Modern Poetry

Snarl.

2004-12-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, I don't know what's going on. First I couldn't create new posts, and now my posts aren't showing up. (!) What ever happened to pen and paper? I didn't win that "Best Cursive" award for nothing...
But I tend to repreat myself anyway, so oh well.

I'm not sure if we're supposed to be blogging on Zukofsky again or not, so I'll do it anway.

I wish we'd had more time to look at "A," although I'm sure we never would've gotten through all of it. I can't imagine the undertaking that A-24 must have been- Zukofsky's wife must have been an amazing musician.
Dr. Sherwood had said that A-24 wasn't really meant to be played, though it could be. This got me thinking:
There's a real sense of artificiality that arises from the idea of "for decorative purposes only." Just look at the music. Don't play it. Remember that china closet you weren't allowed to touch as a kid, because its contents were too valuable? And maybe mom/whoever didn't really use the china, save for very rare occasions, because it was so valuable that she worried about breaking it. Is it really valuable, then, if it has no use/is unusable? Seems aribitrary- it has value only because we say it has value.
So if we apply this to A-24... I have mixed feelings:

1) Assigning a great value to something potentially devalues it? What's the Iliad fine china good for, other than impressing the neighbors or the dissertation council?

2) Zukofsky may suggest that assigning some value to poetry is restrictive. The "value" of poetry then becomes some consumer-oriented desire to extract, therefore limiting its application... becomes a sort of bartering system...

I'm not sure if this makes sense, but I can't help but feel as if A-24 (and maybe the whole of "A," for that matter, I just see it most clearly in the last section) is somehow pointing towards an examination of the concept of value.

I hope this posts.

Where Are We?

2004-12-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

As usual I'm flying blind, so I'm not sure whether we're supposed to be blogging on Zukofsky again or not... but I will anyway.
I wish we'd had more time to look at "A." The undertaking that must have been its last section blows me away- Zukofsky's wife must have been an amazing musician. Dr. Sherwood had said that while A-24 wasn't really meant to be played, it could be, and I've been thinking on that...
There's a real quality of artificiality that arises from something being decorative only. Remember the stuff in the china closet you weren't allowed to touch as a kid? You couldn't touch it because it was too valuable, and maybe mom/whoever didn't really use the china because she didn't want to risk breaking it. So then its value seems sort of arbitrarily assigned- this plate is valuable because I say it's valuable, and because it's so valuable, it's also useless(unusable).
If we can apply that to A-24... I have mixed feelings:

1) that kind of application asks us to question the value of the Iliad fine china. What can we use it for, aside from showing off to the neighbors or the dissertation council?

2) maybe Zukofsky's pointing to the inefficacy of assigning a value to poetry... it's too oriented towards consumption and restricts the possibilities of art.

Maybe both? Maybe neither? I'm unsure about this, but I feel as if A-24 (and maybe the whole of "A," for that matter, I'm just able to see it most clearly in the last section) is suggesting something about the concept of value.

Addendum

2004-12-09T22:58:00.000-08:00

If you're reading this, Dr. Sherwood, I want you to know that I'm totally serious about the puppets thing. I even know how to sew and I have lots of cardboard boxes for the stage! It could be an avant-garde performance piece... It wouldn't even have to be Spinoza! I could do Stein vs. Pound or Stein vs. Eliot.

Gertrude Stein Revisited

2004-12-09T21:55:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at Stein-- at Patriarchal Poetry in particular-- for my final paper so I'm essentially cribbing from that here...
I've been thinking a lot on this, and I've come to the conclusion that, for me at least, it makes a lot of sense to think of Patriarchal Poetry as a feminist text. My line of thought catches mostly minnows but goes something like this:
The trace is a mark that makes the relationship between a word(or element, whatever) and its meaning iffy.
The rationalists say that words are objects with determinate meanings.
Patriarchal Poetry emphasizes the differance(the kind w/ frenchy accent):

"as long as it took to fasten it back to a place where after all he would be carried away, he would be carried away as long as it took fasten it back to a place where he would be carried away as long as it took" (PP).

