Week 11

And so we've come to week 11, to the spring season, and to your final day in the literature course.  I hope you have enjoyed the readings.  There were many we did not get time to address, but they remain for your leisure.  You can access the links here indefinitely, that is until such time as I take the site down.  

     Some themes to think about as you write the in-class essay (posted last week):  

Authority/Society and the Individual:  how authority is defined, how founded and invested, its impacts and relations to those figures and institutions that commonly wield it and/or are affected by it,  parents, teachers, police, the citizen, the child or youth, what have you–all the institutions and people and cultural activities in our society that claim and command our attention by weight of authority ( as distinguished from mere power or physical force).  In literature, the author creates or writes and the story that is told may be in fiction or non-fiction form, in poetry or prose, but its truths such as they are tell us something,  shape our understanding of what it means to be human and to exist in a world that is palpable and real, but ever-changing and always beyond us in so many ways. 

The Natural World:  the womb of all life, Nature is the alpha and omega, and whatever face Nature wears, for good or ill, our fates are linked inextricably.  Whether the world ( and we ourselves) appears as it does in accordance with some divine plan or design or Fate, whether what science calls natural selection and chance events are an aspect of that, whether the mythic stories of creation, lost paradises and first peoples are "true", certainly the world is unfolding and we along with it, witness to, and participant in the show.

Art:  the made world, constructed from the material elements of the world and human imagination and ingenuity and energy and will and the desire to control and shape the experience we are thrown into at birth, and from which only death will deliver us, ultimately.  What does it all mean?  What pleasures, what pains, what needs? To these art address itself.

Love:  What connects us to this world, to this life we are given, however briefly, and what does it ask of us along the way? What is the power and authority that love exerts? What will we do, for good or ill, for its sake or at its promptings?

Year’s End                                        by Richard Wilbur (b.1921)

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a    atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

The poet Richard Wilbur, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one time Poet Laureate, said the following:  “What poetry does with ideas is to redeem them from abstraction and submerge them in sensibility.”  Poetry makes us feel, brings our senses into the moment or view described (as does prose, I might add) Moreover he wants his students to memorize poetry: 

“The kind of poetry I like best, and try to write, uses the whole instrument,” he says. “Meter, rhyme, musical expression—and everything is done for the sake of what’s being said, not for the sake of prettiness.” At the same time, he believes that “For anyone who knows how to use these forms powerfully, they make for a stronger kind of poetry than free verse can ever be.”

“All these traditional means are ways of being rhythmically clear,” he explains: “making the emphases strong, making it clear what words are important. Rhyme is not just making a jingling noise, but telling what words deserve emphasis. Meter, too, tells what the rhythm of thought is. It doesn’t necessarily sound like music, but it has the strength of sound underlying everything being said. I encourage my students to memorize poems. If a poem is good, it is well to say it again and again in your mind until you’ve found all the intended tones and emphases.” He adds, “One of the great fascinations of poetry is that you’re going almost naked: the equipment is so small, just language.”

Good luck on your recitations and paperwork.  It was a pleasure having you all in class!

Week 10

(for Next Week:)

                                                                Allen Ginsberg

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
       – Polonius to Laertes in Hamlet

   Howl is a poem by Allen Ginsberg, first published in 1957, and Howl is, also, more recently, a film, directed by Bob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, about the poet and his work.  One of its source inspirations,  (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174745) "Song of Myself", by Walt Whitman, invites stylisic and thematic comparison as autobiographical free verse poem written in long lines, many including catalog elements, and a narrator intent on laying bare the cultural and natural, physical experience of being human, and of exploring/celebrating the sexual dimension of our lives and the diverse quality of human identity. The poet's uninhibited, challenging voice is central to both, and both draw attention to the importance of authentic self-expression and relationships built on candor and openness. 


In the film Howl, James Franco portrays the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose life and work illustrates the tensions of mid-century America, between the haves and have not, between conservative elites and the disaffected, educated and uneducated alike, searching for more transparency and candidness in national life, more tolerance and compassion, amid an increasingly corporatized and militarized order that proved an obstacle to simple human happiness.  Ginsberg, like Walt Whitman, and like many black writers of the Harlem Renaissance and after, wrote of and for a more democratic, open, peaceful America.

 Having you watch the film Howl (starring James Franco in the role of the poet Allen Ginsberg, author of the poem “Howl”) I will be interested in your response to the content of the poem and the film, the poet’s explanations of his work and why he wrote it, and the critical responses expressed during the trial scenes.  If you owe a short response, or want to focus on Howl as a final project:  In your own words, relate what the poem is about, what you thought of Ginsberg’s discussion of the work, and the opinions aired in court on the matter of its obscenity or no, its artistic merit, the advisability of censoring its publication, etcetera (350 words, short response).

Several links posted here may be useful:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/life_and_art/2010/09/how_howl_changed_the_world.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2006/04/the_paradox_of_howl.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2010/09/howl.html

http://www.shmoop.com/howl/section-1-lines-6-10-summary.html

http://www.dhs.fjanosco.net/Documents/HowlOnTrial.pdf
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A Supermarket in California by Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997)

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.

  In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

  What peaches and what penumbras!  Whole families shopping at night!  Aisles full of husbands!  Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

  I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.

  I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?  What price bananas?  Are you my Angel?

  I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective.

  We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.

  Where are we going, Walt Whitman?  The doors close in a hour.  Which way does your beard point tonight?

  (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.)

  Will we walk all night through solitary streets?  The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.

  Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

  Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

--Berkeley, 1955

                                                                  "Icarus"  –by Henri Matisse

Week 9

                                                   Stonehenge (built circa 3000 B.C.)

The Shadow on the Stone           by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I went by the Druid stone

That broods in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

That at some moments fall thereon

From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

Threw there when she was gardening.

I thought her behind my back,

Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: ‘I am sure you are standing behind me,

Though how do you get into this old track?’

And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

That there was nothing in my belief.

Yet I wanted to look and see

That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: ‘Nay, I’ll not unvision

A shape which, somehow, there may be.’

So I went on softly from the glade,

And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition—

My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

English author Thomas Hardy was fascinated with the ancient world that lay in cryptic form all around the Wessex area where he lived and set his novels.  He included many references to pagan history and belief in his accounts of the folkways of the area, and did himself experience the conflict between "reason" and the irrational intuitions and impulses of his being. Here, in the poem above, he seems to see his departed wife near a Druid stone ( a 5000 year old Sarsen stone lay in his garden) and to be reluctant to lose hold of the visionary "shape."