#weeks 9 through 12

[cwl190]

Week 12

[cwl190]

Week 11

ROSS GAY and DANUSHA LAMÉRIS: In Gaiman’s short story, he describes how there’s a liberation in writing in that there are no set rules and direction for where your writing needs to go. He highlights this with one of the books from his childhood, whose table of context is a poem. Structure in writing are rules, but there are no actual rules in writing. Gaiman talks about how a majority of creative writers that want to get into publishing get driven away from it because they are being fed guidelines that eventually usurp writers’ enjoyment from it, and he emphasizes that sticking to something that you enjoy about writing isn’t a bad thing. You’re allowed to do whatever you want. All he asks is “Can you do it with aplomb?... with style?... with joy?” (326). And as long as you’re able to do so, no matter what restrictions you break, most people are going to look at what you wrote and enjoy it.

In “Small Kindnesses”, all Laméris seems to be doing is listing small acts of graces strangers perform for one another, but you can tell that there was intent put behind every one he lists. For example, lines such as “For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder” is a very specific line, but I believe it’s something a lot of people can picture happening to them and agree with. A lot of the times, poems seem to revolve around concepts and emotions that we find hard to describe or confront because we think that if our work doesn’t have depth, it’s not worth writing or reading about. However, the subject behind Laméris’s work isn’t melancholic or tragic, and he doesn’t seem to be trying to force an epiphany. He enjoys these small acts of kindnesses, he knows we do, and he is expressing his love for the love that we show strangers that we mutually want for ourselves. It’s a simple topic, but one that is heartwarming nonetheless. 

Gaiman states, “You made the whole thing up... Right now you’re a madrunner running from mesa to mesa across the air on a bridge of stuff that you’d made up. All that happened is you stopped” (327). I interpreted this quote as that everything you write down technically doesn’t have a correct structure and doesn’t have to be. A beginning and end are just how you chose to start and end your writing, and it doesn’t matter what the contents are. A poem that seems to take example of the freeform approach Gaiman has is Gay’s “to the fig tree on 9th and christian”. It reads as a bunch of fragments of actions and adjectives strung together that hardly makes sense and doesn’t seem to have a general idea at all. But this is Gay’s flow of writing and how he thinks, and somehow he manages to use really neat imagery like “I was a little tipsy on the dance of the velvety heart rolling” and "giddy throngs of yellow-jackets sugar” blended with questions. I don’t understand it, but it still feels as though it’s a poem.

GARY YOUNG: 

In Addonizio and Laux’s Images, they state “An image, when it’s doing its full work, can direct a reader toward some insight, bring a poem to an emotional pitch, embody an idea” (86).“ Although Young’s poem is very vague, I think it’s really well written because I can tell there’s a bigger emotion he manages to convey with such few words. 

I think this poem has a similar theme to Laméris’s poem about acts of kindness because the narrator seems to be treating the girl he’s holding hands with with lots of care, but he’s shocked to see that he could direct that same reverence for himself. 

The fact that the narrator finds it hard to show himself care is something that I believe would resonate with the audience. In Tan’s “Pixel by Pixel” she states that something she finds important is connecting the audience together through words, and I think that the strangeness the narrator feels for showing himself kindness is something everyone can relate to. The use of “I”, and the narrator being himself all along might cause readers to see themselves in the poem.

Young’s poem also is subtle in a way that works perfectly, because I feel like the ambivalence is what causes to connect the reader the most to the poem. According to Aimee Bender's "Light the Dark", “The words that click into place, wrap around something mysterious. They create a shape around which something loves- and they give hints about what that thing is, but do not reveal it fully” (5). To me, by not giving the audience more context, we want to analyze the poem more in depth. 

ERIKA L. SÁNCHEZ: 

In “Image”, Addonizio and Laux praise the masterful use of color in poems to make the writer’s imagery stand out even more, such as an orange being displayed against a gray December. The stark contrast is used to enhance the poem. When Sánchez uses imagery such as “lucid semen trailing down a crisp, white sheet”, we can vividly imagine it’s reflectiveness against the sheets. The use of “crisp” and “white” are something we associate with cleanliness, so the imagery of the semen stained on it only gives the sense of it not belonging there. This can be a way of Sánchez effectively expressing her resentment at her own feelings.

Along the same vein, in “Writing the Erotic”, Addonizio and Laux state that when writing about sex in Hillman’s “The Spark”: “Each image supports or extends to the next... these images are graphic.... but because the sexual images are tied together with images of the natural world, they feel instinctive, right” (51).  Sánchez does this effectively in her own poem, as Sánchez describes sex with nature imagery such as “olive groves” and “sucking on sour oranges”, as well as blends her feelings with carnal want. “The wet earth of my desire” and “a hunger still unraveling” give the poem a frustrated, more animalistic and angry emotion to it. 