I interpret the above like this: the simple vocabulary makes it more difficult to defer meaning. I'm a stuffy wannabe so I might say this:
Rationalism's devaluation of perception and elevation of pure cognition widen the space between the foregrounded meaning and deferred meaning, further elevating the masculine intellect, and pushing the aural- which is key to an understanding of Stein- deeper into the shadow of the body's (and the feminine's) base perceptions.
Stein's slim vocabulary makes intellectual exclusivity pretty much impossible- "fasten" is probably the most challening word in her excerpt.
Her dizzying repetition and strange syntax make reading it aloud- as Dr. Sherwood has suggested- the best tactic. When we read Stein aloud it makes more sense, and sounds more like dialogue than prose. So her style makes perception(i.e. audition) key to understanding, which she seems to say herself:
"And you hear it even if you do not say it the way I say it as I hear it and say it."
Blah blah blah... no need to punish anyone further except Dr. Sherwood, who'll have to read my term paper. Unless it's not too late to do something else, in which case I'd like to make puppets of Stein and Spinoza and have them fight it out ala "Celebrity Deathmatch."

Mina Loy Revisited

2004-12-09T19:45:00.000-08:00

In reviewing Loy, I looked at Photo After Pogrom and was struck by the phrase “marble pause,” and what an unlikely combination of words that is. Maybe a dichotomy here:
- that unusual combination of words results, for me, in something highly imagistic—I have a strong sense of how dramatic such a pause must be. That solid connection between words and images obeys my conception of the more traditional poet’s aesthetic.
- Still, when we discussed Loy in class, I came away with the idea that much of her focus was on the sounds of the words themselves, the sound of “marble pause,” which would seem to represent a new aesthetic that steps away from word= image of the poet’s design and into word= image/sound/meaning created by reader
So? My first reaction to that conflict is to say that Loy embraces, rather than rejects, but then what to make of her Feminist Manifesto? For me, it very clearly rejects a lot of patriarchal definitions of the feminine… particularly the elevation of the virginal. I could divorce the poem from the manifesto but that gives me pause— we might feel more free, in our avant-garde perspective, to separate poem from poet, but to separate poem from philosophy(i.e. personal philosophy)? They seem important to each other, especially if the focus is on radical perspectives… some ability to violate chronology stemming from reflect on poem: reflect on manifesto… the manifesto’s philosophy creates the poem and the poem’s philosophy creates the manifesto. Who knows? Not me, clearly.

ta-da!

2004-12-09T19:44:00.000-08:00

As everything is again in working order, I'll cut and paste my email blogs.

In reading over Williams again, I’m able to more clearly identify what seems to be his “poetic voice,” for lack of a better description… I’m guessing this has something to do with context—having now had the chance to compare WCW to other writers, I’m able to recognize what makes his poetry distinct. Williams’ style seems very distinct from that of Stein and Loy, and while I certainly don’t think we would confuse anything in “A” with this volume (although only the exam will tell!), Williams and Zukofsky seem, to be, to be the most similar out of the four poets we’ve read this term. There seems to be a directness, some sense of the grounded, to Williams’ poetry that I don’t find in Loy, Stein or Zukofsky. In re-reading The Poor I was reminded of our examination of WCW’s paired poems… I come away now with an image of “under construction.” I don’t know if this is accurate… there seems to be some attention to the process, which also seems characteristic of Stein’s work.

