"Personal Hellicon"

I was recently trapped by writer's block--a condition that plagues me every so often--and having read through this poem again, I believe I have found a directed remedy to my plight. This poem, "Personal Helicon" by Seamus Heaney, shows the speakers growth as a man from carefree child to self-aware adult. Interestingly he uses a well to symbolize his ability to see himself as others see him--humanity is a well of experience (or some such quote in cliche). The first well has no reflection, and that is when Heaney's play seems most full of mirth. That is when true creativity and fun are taking place. Then a face starts to take it's form: first as a hovering, white apparition, then a fully fledged reflection (like the of Narcissus).

I thought to myself, having come to terms with the fact that I have writer's block, what am I trying to write for? Fame? Publication? Money? No, I was writing for the sake of creativity and expression. In this poem, I found that intended audiences, people we assume to be critiquing our work, force us to see the mirror and polish, rather than create. As thus, I have taken to writing in privacy. No expectations, no reflections about appearance, and no stress. I am cured at last.

Sort of a Blog Response

William Williams (quite a humorous name, in fact) has truly baffled and impressed me with his poem, "Sort of a Song." Here, I shall attempt deconstruction and reexamination.

"Let the snake wait under
his weed"

This seems simple enough: let the thing exist where it should exist. He seems to be setting up a direct comparison of the relation between the snake and his weed to the nature of writing.

"and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait
sleepless."

This is where confusion rears its ugly head. Since we're letting the snake exist in his habitat, we must be letting writing consist of its natural factor: words both slow and quick--words sharp to strike--words quiet to wait sleepless. Slow and quick seems clear, a possible reference to several literary ideas that involve pacing and diction. Sharp to strike, now I'm lost. Does he mean "sharp" as in "The better 'to strike' you with"? Or "sharp" as in "striking this will allow you to discover how sharp it is"? It seems the first would fit more cleanly. Words that are slow, quick, sharp, and quiet. Waiting sleepless, however, seems pretty clear: words are always 100% accessible.

The structure here is what has me truly impressed: it's as if the first idea completes the first stanza and leaves me blank space beneath it for reflection. Then, with an em dash of great importance, Williams cuts into my reflection with further poetry.

"--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones."

I can only assume the subject to be writing. If that is true, these lines say that metaphor (a symbol here for figurative language, I think) allows writing to reconcile all things in this world, from the pebble to the human mind.

"Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!"

The use of single word imperatives here is a brilliant call to action. "No ideas but in things" might mean only ideas that pertain to reality.

"Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxifraga I cannot relate these ideas. However, splitting rocks is the first step to breaking ground and finding something valuable (?). Perhaps "Saxifrage" is the thought that helps Williams start in his composition process and he is suggesting that we each find our own Invention Starter.

When broken up, the poem seems to make a little bit more sense. I really wish I could talk to Williams.

"No man is an island, entire of itself."

Edgar Allen Poe's "Alone" starts with a dark and gloomy reminiscence about his isolation in childhood. He then goes on to say that "Then--in my childhood... was drawn/ The mystery... Of a demon in my view." I have experienced times of intellectual reflection in which I believed myself to be entirely of an independent nature. And of that nature, I do deem to have 'seen a demon.' I think that Poe is trying to point out that his separation from others early on has forced him to look from a third party perspective and see the 'demons' of the other's lives. I entirely agree that isolation can breed cynicism through over-analysis. However, in John Donne's Meditation XVII, he says that "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." In that, Donne is saying that all life is interrelated (at least on the level of human emotion) and that Poe's witness of the 'demon' as a result of being alone may be a witness of the 'demon' of loneliness itself.  These opposing ideas became ever-prevalent in my thoughts on this subject when I began to wonder about my academic lack of peers. It wasn't truly a lack of peers at all. Quite the contrary, the 'demon' of my loneliness was a fear of anything more than loneliness. However, Poe's representation of one side of this discussion was artfully crafted with a chain of couplets and what seems to be a loose iambic tetrameter. The genuine nature of the piece will hopefully find its way into my writing through example.

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.