[cwl190]

Week 10

BENJAMIN PERCY & ADDONIZIO and LAUX: 

In “Set Pieces”, Percy puts a lot of emphasis on the set piece of a book/movie. He talks about how Charles Baxter states “we write to make sense of the widowed images in our lives” (41). Something that we want to get down on paper is centered around an image that was unforgettable to us. Percy also introduces his corkboard, which is used to compile several of these images so that he has several scenes of inspiration to draw from. However he also warns against describing every single little fact in your story in great length because the reader’s attention begins to waver. As a result, when it comes to presenting your set piece, the audience is not going to be as affected by what is supposed to be an impactful moment. Percy advises that you should make sure that you are building tension to the attention grabbing moment rather than making every single moment a hard hitting one. 

Similarly, in “Images”, Addonizio and Laux talk about the important of sensory details to invoke a certain feeling in the reader. According to the text, “Poets need to keep all five senses- and possibly a few more- on continual alert, ready to translate the world through their bodies, to reinvent it in language” (86). This ties into Percy’s corkboard because he describes he draws inspiration to write from everywhere. People’s conversations, magazine cuts, all and anything can be used to enforce his own work, and this constant vigilance definitely carries over to a medium that relies on connecting with its readers with less words. The set piece that Percy describes is the entirety of a what a poem is. Addonizo and Laux use examples from the poem “Where You Go When She Sleeps” where the poet uses the hair of the woman the narrator loves and associates different, grander things with that same color to make us understand how the narrator feels about something so simple about her. 

RACHEL ELIZA GRIFFITHS: 

In “Death and Grief”, Addonizio and Laux state that when you write about death, you need to make sure the reader understands what the context of your poem is about, or at least have a general idea of what the theme of the writing is. In Rachel Eliza Griffith’s poem “Good Mother”, I think she’s successfully able to connect to the readers through what is a commonly universal association with mothers, which is their unconditional love despite outside circumstances. According to the text, despite being completely strangers to the narrator, she “didn’t wipe my snot from her shirt, my tears from her collarbone, who did not tell me to pull myself together while everything inside me dropped”. This type of care in this form is something that most people would associate with something only their mothers can give to them, or once did. I think that part of the poem works really well because the narrator doesn’t explicitly state how a notion like this would be important to the narrator. However, in terms of subtlety I think that’s where it ends. The readers definitely understand what the grief is about, but I think that the way the narrator was grieving was too hammered in. That might have been the point, but the repeated “mom” mantra, and then the poem being turned into a general statement about appreciating mothers just felt overdone to me. Readers will know the loss, but I’m more ambivalent on whether or not they feel it with this poem.

HEATHER SELLERS: 

In Heather Seller’s “Accidental Practitioners”, intimacy is created in the poem through name association. Everyone knows the feeling of being reminded of another person closer to them when someone has the same name. People’s identities are tied down to their names, and the Sellers uses that as the concept of the poem, because the students the narrator is teaching are all painful reminders of people she once knew. I believe the reader may feel the loss through quotes such as “I say his name aloud to alter my relationship to grief”. We can understand the narrator is struggling to change that association to the student rather than her brother. And although the narrator plainly states what happened to her brother, ex-husband, and father so the reader knows exactly why she feels the way about them, the narrator also shies away from stating how they have truly hurt her, just as she avoids seating those students with the names together. For example, when the narrator tells the student with her ex-husband’s name, “You can lose me, I tell him. Pretend you will lose me”, this creates a feeling of desperation because we know that her ex-husband has clearly moved on from her. The readers can interpret that she says this because she wants her husband to feel as though he has lost something and that she meant something, and that idea could be saddening to the reader.

KAVEH AKBAR:

One of the most effective things about similes and metaphors are that they transform the literal meaning in a sentence into something deeper to express a certain feeling or idea. Intimacy is created in Akbar’s poem through Akbar’s daily surroundings. According to Addonizio and Laux, the magic behind the use of similes and metaphors when used in poems such as “Finding Something” is that the poem is written in a way that combines both senses and emotion alike. The narrator states that his “heart is as helpless as crushed birds” (Simile and Metaphor, 98). Beings that fly being constricted and harmed shows the magnitude of the grief the narrator is feeling. Akbar does something similar in his poem where Lydia is represented by orchids that are in everything the narrator sees. The reader comes to expect to see orchids described in every line, and when the last two lines are revealed, the reader understands that it’s not really about the orchids. This creates a feeling of claustrophobia and helplessness because no matter where the narrator goes, they will be reminded that Lydia is gone.