Allusion & Power Structures

2004-11-18T07:02:00.000-08:00

Since we began reading Zukofsky last week, I've been thinking about the references to high art that appear so frequently in his poetry. In class, I made my typically pathetic attempt to articulate my point, which didn't seem very popular. Mulish as I am, I'll try again...
I like the literary and musical allusions in "A." They remind me of Eliot, whose poetry I love, even if he was a square. I may have misread his comments, but Dr. Sherwood seemed to intimate that Zukofsky was aware of the overlap there between poets such as Eliot & himself- and that Zukofsky's classical allusions represented a shift away from the paradigm of classical aesthetic as valued aesthetic.
It's not my assertion that Zukofsky would have done better to step away from the Eurocentric tradition by focusing on artists such as Louis Armstrong instead of Bach, because that returns me to the same dilemma:
Can we (or Zukofsky) speak against an ideology when adhering to the conventions of its language & its art? My argument turns around this concern: is the presence of high culture in "A" enough to maintain its elitist hegemony? On its own, probably not- unless we're going for the absolute tearing down of webs of significance through a completely innovative use of language, as I'd suggest Stein does. So: does Zukofsky effectively resist the dominant definition of art/beauty/whatever by contrasting Bach and slums?
I'm not ready to say no, since we've just begun exploring "A." But I'm not ready to say yes, either: can we speak against a language if we operate within its constraints this way? Is Zukofsky operating outside of those constraints in a way I can't see, or is there a value to his contrasts that I'm unaware of? Should I focus instead on structure- ex.: use of the sonnet in A7?

Zukofsky Sonnet

2004-11-17T23:26:00.000-08:00

Wow! I found this task really challenging-so please be merciful! Will attempt Shakespearean sonnet. Will also crib from dead white men.

O1

They broke their wheel, and as they fled, the blur - (1)

Who will question? Where: Around necks, lasso/

Ropes - golden - bows at the first curtain stir

Palms together, palms open from those who

Are stOren(2) - along Fifth Ave.-- "Any change--"

Not pax vobiscum.(3) But the dies irae(4)

Of church and opera women passing strange

Ashen faces (flamma proxima) (5) say:

"Something lacking in Verdi's requiem.

Yes, the violin. Too much vibrato!"

Gold binding pale and paring these from them

"Realmente, e troppo con acuto."(6)

These box tenements, outside Esdraelon(7)

Where manyak(8) sleep, with ladies walking on.

1: Inferno: Canto XVI
2: to mirror "stir," which comes from stOren: old High German for "scattered/to scatter"
3: peace be with you
4: hymn about day of judgement, sung in requiem masses, title of Verdi mass
5: flames follow
6: Italian: it really was too dull
7: valley that made one border of Galilee
8: Hebrew for "cursed"

Four Saints

2004-11-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

Just a brief post...
I really enjoyed watching the video on Four Saints, and, as Dr. Sherwood said himself, think it might have been especially helpful at the beginning of our discussions on Stein. Still, I enjoyed the struggle, and I think that the video provided a sense of closure that we might not have gotten otherwise... so who knows.
I felt as though we appreciated the video because what we saw of Four Saints was very beautiful, the words sounded beautiful and so we were able to, at least to a large extent, abandon the search for meaning that we'd otherwise been so lost in... Not much else to say, as I'm going to avoid my usual ranting and circular logic.

Stein & Structuralism

2004-11-08T16:15:00.000-08:00

I've been hesistant to make a concluding post on Stein because it seems redundant at this point... not because of any shortcomings in the material itself, but because I'm small & singular minded, and continue to circle around the same idea...
Lately I've been thinking about Stein in terms of Peircean semiotics- about the referent and the interprenant. For my reading, this seems somewhat appropriate, because so much of what Stein does is about the relationship between the interpreter and the meaning and the genesis there. I think we could say with relative certainty that Stein recognizes the suppression of alternate readings of signs...
The thing I really struggle with is that the above assertion brings me back to logocentrism, back to Cixous (who I've been thinking about a lot in terms of Stein), back to feminism. Is it possible to say that Stein believes words don't have a determinate meaning without suggesting that such a rejection is feminist? Some distinction between logocentrism and phallogocentrism that I'm missing? But doesn't Stein recognize that the phallic is the privileged signifier in Patriarchal Poetry? Argh...
Again, for me, there's an element of Nihilism implicit in Stein's work... and itsn't that tearing down of distinctions feminist? Uhm:
Is that tearing down of distinctions exclusive to feminism? I don't think so, since deconstruction also rejects (or attempts to reject- I know words are loaded here) logocentrism.
Is it an element of feminist thought? Yes, I think so.
Recently someone suggested to me that the term "feminist" and its philosophy was limiting because it reinforced the marginalization it attempts to escape. In this sense, I'm in some way able to understand why Stein would reject calling her texts feminist. But I think the term has to exist as a vehicle, and that we can get out at the postmodern stop... overlap is present, the restriction of definition is recognized, and with it, the possibility for fluidity. I think. This is the point where I feel as if I'm losing (or have totally lost) the thread of my argument.
In any case, I'm sure Zukofsky will present a whole new set of challenges, and it may be that this puzzle is unsolvable to begin with. It may be that the solution, the finite, is contrary to the whole argument, which isn't really linear... is it? Okay, I'm making less than sense now. End transmission!

