Sign ID/Analysis 8-31-10 Wk 3

Now for an old hat...Sylvia Plath...sorry for the awkward line spacing...

"The Colossus"

 I shall never get you put together entirely,


Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.



Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.



Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull-plates and clear

The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.



A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered



In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,



Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.



ID/Analysis:

• Line 3: the speaker likens the broken male, the Colossus to animals, not just animals, but barnyard animals.
• 4: "great lips..." not only implies irony towards the shattered momument itself, but also perhaps towards a social critique of the ideas concerning "male-centric" patriarchy.
• 6-7:  "oracle...mouthpiece..." more supposed self imposedly importance leading towards societal poking and questioning?
• 8-9: the attempt to rebuild not only the momument physically, but this also filters well with the idea of restructuring male dominant patriachy given that the time of publication overlaops with Women's Liberation Movement for instance.
• 11: "glue and Lysol...": possible attempt to comercialize the construction project? Seems a bit kitsch here. Does this cheapen the act of construction somehow? Or...through the use of objects found within the domesticated space...a woman's "traditional domain, does this serve as a potential means of empowerment for women?
• 12-15: In likening herself to an ant, this does not signify a decrease her worth per se, but step down into a seemingly insignificant role on the page allow her to once again highlight the problem of the Colossus and all of its inherant socio-economic-historical baggage?
• 18: The invocation of the Roman forum highlights the Colossus much like lines 12-15, but this specific reference perhaps stands as a possible warning given Rome's eventual fall?

**I know a lot of this dabbles in interpretation and not inventory, but these are questions that have stuck with me throughout the many times I've studied this poem. I plan to elaborate on these ideas in the near future**

Expansion/Scatterbrain Ex. 8-30-10 Wk 3

"The spies came out of the water." This is what the voice possessing my laptop tells me. I wish for a moment that I could assemble all the seemingly random pieces of music that my ears digest on a daily basis and replay them to myself when random bars and measures invade my head, slipping their vapors into my brain. The clock ticks as I remember how, once again, I forget the promise of technology. It's not a convenience if it's marked error by operator.

How does one write a wedding toast when the day's epitaph has been slowly etching itself into the chipped marble slab of their lives for years now? I've considered taking bets and trying to beat the spread. I'm an asshole, I know. At least I'm a pragmatic asshole, and that has to be worth something. I hear the lights buzz loud as a 757's ghastly shriek next to the room's throbbing pulse marked Timex. I remember Narita, Green Street. That town in Japan like so many others with its polished and smooth temple jutting into the sky like a five year old with a toothy smile and a scheme for a quick buck. This place, where every morning at sunrise, Gotama's faithful shuffle in their thin and brilliant poverty, filled and content with their truths like four loaves of billowing yeast, fresh and crisp.

 Catholicism never had that, whatever that is. Bread really is sacred. I know this after one particular Sunday at Mass where I broke the Host in my twelve year old hands, ate half, and tucked the other piece into my back pocket for my mother who sat in her rent controlled apartment wading through the sewage of the divorce proceedings of her own making. Strange considering I've only seen this woman four times in the past four years, and even then we may as well have been speaking, mumbling through plexi-glass.

I hear your shrill vibrato on the other end of the receiver. I remember the house we've built with our own hands...the knee high wrought iron fence with its black skin falling away in little flakes. The ivy stretching its tangled cursive. Yawning in-between the thin and twisted  ribcage.

Poem Riffing 8-28-10 Wk 3

Donald Justice -- "Men at Forty"  pg. 199 Am. Poetry

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Riff:

[Untitled]

Men at twenty-five

stumble before door jambs

they've yet to open

with trembling fingers. 

Two stairs a piece

up the landing, 

the weight of [expectation**]      Make concrete!!

creaks beneath their feet. 

Lost in their eyelids, 

they see, like Tiresias, 

their faces, haggard

by the weight of decades. 

Now, the Windsors all 

but coil themselves

about the neck, 

this automated syncopation   *possible synonym?

of faces lost in shards 

of glass, the ghostly parade

hums along, listless, 

forty hours at a time,

Only to start again 

forty-eight hours later, 

lives left to atrophy 

among the sputtering engines. 

