CoPo

After re-reading over Walcott’s poem, “Names,” again it is interesting to point out his isolation of Africans as well as the repeated reference to “nouns.” The very first few lines of the poem state “My race began as the sea began,/ with no nouns, and with no horizon,”. This can relate to the very beginning of men and how language did not play a particularly important role to them. Then in lines 39-40, “except they first presumed/the right of every thing to be a noun.” He again focuses on “nouns” but has changes his views. He believes the change has made them view everything as nouns or the boundaries of labeling and language right then for them. Isolation of Africans begins right away when Walcott separates everyone and particularly states Africans are different then “them.” The line 41-42, “The African acquiesced,/ repeated, and changed them.” demonstrates this. I am unsure if this is Walcott trying to show some contradiction between his title, “Names” and how Africans are singled-out and labeled or if he is saying Africans are different then others therefore they do not have “names” in a sense.

Original post by sfinn2id

Serpas, Martha.

The Dirty Side of the Storm.

Norton. 2006..c..96p.

ISBN 0-393-06266-X

$23.95,poetry.

“The Salvage”

Martha Serpas’ second work, The Dirty Side of the Storm, takes careful pleasure in the teasing out of mysteries and binaries; good and evil, life and death, destruction and construction, give way to the swirling, deeply gray, humane truth. Serpas, a devout Catholic, does not preach, but questions, finding these divisions to be imperceptible, incomprehensible, and untrue to suffering humanity. Her poetics achieve this original and honest grappling in the face of the clear legacies and boxed-up poetic movements to which her poetry may be superficially ascribed. Martha Serpas may be decried as a mystical poet, a nature poet, a Southern poet, a female poet, a religious poet, and (by default) a current events poet. Yet, none of these distinctions take into account the mastery of Serpas’ own desire to reach toward the incomprehensible, the shadowy in-betweens with which she is most intimate. The deeper she reaches into herself, and the topography of her life and location, the more we see into the muddied waters of our own life. What sustains us is also deadly, and the Divine is not a winged rescuer, but a figure as complex and paradoxical as His creation.

As a poet, Serpas stands powerfully upon her own gift of sound-work, pulsing and cyclical use of forms, and the originality and intimacy of her metaphoric landscape. Her base of a Catholic God and the Louisiana Bayou are not limitations on the scope of her work; rather, like any good poet, she uses what is at hand as a concrete base for transcendence. Her poetic landscape is focused by a steady hand, and self-consciously participates in traditional metaphors (chiefly, that of water), and formal traditions: couplets, tercets, quatrains, as well as episodic free-verse. Tracing the arch of the book as a whole, it is clear that the individual lyrics contain piece-meal narrative structure. But they are not so bound and ordered as to be a sequence. Rather, they constitute a shapely volume; many of the poems were published in literary journals individually.
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Original post by Whitney

 Response to Outside Poetry Reading:  Fred Chappell reads his work at Thursday Poems, Nov.15, 2007

The work of Fred Chappell was relatively new to me on hearing him read November fifteenth. However, I was prepared for the breadth and depth of his work-the incredible range of subject matter and form to free-verse, to other genres as well. His reading was unorthodox and incredibly endearing. Rather than hinder, his soft mountain accent lilted his poems, giving them a new cantor, stressing words I hadn’t stressed in my own private readings of them, and shedding new meaning.

He did something else which I cherish in a live poetry reading, he “jabbered” (his own word) between poems, providing insight into their creation. His own career spans so many decades and so many volumes (including a series of four novels, paralleled by four volumes of poetry, belonging to the four elements…an epic, intricate meta-work that intrigues me), that he felt called to delve into the inspiration for his variety of poems. The seemingly simple, and incredibly approachable, man revealed his detailed knowledge of botany, for his “garden poems,” the richness of his own memories, and his ability to translate German and French lyrics for the purposes of his “nesting” poems. Within all of these specific introductions to poems, Chappell began to reveal something beautiful to all present-the methodology of a poet is one of astute attention, intention, meticulousness, and a concern with the intricate, and knowledge of all kinds. I appreciated his philosophy of poetics as much as his poems.
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Original post by Whitney

During Fred Chappell’s Thursday Poems reading, he remarked to the audience, “I’m a slow learner.” While this prompted a response of laughter and applause, I realized that Chappell was in fact telling the truth. His poetry hasn’t learned from the newest, free verse poetry that his contemporaries are composing today. While he remains unique, he writes his poems sticking to tradition and adhering to the meter and rhythm that poets have used for centuries.