Rapunzel Rewrite

2004-10-20T15:51:00.000-07:00

Please forgive the lateness of this post...
I'm going to preface my re-write because (a) I preface everything and (b) I like to ramble:
I've been struggling with this Stein fairy tale rewrite... I got a lot of Anne Sexton vibes from the other, really wonderful rewrites that I've seen on the other blogs. I guess it's my tendency to place Stein in the category of "feminist literature," which I'm discovering isn't entirely appropriate. To me, Stein's work suggests a reexamining of dialogue & a reexamining of the need for linearity. In some sense I think this forces a reexamination of patriarchal restrictions/ideologies such as those we see in fairy tales, since the traditional rules for literature are defined by the patriarchy. So in my rewrite I'd like the latter to be a byproduct of the former, but this kind of rewrite is against the grain, and when fairy tales are the subject that points me toward a feminist reading/rewriting. I was going somewhere with this, really. Oh well.

Rapunzel

Once there was a young woman who believed herself trapped. This young woman was trapped by an old woman who believed that to be trapped was to be protected. This young woman was trapped and was searching for something. What this young woman was searching for was not to be trapped by the old woman who believed she was protecting but not to be released from the trap. The young woman was called Rapunzel and she was a beautiful, trapped, woman waiting for something but this woman did not know what she was waiting for. The old woman was an angry, ugly, protective woman.
This young woman believed she should be waiting for something because she was trapped. This young woman believed that waiting for something would be an end to being trapped but she did not know what she was waiting for. The old woman who had trapped the young woman did not know the young woman was waiting for something because she did not believed that being trapped was to be waiting for something.
The old woman wanted the young woman to be trapped so much that she could not open the young woman's trap herself without the young woman's consent. For the young woman to consent to the old woman so that the old woman could visit the young woman in her trap the old woman and the young woman both had to consent that the trap was there. The old woman would admit to the young woman being trapped and say,
"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, do let me into your trap by letting down your hair, for I do know that it is a trap you are in and I do know that the only way into the trap you are in is for you to let down your hair and you should let down your hair for me to come into your trap."
When the old woman spoke to the young woman this way the young woman would answer the old woman by letting down her hair. In the letting down of her hair the old woman could come to where the entrance to the trap was because only the young woman and the old woman knew where the entrance to the trap was. The young woman knew that this was the entrance only she and the old woman knew about but the young woman did not yet know the entrance was to a trap. The young woman did not yet know that she was trapped, although she knew that she was waiting for something which the old woman did not know because the old woman did not believe that to be trapped was to be waiting for something but rather that to be trapped was to be protected.
While the young woman was alone in her trap she would sing and this is the way that the young woman knew she was waiting for something. If she were not waiting for something the young woman would have to reason to be singing for there would be no reason to sing if one did not know as the young woman knew that to sing was to be asking for something. To sing was to be asking to be let out of the trap because the song could be let out of the trap and it was the trap that the woman was waiting to be let out of. The young woman did not know that she was waiting to be let out of the trap but she knew only that she was waiting for a thing and the song came from this waiting and this being trapped.
One day a young man who was a prince who was also charming was riding through the forest where the old woman kept Rapunzel trapped. One day this young man who was a charming prince was riding through the forest when he heard Rapunzel singing. Rapunzel's singing was charming and because the Prince was also charming and because the prince found a trapped thing singing charming the Prince wanted to come inside the trap. Whether or not the Prince who was charming wanted to come inside the trap to hear the singing or whether the Prince wanted to free the singer from the trap because he knew the singing was a sign of waiting and that the waiting was really for freedom from the trap we cannot know, but this does not change the prince's actions.
The Prince came every night to hear Rapunzel singing and in hearing her singing the Prince heard that she was trapped because the singing was not because she was trapped but because she was waiting for something. The Prince who was charming and who found the singing also charming was also charmed by the singing itself because he believed that the singing was a sign of waiting for something and that the something the singer was waiting for was to be released from her trap.