Calisthenic Ex. 8-25-10 Wk 3

Untitled

eyes shocked
doors to the world
nearly and closely
in the chain reveal
cut stems
safely into the fire
revel of hips
I am not great
Native American, foreign Italian
In the light of her lamp
through applied belief
a few years back
love-sick eighth graders
simply his aristocratic training
the dark serves them
How can I be content?
I am not the city you know
On the alleyway thermals,
Now it is perhaps clear

Revision:

Untitled

In the alleyway,
a flimsy chain fence reveals
cut stems tucked into fires.

In the light of the lamp,
through their applied belief,
I am not perfect .

A few years back,
amid a revel of hips
with her simple training,

"How can I content
these love-sick American foreigners
served in darkness?"

Now it is clear,
I am not the city you know.

Pedagogy Forum 8-25-10 Wk 3

After class last night I spent a fair amount of time considering why I was enrolled in this class to begin with. This isn't to say that I wont't enjoy the class. That's not the case. I suppose the primary reason why I enrolled in this class was to have a better understanding of poetry from the inside out. For years, I've studied semiotics and various other theories and I feel quite comfortable analyzing poetry. That's one of the things I enjoy, the picking, dissecting, teasing out the tiny little fibers. I thrive on the analysis, the creativity inherent in crafting a piece of work with an argument capable of standing on its own

 I've never placed much of an emphasis on my own creative writing in my undergraduate studies, save for the occasional CW class. This isn't because I doubt my own creativity, but I think because it seemed a little daunting stepping up after having read the poets that I have. I'm not claiming, or even hoping to be the next Frost or Whitman. I don't suppose any of us are that pretentious. I will say that the idea of rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty does appeal to me despite everything else.

Junkyard Quotes 8-25-10 Wk 3

Any fool can easily dig a hole. I only wish I could fall in.

The roof is holding on by his fingernails.

Your voice is wrapping around my windowsill.

Thom York, Radiohead "Scatterbrain"

**Again I find myself drawn to song lyrics, instances of pop-culture. I don't know why, but something in these words strikes a chord in me. I do think however the second lyic seems a little cliche. What does anyone think?**

Sign Inventory/Analysis 8-24-10 Wk 2

C.K. Williams

"It is This Way With Men"

They are pounded into the earth
like nails; move an inch,
they are driven down again.
The earth is sore with them.
It is a spiny fruit
that has lost hope
of being raised and eaten.
It can only ripen and ripen.
And men, they too are wounded.
They too are sifted from their loss
and are without hope. The core
softens. The pure flesh softens
and melts. There are thorns, there
are the dark seeds, and they end.   

• men defines as tools, nails
• "driven down" (3) implies negative connotations on surface level, but to remember what work nails do, and therefore men by association  are capable of providing unity and cohesion. 
• the "earth" being sore implies a continued negative connotation...corrosive?
• the metaphor and allusion to fruit leads to further complexity --- fruit as a traditionally feminine image : reproduction/fertility : seeds. 
• "spines" phallic symbol, possible defense mechanisms? Freudian implications?
• hopelessness - line 6 - possible impotence?
•  line 9 - men are wounded too, but aren't they previously injured, as seen in lines 6 and 7 -- hopelessness. 
• lines 11-14 : fruit images return, rotting fruit = death, highly obvious, but still there..."the core softens...pure flesh melts" leaving tainted flesh (men)
• line 13: thorns - phallic = dangerous? possible social and gender critique?
• yet this hopelessness, the desire to be chosen and eaten, adherence to "tradition" ultimately leads to destruction. 

Junkyard Quotes 8-23-10 Wk 2

Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there...

-Thom York, Radiohead

It wasn't actually a hostile takeover. Delta just bought everything with a Northwest logo, gutted the operation like a fish and told the unlucky ones to hit the bricks.

-My uncle in response to a discussion concerning the Delta/Northwest merger

Altheia, Altheia
Don't let them put the blame on you.
What seems so bad now,
could easily change for the better.

-Robin Trower

We wove ourselves into the terrain [...] Chameleons crawled our spines.

