The moon has nothing to be sad about.

In the line preceding the crackling and dragging blacks, the speaker notes that "She is used to this sort of thing." The antecedent of "she" is the moon, as it is personified in the prior stanza, and the line is an elaboration on the statement that, "The moon has nothing to be sad about." Which ends in a preposition. But I just wrote a fragment, so it'll be all right.

In any case, when I imagine the moon crackling and dragging, I imagine its orbit through space. Taking into consideration that the moon is [probably] lifeless, I can't imagine anything on the moon would be crackling and dragging. The "blacks" could perhaps be referencing the "edge" of the moon, which looks black in the night sky, but that seems like a disappointing and shallow interpretation to me. What else is black in the moon, though? Craters? "The man in the moon"? I used to think the moon looked like it had a picture of a wolf on a cliff howling at the moon in it. I don't see it anymore, which is disappointing.

The title would probably have to refer to more than merely the edges of the moon as perceived from Earth, however. It could tie into the line, "We have come so far, it is over." There, they (the feet?) reach a sort of metaphorical edge. It could be the edge of life, as many have already noted. Knowing as we do that Plath favored confessional poetry and also that this poem was one of the last she wrote prior to her suicide, this interpretation would make align well. Maybe the perfected dead body of the Greek woman is her twisted glamorization of death. Having read Ava's post, I do see now some oddly striking parallels between Plath's mindset and Nina's in Black Swan.

It reminded me of that song a little bit. That song almost became my eighth grade class's graduation song. It's a crazy world.

Oh, Sylvia

Words - Sylvia Plath

I feel as though this poem is another lamenting her lack of recognition as a poet. Otherwise, I don't know what the title could mean. I believe the image she depicts of the tree being chopped is a metaphor for her work's being "cut down."

The echoes of which she speaks sound, I believe, like horses as they run away. The echoes return in the penultimate stanza as dry words and riderless horses.

The water striving to re-establish its mirror could be interpreted as a symbolic representation of Plath's striving to establish herself as a poet. The rock the drops and turns may be one in the same with the white skull eaten by weedy greens. This imagery sets a desolate picture to reinforce the hopelessness of the tone.

"From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars/ Govern a life." That sounds like another metaphor. Her hopes are drowning under the weight of her predetermined destiny to remain unknown.

"I can't love anything I can't finish."

Brilliance - Mark Doty

"I can't love anything I can't finish."

That's just a good line. I think it encapsulates the the tone of the entire poem; this man is dying, and he knows it, and he doesn't want to leave behind any unfinished business. When he goes ahead with the goldfish, he reaches an important decision. He can't necessarily tie up all the loose ends, so he may as well get the bowl of goldfish. If he has to die, he wants to go "in brilliance." I'm not sure how goldfish make one's life transform immediately into something brilliant, but I certainly wouldn't deny the man his contentment.

"And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that's what everyone else does."

What... is the deal... with the sudden disinterest in new stanzas?

The Feelings - Sharon Olds

The feelings in question deal with grieving for a deceased father without faith in an afterlife and also physical feelings, like the hair like a wolf's (which I found to be a strange comparison because I don't know how a wolf's hair feels in comparison to a dead human's) and the dry lips (and maybe it is not weird that she did that, but it took me by surprise) and the weight of the husband on her apparently fruit-like body, which was leaking tear-juice all over the place.

Also, I don't know what was going on with the Eskimo and the death canoe, and the daydream about the ashes was sort of disturbing.

"How did I get into this ... great big nutshell?"

The Roundhouse Voices - Dave Smith

In a nutshell:

There's a guy who practiced baseball with his uncle a lot, and the uncle died, and now he's having an identity crisis.

"I'm here/ though this is a day I did not want to see," provides the only bit of enjambement in the poem, which I can only imagine to be a short of shift in tone to one more directly melancholy. "Mick" is an allusion to Mickey Mantle, who I have learned from Google is a baseball legend, so that makes sense. I am as yet unsure of the significance of the roundhouse, which is like a shed. Maybe the speaker is in the roundhouse, and he's recalling those voices asking him who he is and maybe something his uncle said to him. The "box of silk" is a euphemism for a casket, and "the sun that made its glove soft on my hand" is personification. "I see myself like a burning speck/ of cinder come down the hill and through a tunnel/ of porches," is a simile.

LoL: Lots of Labels

Skunk Hour - Robert Lowell (the village creep)

post-discussion

Probably not intended as a personal outing. But you know. Maybe.

The skunks were rather underrepresented in my interpretation; the mother skunk's nurturing side makes them the characters with the most enviable familial ties in the poem.