One night when the Prince who was charming saw the old woman come to the trap where she kept the young woman who was trapped and who was also waiting the Prince hid behind a tree and heard that it was the old woman who the young woman was waiting for as the old woman said,
"Rapunzel Rapunzel, do let me into your trap by letting down your hair for I do know that it is a trap you are in and that the only way into the trap that you are in and I have placed you in but called it protection because I do not believe it is a trap is for you to let down your hair."
When this was said by the old woman to Rapunzel Rapunzel let down her hair and old woman climbed it to come into the trap where she kept Rapunzel. The prince who was charming knew that he should try to come into Rapunzel's trap by saying the words that the old woman had said and he knew that he should say these words to Rapunzel because he was charming and because he found Rapunzel's song charming and the charm of the song was in the trap. So it was that the next day the prince went to the trap where Rapunzel was kept by the old woman when the old woman had gone from Rapunzel's trap. The prince went to the trap and said the words that Rapunzel had said and Rapunzel let down her hair for him to be let into her trap. Whether or not Rapunzel let down her hair for the prince to come into her trap because she believed that the prince was charming and because she believed that her song had been charming to the charming prince or because she believed that it was the old woman calling to be let into the trap again is difficult to say. It may be that Rapunzel then knew that the thing she was waiting for was to be let out of the trap and the way that Rapunzel knew that this was the thing she was waiting for was because the prince was charming and the old woman was not.
In any case the prince came into the trap where Rapunzel was kept because Rapunzel let down her hair to the charming prince and when Rapunzel saw that it was a prince who had come into her trap she was surprised. The prince spoke to her but he did not speak to her about her trap but instead about her song. The prince spoke to Rapunzel saying that her song which had been because of her waiting for something that she did not know what it was had charmed the prince and the prince had wanted to see the woman who was charming and who was waiting. Then the young woman was asked by the young man to marry him and the young woman agreed. The young woman to the young man who had asked her to marry him because Rapunzel believed that the prince was charming and because she had been waiting for something though she did not know what it was then and now believed it was the charming prince she had been waiting for.
Rapunzel said to the young man,
"I will marry you but I cannot marry you until I can leave my trap and I do not know how to leave my trap because it is all that I know. I know only that I am trapped and that I have been waiting for something though now I know what the thing is that I have been waiting for. Now that I know these things I would have you bring me silks to weave a rope with so that I can leave my trap. To bring me silks will let me leave my trap and to leave my trap will be to find the thing I have been waiting for as you are the thing that I have been waiting for. I do very much want to leave my trap and marry you should bring me silks to weave a ladder."
And so it was that the prince brought Rapunzel silks to weave ladder so that she could weave her trap. But though Rapunzel had told the prince that she did not know how to leave her trap she did not truly know that it was a trap because she knew only that she was waiting and through this waiting had met the prince because she had been singing because to be singing while trapped was to be waiting for something. If Rapunzel knew that she was trapped she did not know who had done the trapping for it was the old woman who had trapped Rapunzel. Rapunzel the old woman trapped and never told Rapunzel that it was a trap and so Rapunzel told the old woman that the prince also came to her in her trap and the old woman was very angry. The old woman was very angry because she kept Rapunzel in a trap to be protected because she believed that to be trapped was to be protected and did not know until that moment that Rapunzel had been waiting for something. What the old woman now knew was that the thing Rapunzel had been waiting for was not the old woman but the prince who had been hearing Rapunzel singing.
Now the old woman was very angry because the trap could not be a trap if the trap was protection if the prince could come into the trap the way that the old woman did. Because the old woman was angry she cut Rapunzel's hair and Rapunzel knew then that the thing she had been waiting for was to get away from the old woman and the prince who was charming could take her away from the old woman and so the prince was charming. Because the old woman knew that the trap could not protect Rapunzel and because the old woman wanted not to protect Rapunzel with the trap but to keep Rapunzel from anyone else the old woman was angry and sent Rapunzel away. When the prince came into the trap to find Rapunzel he found the old woman who said to the prince that she had sent Rapunzel away and the prince looked for Rapunzel and found her. The prince heard a voice and this is how he found Rapunzel because although Rapunzel was no longer trapped by the prince she was still waiting for something and the thing that she was waiting for was the Prince. And so Rapunzel and the Prince found each other.

