Rather than "a lot of poets," this week might have been loosely titled "Confessional Poetry," as Janaka noted in her entry. (Incidentally, "early 20th c. poets" could also go as "modernist poets." But those group denominations probably end up doing more harm than good in terms of reading the actual poems.)
So I was reading Ginsberg's "Transcription of Organ Music," and I came upon the bit about him losing his cherry on the docks of Provincetown, when it occurred to me that I was reading that poem on the docks of Provincetown. Much to my surprise, I was not struck down by Pat Robertson. Ginsberg always gets mad props for being Whitmanian, but I can never find a whole lot in Ginsberg that is Whitmanian beyond his long lines. The Whitmanian "I" is rarely singular, and almost certainly never refers to a biographical subject, whereas Ginsberg's confessional poems depend, for their shock value, on these things having happened to an actual subject: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by iced non-fat lattes..." etc. The shock value also rests on that "best," as if Ginsberg anticipates a reader who would understand that the "best" should have been doing something else, but for the obstacles placed in their way by the various Moloch of the world. Most of the actions undertaken by these psychos involve almost-scholarly attitudes or interests -- I'm suddenly reminded of Jan's slumming in Native Son. In "Sunflower Sutra," Ginsberg finds glory in the form of the flower, rather than in this particular battered flower: battered of course by Moloch, the prolepsis, the contrary, that allows the soul of the flower to emerge. Moloch is a big subject here, but does he elide a kind of complacent pastoralism at the heart of Ginsberg's enterprise? Do you love me? Now? That I can dance?
Notice Ginsberg's use of black dialect in "America." It's not very straightforward, but I'm sure it's the kind of thing we'll get asked about.
I'd forgotten what an incredible poet Lowell could be. In my mind he was always the straightlaced Brahmin counterpart confessor to Ginsberg. But of course he's much more complicated, particularly in some of the early poems of the volume. These poems, on historical figures, use Browning's dramatic monologues as a point of departure, employing Crane's diction and an acquaintance with Freud to make...something. I really need help on Lowell, especially regarding the critical conversation on him (if there is any). Ironically, the sonnet spoken by Crane does not make use of his diction, although it does employ the outsider's view, the "stranger in America." The prose section I take to be a memoir providing some prosaic (ahem) background for the later, more explicitly confessional, verse. It might pay to focus on the father's experiences in Japan and China. The poems on McLean's suggest the insanity lurking under all institutions. Kurt Cobain was murdered.
Elizabeth Bishop is a subtle one, whom I think I'd understand better had I been more familiar with Moore. She uses a lot of colloquial, demotic diction, suggesting a lot more than saying anything outright. I suppose it's a bit like her epigraph: "What is geography? A description of the earth's surface." The hubris of a textbook that would attempt to describe the GLOBE becomes instead, in Bishop's work, an almost miniaturist approach to specific elements of and on the earth. "In the Waiting Room" and "Crusoe in England" offer plenty of opportunities to talk about teleopoiesis and fungibility, I think. In the former, Bishop casts herself as a child, with the child's fragile sense of identity suddenly thrown into focus by the National Geographic pictures. There's a conversation for you.
John Ashbery is a proud product of the greater Rochester, New York enivrons. No one will believe this, but I insist that there is a distinct "Rochester flavor" to virtually everything of his I've read. It's partly his diction and partly his sense of reality. (While it's not on the list, I highly recommend Ashbery's "As You Left the Holy Land," which is in the same volume with "Self-Portrait.") I love "Self-Portrait," but I'm a little uneasy as to how it will be approached by our interrogators. The poem is an extended meditation on creation, both artistic and in its widest, Stevensian sense (Stevens is never talking about just poetry). (It is worthwhile to actually look at the portrait before and during one's reading of the poem: http://www.khm.at/system2E.html?/staticE/page240.html). Ashbery's tone is definitely something worthy of attention: demotic yet educated, including French phrases as well as citations, all permeated by the insistent "But"s of revision, addition, and complication. "The city" here seems to be Ashbery's metonymy for the non-poetic, that which would impede the solely aesthetic. Yet it's not Stevens' "malady of the quotidian"; it's rather something essential yet complicating (?).
I don't really know what to make of Shange. I feel like I need a lot of the history of the movement to get a better grasp on the work.
Lee gives mad props to Broadway and Argyle, but he is somewhat down on the Gold Coast and the Magnificent Mile. Fine, I won't ask him to dinner. Of course, Rogers Park here is not a site so much as what Anthony Giddens has called a "phantasmagoric" place. The poets are there, but the exchange with the speaker is somehow merely instrmental. My personal favorites here are "Interrogation" and "This Room and Everything In It." The former fails to clearly divide between the role of interviewer and interviewee: the questions come to make use of the first-person plural, the questioner becoming not a repressor per se, but a fellow exile. In either case, the speaker refuses the possible consolations of memory and community (due to the necessity of reliving the past?). The latter poems uses memory to approach definition only to lose it with memory's failure.