"I myself am hell" is a line from Paradise Lost.

This is an example of confessional poetry because it is a glimpse into the life of the poet himself.

The tone is lonely, cynical, melancholy and hopeless.

Acting Like A Tree - Jonathan Aaron

"How to Make a Company Party Bearable and Be with the Wolves"

I wasn't actually far off on this one. I neglected to use the word "anthropomorphism" and note the alliteration in "red ribbon of a river," and I didn't know that there was a tradition of humans becoming trees that pertains to a name I don't think I caught that sounded like Avid.* But this guy. He didn't need to be with people because he was rich inside his head.

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry - Howard Nemerov

The title is interesting because it's a sentence fragment and creates a conversational tone, and the reader expects an answer to the question he never actually asked, and he probably expects it in the form of a definition.

The last stanza is a rhyming couplet, and prose falls while poetry flies.

Also, it was recommended that we read Emily Dickinson's poem that begins with the line, "A bird came down the walk."

*Ovid. Metamorphosis. That was silly.

Crayons

Acting Like A Tree - Jonathan Aaron

Uhhhm. So there's this guy at a party, and he's all, "Oops, I forgot to wear a costume," so then he pretends to be a tree, and this little girl looks at him like, "That is not how you act like a tree," so then he closes his eyes and tries harder, and then he drifts away into his imagination, and he hears a wolf. That's what I got from this. It's a strictly literal interpretation. I'm really not sure what else it could mean.

It could be pointing toward the fact that what one person observes to be a tree may not be exactly the same as what somebody else observes. Sometimes I think about colors, and I wonder if everybody sees red the same way that I see red. Maybe when I see red, other people see purple, and we just don't ever realize it. Sometimes I think that's why people have different opinions. They literally see things differently. But who knows.

I don't know what just happened, but I didn't enjoy it.

The Bear - Galway Kinnell

Bleeding bears everywhere. Eating them. Sleeping in them. Drinking their blood. Digesting them. Smelling them. Gross. Why would you do that? It sounds unbearable.

...

...

Ahaha.

>.>

I don't even really know what else to say. I mostly just wrote snarky comments and disgusted sounds and various interjections in the margins of this poem. It's separated into seven parts. Maybe that's significant. Number of divine perfection and all that.

This Blog Background Reminds Me Of TFiOS

Skunk Hour - Robert Lowell

I am pretty sure it's about loneliness, but maybe I'm projecting again.

Beyond that, I'm sensing a theme that the speaker wants to be with someone but can't. Here are some words that jump out at me:

- hermit

- fairy

- marry

- love-cars

- "Love, O careless Love"

- sob

- Church

I think he's afraid of growing old alone, like the hermit with the son and her "farmer" has. He refers to the millionaire "who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue," perhaps indicating attractiveness, and "our fairy decorator" who would "rather marry" than find work for money. I thought perhaps "fairy" had some sort of ship imagery, but that's "ferry." The only definition of "fairy" aside from the floaty magical things is a derogatory word for homosexual males.

The next stanza refers to his watching for love-cars, and he says, "My mind's not right." I suspect the speaker is uncomfortable with his sexuality, which is why the lyrics, "Love, O careless love..." might make him "sob in each blood cell," and he perceives himself as hell. Not in hell. Just hell itself. Hell personified. His own hell, his own prison he can't escape. Alone but for the skunks marching alongside the Trinitarian Church--the structure he probably views as somewhat responsible for his loneliness.

Eigentlich Nicht: Second Thoughts

Here are some things I learned in class discussion.

Sylvia Plath - The Colossus

I should've just skipped the title. I was closer the first time.

Anyway, the consensus reached seemed to be that the poem was probably written about Plath's frustrations as a female writer and with her husband Ted Hughes, whom she viewed as sort of a father figure with whom she had an unhappy marriage. Hughes was the British poet laureate, and the theme of Greek antiquity throughout the poem seems to have been utilized to indicate Plath's feeling that there was no way for her to escape male dominance in the poetry hierarchy.

The poem is an allegory. The "mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles" probably point toward Hughes' poetry, which often dealt with animal sounds. She writes to convey her years of laboring to make herself known. She cleans the ruins of The Colossus of Rhodes to see if it has anything to say, but she is only an ant, and her efforts are fruitless.

The enjambment, which emerges only in the latter stanzas of the poem, imitates the unending debris of this monument.

Though we discussed that the "red stars and those of plumb-color" act as a symbol often ignored by analysts of the work, we spoke about the association of the colors with pain, and I proposed that stars turn red as they die. Also, I am realizing as I type this, she says she is "counting" them, which makes a lot of sense with the theme of fruitless labor.