Allegory & Symbolism: Mina Loy

2004-10-12T09:03:00.000-07:00

Someday I will learn to think in clear, concise lines and produce intelligent/ible ideas. Today isn't that day:
The other week I had a very enlightening conversation with Dr. Sherwood- between bouts of my yammering he made a structuralist analogy that really helped me to re-conceptualize my reading strategies for this class. Since then, I've been trying to avoid any allegorical readings of Loy's poetry, and trying to recognize the value in the words themselves, rather than what the words might represent- I'm sure I'm lagging behind the rest of you in this, but now the last pony has finished the race...
Anyway, when we looked at Photo After Pogrom, Time-Bomb, etc., we were asked whether or not we thought the poems "worked." I'm still mixed on the answer:
It's pretty easy/tempting to connect these poems to specific events (i.e., Holocaust, WWI) and so to read Loy's experimental use of syntax, vocabulary, etc. as representation-- the white space in Time-Bomb as representing desolation, the appearance of the word "prophecy" as signifying some sense of the apocalyptic. I struggle with this... the search for historical relevance in her poetry... if we're searching for the signifier, does that elide our ability to recognize the sign? To appreciate the sign? Do we lose the sense of the arbitrariness of language that, for me, the avant garde's experimental use of language demonstrates and plays with? What happens to the qualia of a time-bomb if we consider it only in terms of WWI?