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Rather than "a lot of poets," this week might have been loosely titled "Confessional Poetry," as Janaka noted in her entry. (Incidentally, "early 20th c. poets" could also go as "modernist poets." But those group denominations probably end up doing more harm than good in terms of reading the actual poems.)
So I was reading Ginsberg's "Transcription of Organ Music," and I came upon the bit about him losing his cherry on the docks of Provincetown, when it occurred to me that I was reading that poem on the docks of Provincetown. Much to my surprise, I was not struck down by Pat Robertson. Ginsberg always gets mad props for being Whitmanian, but I can never find a whole lot in Ginsberg that is Whitmanian beyond his long lines. The Whitmanian "I" is rarely singular, and almost certainly never refers to a biographical subject, whereas Ginsberg's confessional poems depend, for their shock value, on these things having happened to an actual subject: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by iced non-fat lattes..." etc. The shock value also rests on that "best," as if Ginsberg anticipates a reader who would understand that the "best" should have been doing something else, but for the obstacles placed in their way by the various Moloch of the world. Most of the actions undertaken by these psychos involve almost-scholarly attitudes or interests -- I'm suddenly reminded of Jan's slumming in Native Son. In "Sunflower Sutra," Ginsberg finds glory in the form of the flower, rather than in this particular battered flower: battered of course by Moloch, the prolepsis, the contrary, that allows the soul of the flower to emerge. Moloch is a big subject here, but does he elide a kind of complacent pastoralism at the heart of Ginsberg's enterprise? Do you love me? Now? That I can dance?
Notice Ginsberg's use of black dialect in "America." It's not very straightforward, but I'm sure it's the kind of thing we'll get asked about.
I'd forgotten what an incredible poet Lowell could be. In my mind he was always the straightlaced Brahmin counterpart confessor to Ginsberg. But of course he's much more complicated, particularly in some of the early poems of the volume. These poems, on historical figures, use Browning's dramatic monologues as a point of departure, employing Crane's diction and an acquaintance with Freud to make...something. I really need help on Lowell, especially regarding the critical conversation on him (if there is any). Ironically, the sonnet spoken by Crane does not make use of his diction, although it does employ the outsider's view, the "stranger in America." The prose section I take to be a memoir providing some prosaic (ahem) background for the later, more explicitly confessional, verse. It might pay to focus on the father's experiences in Japan and China. The poems on McLean's suggest the insanity lurking under all institutions. Kurt Cobain was murdered.
Elizabeth Bishop is a subtle one, whom I think I'd understand better had I been more familiar with Moore. She uses a lot of colloquial, demotic diction, suggesting a lot more than saying anything outright. I suppose it's a bit like her epigraph: "What is geography? A description of the earth's surface." The hubris of a textbook that would attempt to describe the GLOBE becomes instead, in Bishop's work, an almost miniaturist approach to specific elements of and on the earth. "In the Waiting Room" and "Crusoe in England" offer plenty of opportunities to talk about teleopoiesis and fungibility, I think. In the former, Bishop casts herself as a child, with the child's fragile sense of identity suddenly thrown into focus by the National Geographic pictures. There's a conversation for you.
John Ashbery is a proud product of the greater Rochester, New York enivrons. No one will believe this, but I insist that there is a distinct "Rochester flavor" to virtually everything of his I've read. It's partly his diction and partly his sense of reality. (While it's not on the list, I highly recommend Ashbery's "As You Left the Holy Land," which is in the same volume with "Self-Portrait.") I love "Self-Portrait," but I'm a little uneasy as to how it will be approached by our interrogators. The poem is an extended meditation on creation, both artistic and in its widest, Stevensian sense (Stevens is never talking about just poetry). (It is worthwhile to actually look at the portrait before and during one's reading of the poem: http://www.khm.at/system2E.html?/staticE/page240.html). Ashbery's tone is definitely something worthy of attention: demotic yet educated, including French phrases as well as citations, all permeated by the insistent "But"s of revision, addition, and complication. "The city" here seems to be Ashbery's metonymy for the non-poetic, that which would impede the solely aesthetic. Yet it's not Stevens' "malady of the quotidian"; it's rather something essential yet complicating (?).
I don't really know what to make of Shange. I feel like I need a lot of the history of the movement to get a better grasp on the work.
Lee gives mad props to Broadway and Argyle, but he is somewhat down on the Gold Coast and the Magnificent Mile. Fine, I won't ask him to dinner. Of course, Rogers Park here is not a site so much as what Anthony Giddens has called a "phantasmagoric" place. The poets are there, but the exchange with the speaker is somehow merely instrmental. My personal favorites here are "Interrogation" and "This Room and Everything In It." The former fails to clearly divide between the role of interviewer and interviewee: the questions come to make use of the first-person plural, the questioner becoming not a repressor per se, but a fellow exile. In either case, the speaker refuses the possible consolations of memory and community (due to the necessity of reliving the past?). The latter poems uses memory to approach definition only to lose it with memory's failure.
OK that's it.
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