that shaped the works of Virginia Woolf and Alfonsina Storni, but I found Storni's poems much easier to read and relate to. I found her life story more fascinating than that of woolf's, and I found myself admiring her for being the first female writer accepted into the predominantly male Latin American literary world. Storni was not afraid to speak out against the hypocrisy of the male dominated world even if it meant making enemies along the way. The very fact that she became financially independent at a young age, supporting herself with a variety of odd jobs is the driving force behind all of her works. Storni remarked that being forced to be financially independent at a young age taught her to live more like a man, rather than a pampered woman. Storni became intellectually and emotionally independent as a result of her succession of jobs. I thought the most dramatic aspect of her life was her pregnancy resulting from an affair with a married man when she taught at a rural elementary school. After the birth of her son, Alejandro, Storni did not settle down complacently as most women do in her time period, but kept on working and published her first book of poetry, The Restlessness of the Rosebush.

I love Storni's poems You Want Me White, Little-Bitty Man, and Departure because they were about her feminist beliefs and her life experiences. You Want Me White is a backlash against the hypocritical double standards of the male dominated society where males expects her to be "white as dawn...made of foam", virtuous and chaste while he made toasts to the God of wine and to leave his soul "entangled in all the bedrooms". She challenges men to go away into nature in order to reclaim themselves and purify their soul, and then ask the same of her.

I really loved the Spanish reading of Little-Bitty Man in class today, and it made me realize how much I miss reading poems in Spanish. Storni rebels against societal conventions which keeps her caged like a canary when she wants to be set free. At first, I interpreted the poem to mean that the man is of regular height but is diminished in stature (physical or moral) by the way he treats her. Then again, the "man" within the poem doesn't have to be a physical being, it can also be societal and cultural expectations which traps women into cages.

 In 1935, Alfonsina was diagnosed with cancer and underwent treatment which left her both physically and mentally drained. After the cancer recurred and spread in 1938, she refused to do further treatment, which was seen by some as a way of rejecting the oppressive male dominated medical community who has control over her health. As a way to take control of her life, she committed suicide on October 25 by walking into the sea at Mar del Plata, Argentina. She was such a strong woman throughout her life and she lived her life in such a way that even her death was an echo of the way she lived and what she believed in.

I should have had this set up way earlier. Sorry

I know I was supposed to have this set up by...the first day of class. Oops, sorry Dr. Reed *Sheepish smile*

The first reading we were assigned was Ruben Dario, who was considered the leading figure in the Spanish American Modernismo movement. Dario created a new standard for Spanish American literature by combining elements from both European and Latin American literature. I enjoyed reading all of his poems, but the ones that were my favorites were "Sonatina", "Blazon", and "Leda".

In "Sonatina", the princess feels sad and restless trapped in "the marble cage of the royal palace..." filled with all the finest things that money can buy. This shows that money can't buy a person happiness, and even the richest most sought after person is secretly unhappy with all the wealth they acquired. The poem reminds me of Disney fairy tales, such as Sleeping Beauty and Tangled, which is a more modern interpretation of the classic Rapunzel story. The one thing that puzzles me is towards the end, when the princess's fairy godmother showed up. That kind of showed me that it was starting to edge into fantasy territory. The godmother told her, "Hush, Princess, hush...the joyous knight who adores you unseen is riding this way on his winged horse...from far off, having conquered Death, to kindle your lips with a kiss of true love." which was a little off putting, instead of trying to resolve her predicament, the godmother was telling the princess to be quiet and tough it out until her prince charming arrives to save her.

The end of the poem felt a little disappointing to me, because I felt it was telling girls to be totally dependent on a guy to save them from difficult situations, and promising them that if they sat tight and waited long enough, they will be rescued by their prince charming. Maybe I'm being slightly feminist but telling girls to put all their hopes on the line just so a guy can make them happy is a little crazy and that's not how reality works.

"Blazon" and "Leda" was about the God of Mount Olympus, Zeus who takes the form of a swan and rapes Leda, a nymph who then gives birth to Helen of Troy. I really enjoyed reading about Greek mythology and I thought the way that Dario described Zeus in swan form was really majestic, and how Zeus was of "divine origin". He is described as being snow-white and pure, with a wing so white that it was almost "Eucharistic", Christ-like. "Blazon" focused on describing Zeus as swan form, but I really thought that the second poem "Leda" told more of the whole story, and that was more interesting to me. However, I did not really care for how the poem ended, with Pan, the sheep herd god of the woods accidentally witnessing the scene, it just further added to the trauma.