No one can count the stars.

Robert Lowell - Epilogue

I was more on track with this one, though I missed some things. I think I was projecting a little bit.

The poem was less about seeking inspiration and fearing being too realistic and more about the constraints of writing in general. He perceives poetry to be an art dealing with recollection, which consequently relies on fact and is paralyzed by this. He expresses a certain self-consciousness about the shortcomings of his writings, but then he goes on with this:

"Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning."

assonance

alliteration/consonance

more assonance

What he wants is to bring his poetry to life--to give it a certain timelessness--and he envies Vermeer's ability to do so.

But snow is prettier.

"Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry" - Howard Nemerov

Nemerov uses a nice rhyme scheme here. I like those. I know people like to be all fancy and say, "Not all poetry has to rhyme," blah blah blah, but I think it's nice when they do. Even though it's gotten a lot less impressive since the dawn of rhyming dictionaries.

I'm not sure why he has it structured so. ABAB CC. That's weird. Maybe it's a thing. Someone should tell me.

But Nemerov seems to liken the difference between prose and poetry to the difference between freezing drizzle and snow. In other words, it's a fine line. But snow is prettier.

"So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane." - Looking for Alaska by John Green

"Thanks, so do I."

"Epilogue" - Robert Lowell

I'm pretty sure this one was about a guy who is trying to write, and he's having trouble imagining. He just keeps fictionalizing his own experiences--a problem to which I respond: it happens.

This isn't analysis, but nobody cares that I'm doing this anyway. The last time I saw John Green, I asked him a question while he was signing all of my books.

John: "I like your shirt." (It had the Nerdfighter gang sign on it.)

me: "Thanks, so do I." (I felt that it was okay to say that because I'm pretty sure his brother Hank designed it.)

[some kind of passing off of books, then in the autographing time...]

I asked him for advice about this very problem, and I would try to paraphrase it for you, but I was simply so nervous that I have very little recollection of any words exchanged, and also I am pretty sure I stammered a lot.

I do remember that his advice startled me. The essence of it was that I shouldn't worry about that. People know the risks when they befriend writers. I wish I'd written everything down somewhere, but I was frazzled and worried about having to drive on the interstate after that.

Not The Bell Jar

"The Colossus" - Sylvia Plath

Skipping automatically over the title, as per usual, I read this poem with significant confusion. The apostrophe, "O father," in the fourth stanza originally led me to believe it was perhaps a poem being addressed to a father who had left. The poem seems to have sort of an angry, accusatory tone with undertones of bitter vulnerability, and that seemed to support my initial thought process. So did the last two lines:

"No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing."

I thought that was indicative of the speaker's having given up on awaiting the father's return.

But then I read the title and decided it was probably about the Colossus of Rhodes. I have no idea why she feels so angsty about this statue. I guess I might be annoyed if I labored thirty years on the same ginormous statue and felt it to be no benefit to me. But I don't know how she can complain about sounds it makes. She must be losing it up there in the guy's ear/cornucopia.

"Can we panic nooooow?"

"He lay for a moment, blinking in owlish incomprehension at the light; then suddenly remembered--everything.

"'Oh, my God, my God!' He covered his eyes with his hand." - p. 259

Sooooo....

....

Did he kill Lenina? Bryan, you can't answer because... I already know. What you think. Is a fragment. But still. It would explain his otherwise rather overreaction-y dismay at remembering "everything." Otherwise, "everything" is just... soma. And stuff. There you go. There's a theme: Everything is just soma and stuff. That's what the civilized people think.

I just became surprised and kind of sad about the Lenina business. But I have to go watch Chamber of Secrets some more. Harry doesn't die, and I knooow it because... straightforward is good.

*breathing heavily*

"From time to time he stretched out his arms as though he were on the Cross, and held them thus through long minutes of an ache that gradually increased till it became a tremulous and excruciating agony; held them, in voluntary crucifixion, while he repeated, through clenched teeth (the sweat, meanwhile, pouring down his face), 'Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good!' again and again, till he was on the point of fainting from the pain." - p. 244

He's just like Dobby. Just like Dobby! He's aaaaaall content with his lighthouse, and then he realizes he never set out to be haaaappy, and then... masochism. Yep. Seriously I have to watch Harry Potter now.

Ummm...

Oh yeah, so I decided to blog about the first half of chapter eighteen and then a second post about the second half of chapter eighteen. But... I read the second half already. So this is hard. And I am cheating. Empty sentences. Aaaaand go.

It's my nephew; he's very disturbed. Meeting strangers upsets him. That's why I kept him upstairs.