-Yusef Komunyakaa, "Camoflaging the Chimera"

**While most of these are instances of pop-culture, I still feel drawn to them for some reason that I can't accurately explain. Maybe it's my bias in terms of individual taste, but I still feel like there is something in these words that I've yet to tap into.**

Riffing/Improv Ex. 8-23 Wk 2

Mark Doty

Broadway

Under Grand Central's tattered vault
--maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit--
one saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim

billowed over some minor constellation
under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings
in a storefront tableau, lustrous, the live macaws

preening, beaks opening and closing
like those animated knives that unfold all night
in jewelers' windows. For sale,

glass eyes turned outward toward the rain,
the birds lined up like the endless flowers
and cheap gems, the makeshift tables

of secondhand magazines
and shoes the hawkers eye
while they shelter in the doorways of banks.



Riff:


Under the faded tin roof
beneath a fistful of stars 
a coyote wails in the distance.
Far from this moment, but close at hand. 


Desert sage sways under 
the stiff and cracked heat, 
its thin pink fingers caught
in splintered door frames, 


opening and closing, 
those tiny knives, 
a lifetime of snagging
elbows and knees caught unawares. 


The store front groans, 
its faded tattoos 
whisper the age of 
its oak skeleton. 


Glass eyes covered,
blinded with old type print, 
rusted nails turning its grin 
to a pit of abscesses. 


Vultures perch along its spine, 
waiting, always waiting, 
their stomachs roused
from their delicious sloth.  

Calisthenics Ex. 8-22-10 Week 1

Black swans, the nature of which I do not know...save for Thom York's interpretation of such. Nice leads to what---wrong. I don't know, and neither should you. It does me in like the mosquito and its ball of string dangling from the eraser. What should be erased? Who decides, and why? I'm only being nice because i want something, and so are you...

Revised:

Black swans I do not know save Thom York's interpretation...which leads to what, I don't know...and neither should you. It claws like the mosquito of yarn hanging by the last thread of his Stolz from the eraser. What should be stricken and why? I'm only being, atmen--the German verb to draw breath--because, and neither can you.

*Stolz--German for pride

How to solidify pride, how to make it tangible?

Expansion Ex. 8-20-10 Week 1

As i sit in the lobby, its single dirty lightbulb swaying naked over my head, the smell of the couches faux leather rings in my nose. the air conditioner rattles, coughs and turns my perch, with its lack of lumbar support into one of those vibrating beds one finds in only the swankiest of hotels. for the thrilling price of 25 c, one can spend the next five minutes rumbling, simmering, in caked sweat, divorce proceedings and who knows what else. this ride is on the house. this is the couch i sit on for hours listening to Mary, her frail voice unchanged by my weeks and weeks of constant assurance that everything will be just fine, and that her ovaries have not turned to dust thanks to some acronym stuffed inside her ever growing file in some doctors office that i will probably never see.

Poetry should be raw and sweet with  a touch of sentiment she says. my words are a poets words she says, but I know better, and so do you...the sign on the wall, with its faded bronzed letters tells me that the building was raised in 1964. that puts my father at a measly five years old walking down the block two houses to St. Vincent's Catholic school, a place held in high esteem for generations of my paternal history. St. Vincents is just like the Washington School, or any other grammar school in the dinky little town in north Jersey twenty minutes out of Manhattan that will forever pay hommage to Roland Barthe's place of birth. I still gorge myself on the chipped bricks that slowly fall out of the dentures of the rectory. I still lose myself to the swelling wooden planks of porches, whose house dwarf me in their age.

The Cohen's live two doors down. the only Jewish family on the block, save the Irish and Polish. Aaron, the only child, was nice enough always spoiled. like many only children are. Their house always reeked of cat piss, or some other equally unpleasant animal signifier.  The father, Bernard, with his swarthy skin used to frighten me, and struck me more as a Sicilian rather than a Jewish man. For what reason, I dont know. Always shuffling to and from his city appointed work van, the same colour as a fresh bruise. a fresh bruise tethered to various points up and down the block at any given hour. Always the same glazed and distant stare in his eyes. The tired and broken look of incapability.  the Missus possessed a penchant for the finer things. fine crystal---waterford or swarovski if i remember--they always looked out of place on their shelves of breathing tchochkies.

Test Blog 8-17-10

Test Blog for Davidson's English 6385 on 8-17-10