ADDONIZIO and LAUX, JANE SMILEY, & CATHERINE POND: 

Some “seeds” I noticed in Pond’s poems was definitely the way she wrote how them and their friend would react to the funeral procession if she had been with them, to drawing us back to their reality. I think everything about Kayaderosseras moves smoothly, from the flower petals hitting the windshield to the narrator inexplicitly expressing how uncomfortable they are passing by the funeral procession by describing how their fingers felt against the wheel.

However, I thought that “As If” was not as neatly executed as the previous poem. This one was more of a pebble for me because the narrator mentions lots of seemingly unfinished ideas and thoughts. They jump between mentions of Ontario’s fires which didn’t fit the theme of the poem and made it feel out of place, and it’s difficult to tell who is being addressed to in the poem in a way that is more confusing than interesting. For example, the narrator states that “Now we stare at the lake not speaking”, but who the “we” is is never specified, and right after she’s turning on the blinker. It’s nonsensical, but we can tell that there’s real grief behind what the narrator is saying. This makes me think that it’s what Addonizio and Laux meant when they stated that although a poem may seem to be well written, there were definitely feelings behind it that may or may not be polished and refined in the future.

**Professor Gaudry if you happen to be reading this, did you know that I make dollhouses? I know you mentioned liking miniature furniture so here are some of mine (house 1 | house 2 | house 3)**

[cwl190]

Week 9

DONIKA KELLY: 

In “Writing and Knowing”, Addonizo and Laux make the point that poets began to write “with the simple idea that what they saw and experienced was important to record, and that the modest facts of their lives... could contain the enduring facts and truths of the larger world” (Poet, 23). In my opinion, what I interpreted from this text is that writing poems isn’t only something that is based on what you know, but can also be used to expand on a bigger idea. Anything that may seem mundane on a surface level can be written into a great poem if made into something people can emphasize with, whether that may be through the senses or something common people share.

In Donika Kelly’s poem “Hermit Thrush”, by describing how white girls covering their legs make specifically the narrator feel better about themselves, Kelly is able to use winter to make a commentary on how societal standards on beauty affect poc such as the narrator. The narrator implies through this that by concealing their skin because of winter, it undoes some of the underlying inferiority the narrator faces due to how they are treated due to their ethnicity. 

I think that this is what Addonizo and Laux wanted to express when they state that poetry is about “bringing forth something that’s inside of you... making something, in language, that can be transmitted to others” (Poet, 22). “Hermit Thrush” is the narrator’s own feelings brought to expression by winter, and minorities that face discrimination may be able to connect with this same feeling. 

ROBERT WRIGLEY: 

Addonizio and Laux’s statement about using imagination to compensate for a lack of experience is an effective tool in writing poems. According to the text “The trick is to find out what we know, challenge what we know, own what we know, and then give it away in language” (Poet, 21). Your inspiration comes from what you experience in your life, whether or not they may be happy, confusing or even troubling. You might not know enough about it, but the point they may be trying to make though this is that although that experience is important in making your writing compelling, it’s the emotions and senses tied into the text that will make the audience emphasize with and believe what you write. 

Meanwhile, Percy puts emphasis on researching every single facet of a topic you’re writing about to be believable. He tackles all his stories as research projects that he takes into his real life, where he’d spend “several days working with the employees, eavesdropping on their conversations, taking notes on the peculiar insider lingo I could never have gleaned from Wikipedia” (146). He places emphasis on embodying what you are writing, and through the experiences he had himself will be able to bring what he knows instead of what he read in. By being there in the flesh, he is able to notice things that may have been looked over on paper. 

In Robert Wrigley’s poem “Machinery,” Wright seems to be a blend of both of these perspectives. The narrator doesn’t know machinery to the extent his father did, and his father doesn’t know poetry the way he did. This results in a weird hybrid of knowledge where Wright knows what all the tools his father uses are called, but he doesn’t know how to make them work: “A fine wood plane but not the thickness planer, which I would not know how to use. A variety of clamps I use to clamp things-needing-clamping clamped” (Wright, 2). Imagination plays a huge part in this, as he begins stringing tool functions in with his own writing so that it functions as a representation of his feelings about his father as well as what he remembers of him. 