"'But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.'" - p. 240

Wow. Wowowow. I wish I... knew how to say profound things right after somebody makes an argument against me. I have to rehearse thoughts for hours in order to make them sound like that. That was awesome.

His certainty about that baffles me, also. I am very ambivalent about everything. It takes a while to deciiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiide how to feel about sssstuff, y'know? Okay. I'm watching Chamber of Secrets right now; not gonna lie. These sentences are about eighty percent empty. Or twenty percent full. It's a shame because this is one of the best chapters in the book! But you know, I'm not getting a grade for this, and... priorities. So here's a picture of what's really on my mind:

"Writing is making sense of life." - Nadine Gordimer

"'I should like a thoroughly bad climate,' he answered. 'I believe one would write better if the climate were bad.'" - p. 229

It's true, I think. I find that terribly worrisome, considering my career objectives. Let's look at some examples.

J.K. Rowling is the richest woman in the world. She's got more money than the Queen of England. Everyone loves her, with the exception of people who think that Harry Potter is either annoying or evil.

Emily Dickinson, about whom I wrote my Famous American report in third grade (and also one in seventh), is, for all her confusing capitalization, one of the most-read poets of all time.

Charles Dickens... well, we've all read some Dickens at some point in our lives, haven't we?

You know what they all have in common? They're all varying degrees of miserable.

J.K. Rowling, after moving back to England from Portugal with her daughter as a single mother, wrote the beginning chapters of Harry Potter on napkins in pubs while her baby daughter napped.

Emily Dickinson was a hermit. She was also depressed.

Charles Dickens described himself as a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy."

For the sake of avoiding unnecessary mental crises, I am going to stop there.

I have this autographed picture on my desk in my room. Sometimes people think it's a new frame that still has the random picture in it.

Smashing!

"And suddenly it was luminously clear to the Savage what he must do; it was as though a shutter had been opened, a curtain drawn back." - p. 210

That's an epiphany if ever I've seen one.

John knew all along, I think, that he hated this soma stuff, and that something had to be done about it. He just didn't feel like being proactive. He didn't feel a personal responsibility for any of them. He had been too busy mooning over Lenina. The realization that Lenina wasn't really his type and the death of his mother--these in rapid succession-- provided the impetus/incentive for him to make his move. That soma-smashing session reminded me first of the Boston Tea Party and then of the scene in Order of the Phoenix in which the prophecies all get smashed. The Boston Tea Party is the better parallel in terms of intent, but the Order of the Phoenix parallel works better for me because I saw that one happen, and it sounds smash-y-er in my mind.

He doesn't know what a Moogle is!

"Her lips moved. 'Popé!' she whispered again, and it was as though he had had a pailful of ordure thrown in his face." - p. 204

Thaaat reminded me of a scene from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (the movie, not the book, and it made a lot of people--not me-- mad).

Also, this one reminded me of the same movie D=!

"'Is she dead?' he asked.

"The Savage stared at them for a moment in silence. Then in silence he rose to his feet, in silence slowly walked towards the door.

"'Is she dead?' repeated the inquisitive twin trotting at his side." - p. 207

1:50-2:20 of this scene, to be precise. The difference is that the creepy twins don't mean any harm; it's all in their conditioning. Dudley is just a jerk-face who's been conditioned to be a jerk-face by his jerk-face parents. Ahem. Sorry. It is Harry Potter Week.

Also, maybe this is just juxtaposition of the two different cultures, but John seems almost excessively attached to his mother. They told him this was coming, and I'm perfectly aware that knowledge of terminal illness doesn't make the imminent end any prettier or less traumatic, but his denial seems... off. Preposition. I'm going to label it the Oedipus complex because I like to put intelligent-sounding things in my tags... but also because I think he might have a touch of an Oedipus complex.

1-2-3-4

"There was a moment's silence; then, in a very low voice, 'I love you more than anything in the world,' he said." - p. 192

0:45-1:00

Only sometimes. Unfortunately for John, this is one of those times. Kind of.

The problem with this scenario is that John and Lenina have very different (and extreme) definitions of the word "love." John believes it's the Romeo and Juliet, I-have-to-kill-myself-immediately-if-my-loved-one-is-dead definition. Lenina thinks it's the wow-that-guy-is-physically-attractive-and-positively-interesting kind. That's... not a very sturdy foundation. Bad things are bound to happen, and as we've seen, they did.

I believe the half of the phone conversation at the end of the chapter was an alert to John that Linda's not doing so well. Soma overdose, probably. Maaaaaybe Lenina will come back after that? Probably not. They're all conditioned to be all right with death. Maybe that would be good for people. Hmph.