Chasing "The Cat"

"Outside it was night
like a book without letters.
And the eternal dark
dripped to the stars through the sieve of the
city."

In this wonderfully deep poem, Miroslav Holub addresses countless meaning through deliberate word-choice. A book without letters could be a picture book, a book of runes, or (what I believe to be most likely) an empty stack of pages. The implications of an empty page are truly astronomical: the night is entirely what we make of it. Our imaginations run most rampant in the darkness.  Then saying that the "dark dripped to the stars," Holub has both impressed me with his alliteration and confused me with the use of "to." In the analogy, it seems as though the stars would be the holes in the sieve that allow the draining to occur. However, looking to the sky, the stars are surrounded by darkness: the sieve seems to be composed of the darkness. This seems to suggest that darkness is indeed the light that shines through the sieve. Blank pages are white; stars shine white. Maybe Holub is saying that darkness, in the literal sense, is true light, in the figurative sense. That is to say, the embrace of darkness is a virtue of those seeking the light. After all this, I am made to ask: Did Holub consider this in the such detail?

Praise for "Praise in Summer"

In his poem, "Praise in Summer", Richard Wilbur literally flips perception of the world upside-down. This poem grants its imagery of a world unimagined through the artful and beautiful meter and rhyme format of an English Sonnet. Wilbur's ending couplet, most interestingly, grants the opposition to his new world by detailing the world as it is normally seen. This is very significant in that the poetic departure from the majority format indicates a figurative divide between Wilbur's world and ours.


Earlier in the poem, there is an interesting juxtaposition of imagery.


"The hills are heavens full of branching ways

Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!"

Wilbur's use of "branching" when describing the hills above (!) collides with the image of the tree. This may be suggesting that up is down and down is up: all things are of equal merit because, at their most base, all things are the same. 

Another interesting piece, or theme rather, is "this mad instead". Wilbur notices and raises (as an issue) the use of the word "instead" when describing something that could be; "uncreation." Wilbur is definitely of the creative sort. This is by far one of my favorite poems. 

Existing Outside: "Of Mere Being"

In his poem, "Of Mere Being," Wallace Stevens Uses several commonly applied symbols to explain, through leaping logic, his idea of 'being'. His use of vivid, abstract imagery, in tandem with this symbolism, creates a portrait of the infinitesimally small space between the mind and the world: "Immense cosmic power, itty-bitty living space." The dark corridors of irrational hope--faith. We reach to the "end of the mind" to grasp at all that we cannot understand, or rather those things that we cannot explain. The most readily used example of this 'space' is faith, more specifically faith within religion. Divinity is neither of this world nor of the mind. Quite the contrary, this world and these minds are understood to be of divinity. Therefore, we can categorize faith as falling between the world and understanding of the world.

What's most incredible, on a related note, is that sometimes, the world outside that space is effected solely by the existence of the mind within. This idea is demonstrated by the Double-Slit experiment. Even by merely being, we are effecting the way that the world functions.

Double Slit-Experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfPeprQ7oGc

Beginning Again

A new year has come and I have curiously found myself addressing poetry in the same respect as the former semester: with an "Introduction to Poetry" from Billy Collins. I read the same lines, I notice the same themes, but this time, the poem is different. What has changed? I am older, more versed in literature, more poetically aware, so to speak. No longer is my instructor holding my hand and walking me through meaning. I'm not beating it with a hose either. Poetry isn't a solitary interrogation--it's a conversation. With new beginnings, I am capable of asking the poem for reason, following the point of a fiber optic, being lead to importance and meaning.

Billy Collins addresses the 'normal' approach to poetry with disgust and contempt. Voicing his requests politely and in sequence, each a symbol of respect for poetry. Then he labels the bad readers. "Them." An ominous pronoun. "they begin beating it with a hose...." Collins characterized the unnamed readers as criminals.

Truly a new beginning, this semester looks bright.