EMMA DONOGHUE: In “You and Me,” Emma Donoghue says that for her,  “writing is about the basic thrill of making something out of words that never existed before” (236). She shares an example from her own book about how a “scene begins in a pleasant way, everything green and pastoral—and then we watch as she begins realizing that the bumps of the grass under her feet are not clods of soil, but skulls” (Donoghue 236). She says that “if you give the reader a vivid and concrete image, that will hook their attention, making it easier for them to understand and remember the details longer” (Donoghue, 236, italics mine). For this prompt, connect the dots between Donoghue’s thoughts about “vivid and concrete images” and any of the poems for today.

Donoghue puts the most emphasis on using sensory details in order to convey a type of emotion or idea in your poem. She brings up how she herself has trouble grappling with bigger concepts, so by giving her a visual example of what you are trying to describe, that gives her a better understanding of what is trying to be expressed. Donoghue uses the example of a poem that is largely split between locations: “You think you’re moored, then the next thing you’re sailing again, and then you’re rowing instead of sailing” (235). Donoghue emphasizes that through this, we are whiplashed into location and scenario rather than just being told that there’s a sense of turbulence.

This is used in “Hermit Thrush”, where the narrator does not specifically state how they feels in comparison to the white girls, but through them covering themselves up we are able to interpret the narrator’s insecurities.

SHIRA ERLICHMAN: Connect the dots between Shira Erlichman’s poem “The Knife-Flower” and the craft chapters on “Images” and “The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle.”

In “Images”, the strengths of using sensory details are strongly emphasized in this craft chapter. The mental images we derive from our senses are essential not for just the sake of enhancing the description of things, but the significance they hold when tied with emotions and memories. There is no stronger way to evoke a certain feeling than when you give an object association with something distinct. According to the text, “The poet enlivens his images with the use of color: “gold whirlpool,” “gold sea,” “full of the gold that took him.” Brightness, gold, and sunlight are everywhere. Like the love described, the poem won’t let us go- in one long sentence it takes us into that whirling and shining” (Images, 88). Love is a broad feeling, but it manages to be encapsulated by things that are more tangible due to the visualization given to us. 

In “The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle”, there is a discussion on importance of family on our writing. According to the text, “those closest to us still need to be written about, to be memorialized and argued with and resented and loved” (The Family: Inspiration and Obstacle, 36).  All the positives and negative emotions we first experience are because of our families. It doesn’t have to be detrimentally tragic to be a factor to our inspiration, but family is what introduces us to what we know. 

In Shira Erlichman’s “The Knife-Flower”, Erlichman writes a scenario of the narrator receiving a lily with a stem that pointed into a knife created unpassionately for the sake of a project. In this poem, when returning home for Spring Break, the narrator’s father breaks the knife-flower. The craft essay “Images” ties into this knife-flower because of how fragile it is, much like the slightly strained relationship between father and narrator. It’s been delicately made, and because of the father’s lack of caution, is easily broken. The incident is told in a way that is very matter-of-fact, but the way in which the second half of the poem is presented is in a clumsy, awkward matter that gives us the impression of the familial dynamic between the narrator and their father. Fumbling and falling short at times, but well-intended. The narrator doesn’t seem phased: “Immediately my mouth formed “It’s okay,” even though the break looked dooming” (The Knife-Flower). Although the father is extremely guilty, the narrator seems to have accepted the break for what it is despite their feelings about it. I interpreted this as growing up. The narrator has taken hurt and rejection as a part of life, despite how the parent may try to shield them from it.

HAYAN CHARARA (A): Connect the dots between Hayan Charara’s poem “Mother and Daughter,” one of this week’s chapters from Addonizio and Laux’s The Poet’s Companion, and Benjamin Percy’s “Consider the Orange: Meaningful Repetition.” For Percy’s essay, you’ll focus on the third element: manner of speech.

In Benjamin Percy’s “Consider the Orange: Meaningful Repetition”, Percy describes the significance in repetition isn’t necessarily in the repetition itself, but how it ties into certain themes: “I’m talking about aligning the narrative, creating a sense of structural and thematic cohesion, satisfying the emotional arcs of characters” (159). Repetition can be given a double meaning, used to convey something with more nuance and causing the reader to analyze the text on a deeper level. 

Hayan Charara’s poem “Mother and Daughter” takes this repetition and transforms it into an exploration between the relationship between a mother and daughter. The repetition becomes a mimicry of how daughters adapt behaviors from their maternal figure, then a window into their innermost thoughts and feelings about each other due to the car sinking. I thought the escalation in this was done really well because rather than the daughter remaining as a static mime of her mom, we can see their relationship wasn’t perfect despite the daughter’s admiration of her mother, and yet they still deeply love each other. Addonizio and Laux’s “The Family: Inspirational and Obstacle” is reflected in this work, because the relationship between mother and daughter is the central focal point of this story.