Spring and All

2004-09-23T18:53:00.000-07:00

In the introduction to the poems of Spring and All, Williams seems to suggest that the traditional poetic style- that preceding modernism- is based on fantasy: "By it they mean that when I have suffered...I too shall seek refuge in fantasy" (177).
In other words, Williams poetry isn't "heartless, cruel," or "making fun of humanity," but rather refuses to embrace fantasy in order to avoid reality- I suspect that this reality concerns social issues, rather than personal losses, etc., especially given the large number of vignette-type poems that appear in Spring and All, such as To a Poor Old Woman and The Poor. Does this suggest that Williams' work can be seen as social criticism? I certainly wouldn't say that Williams' poetry works as social criticism across the board, but there are certainly a number of poems, at least in Spring and All, that focus on the poor.
Bringing us to the question of whether literature and politics should be divorced from each other- it's my impression that the writers of Williams' time were divided on this one. I'd suggest that it's impossible to separate politics from literature- literature is so often a reflection of a society's political climate. I suspect that the stress on separating one from the other was more a warning against didacticism than a desire for complete isolation, but then, I can't imagine that literature works in a vacuum, which probably biases my perspective.
That yammering done: I've been thinking on the relationship between the poems and the prose-like structure of Spring and All, but I haven't met with much success. Among the prose-ish stuff Williams throws in between his poems, this is very interesting to me:
"What I put down of value will have this value: an escape from crude symbolism, the annihilation of strained associations, complicated ritualistic forms designed to separate the work from "reality" --such as rhyme, meter as meter and not as the essential of the work, one of its words" (189).
"What I put down of value will have this value" gets me thinking on the nature of construction, which is probably a place I shouldn't go, as it risks confusing modern and post-modern thought. (Interesting to think on the relationship between the two, though... can we really call one precursor to the other?)
The prose-like segments in Spring and All have the feel of the manifestos we began this course by examining, although Williams language is generally less exclamatory. All the white space in these sections is interesting, not only because of the emphasis it creates on what is written, but also for what it suggests about what isn't- about absence, about omission, about fragmentation and the abstract- could there be some connection between omission and the embracing of fantasy Williams suggests is characteristic of the traditional poetic style?
Williams says" I find that there is work to be done in the creation of new forms, new names for experience" (203). I find a direct connection the poems in Spring and All here. As far as the creation of new forms goes, I'd say this is evident in the experimental nature of Williams' poetry- his play with line break, syntax, punctuation, repetition etc. As far as "new names for experience" goes, I'm reminded of Dr. Sherwood's assertion that Williams embraced American idioms. In so doing, I'd say he was also rejecting the euphemisms and allegories of both traditional and "high" modern art.
Finally, if anyone is actually reading this thing(thanks Ingrid!): I wanted to ask if anyone thinks that Williams' work can be seen as being anti-enlightenment. The first reading from e-reserve explained that modern writers were often anti-feminist, which I can see for people like Eliot or Pound, but I'm not sure how it jives with the embracing of "low" modernism. In my opinion, the enlightenment suggestion that the intellect is somehow "higher" than the body(rejection of the carnal self) is anti-feminist in the sense that the intellect to which enlightenment refers is traditionally represented as masculine. Thus rejection of the body, of the visceral, the carnal, etc., is, for me, also a rejection of attributes traditionally ascribed to the feminine. Williams is searching for new creative forms, rejecting the "high" and embracing the "low" and the idiomatic- does he therefore embrace the feminine and reject the male values placed at the center of his culture? Does The Young Housewife throw a wrench into this thinking?

WCW Pairs

2004-09-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

Checked out the other blogs for our class today- ya'll sure are smart...
I thought that the changes made in Williams' Flowers By the Sea were the most subtle of all the pairs of poems we were given, although I wouldn't suggest this makes them less significant. Was struck by the relative lack of change in punctuation versus the rather dramatic changes in line breaks from version one to version two. I found the second version more concise and its imagery more concrete. Might this be antithetical to the avant garde in some way...? Not that clarity of thinking is somehow less important to modern poetry, but rather that the traditions we might associate with more readily accessible & concrete images don't strike me as a hallmark of this era.
At the risk of misquoting(or mis-paraphrasing):
On Friday Dr. Sherwood suggested that the second version of Young Woman At a Window was preferable to the first because it embodied more closely the tenets of modern poetry we've been learning about. (I use the word "better" with this caveat: I think it's fair to say that modern lit isn't "better" than, say, Victorian lit in the sense that one's good and one's bad, only that the second version of Young Woman is a better modernist poem.)
Anyway, I've been mulling over this, and as my synapses fire rather slowly and my addiction to television is constantly degrading them, I'm only now coming to any kind of conclusion. I realize I may be speaking too much in absolutes here, but:
If a poem that obeys all the tenets of modernism is our gold standard, how do we avoid returning again to that mindset which values one kind of art over another(i.e., high vs. low)? Is it possible to exist outside boundaries if we continue to create new ones? Abandoning the old school rules of poetry and creating new rules for modern poetry? Is it possible to define modernism? Should we define modernism? I suspect that the answer is no, but how can we avoid it when we evaluate a poem and ask, "is this modern? Is this avant garde?" Definitions are restrictive, but are they also necessary? Am I creating a paradox where none exists? (Am easily stumped- suspect I create paradoxes where my simple-mindedness is the best explanation.) Is it possible to designate some point at which a given definition exits the realm of necessary and enters that of restrictive?

Test Drive

2004-09-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

Hoping this works, as my technological literacy is Beverly Clearly-level at the absolute best.