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Original post by lauren

Julianna Baggott was quoted in this article on the Poetry Foundation web page. The article discusses the effect that the VT shooting last Spring has had on how creative writing professors handle violence in their students’ writing. Baggott is named as the voice of one extreme – that teachers have only literary, not moral, responsibilities to their students – while the other extreme argues for a absolute merging of those duties.

From the article:

“Most of the poets who responded to my interview first defined their own notion of “evil,” and, like Levertov and Duncan, they differed on the question of their moral and literary responsibilities. On one end of the spectrum is Bucknell University professor G.C. Waldrep, whose theological beliefs inform his work and life.

“Evil is a given. It is part of our human condition, whether one perceives its origin in the putative ‘Fall’ or not,” he says. “The most we can do, perhaps, is recognize it for what it is, in ourselves and in others. And behave accordingly: which includes writing about it with honesty and passion.”

On the opposite end is Florida State University professor Julianna Baggott. “I don’t think in these terms and I don’t think I ever will,” she says. “Are you asking if it’s my role to teach the difference between good and evil, or the evils of evil? No, that’s not my job. I teach people how to write—I believe my duties are more of an artful mechanic than a preacher. . . . I’m not a psychologist and have no understanding of psychosis, but I see Seung-Hui Cho’s actions as those that stem from a deep mental illness.””

Also, here is a link to the PDF file of Virginia Tech’s plan for responding to disturbing writing.

Original post by rmillard

Original post by Whitney

from “Jail Alley” in between Hanover and George Streets… behind the old Eyeclopes/new Third Floor Studios.

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Original post by jowens

Wow. The lecture today pretty much cemented Heaney as my favorite poet so far this semester. I had a vague awareness of his work coming into the class, so I was really looking forward to cracking open these poems. Coming from an Irish Catholic (and only recently American) family, Heaney’s got a special uncomfortable spot in our hearts.  I’ve never experienced such discomfort from reading poetry before. I came to my mother’s house to share it with her, and she’s sitting across the room, reading “July,” and crying. I vaguely remember hearing talk about the troubles when I was a kid, but it was never called anything. It was what it was. We were never allowed to wear orange. We were poor in Ireland, then we came to America to be poor here instead. That’s the simple version. That’s all they ever tell a kid. But it’s amazing to have it opened up before you, to put a name to it. To think that that kind of thinking can follow a family across an ocean, and here I am, years later, still hung up on it, even though what I’ve been handed is most-assuredly a watered-down version of actual sentiment. My mom says, “You remember it with your blood.”

Original post by sfranklin

 i hope this makes sense

 I fell completely in love with Heaney’s poetry while reading the first assigned section of poems.  The way Heaney taps into a collective memory without nostalgia necessarily I really found intriguing, because I think a lot of American poetry and fiction when referencing shared history or memory too often looks with rose colored glasses and glosses over especially horrific moments in that shared history.  We’ve encountered a lot of exceptions to this nostalgia and sense of longing in copo, but even in poetry today (I’m thinking specifically now of Ted Kooser and Billy Collins) there is a lot of romanticism of early American life or a “simpler time.”  One of the aspects of today’s lecture by

Temple
Cone that I was happy to learn about was more of the Irish history that influenced Heaney’s writing.  I thought it gave elucidation to Heaney’s poetry, which is steeped in history, but has no illusions of romanticism.  I find it oddly appropriate, however, that Heaney considers himself a Wordsworthian: odd because generally, I think of Wordsworth as highly Romantic, but that should be inverted (the Romantics are very Wordsworthian); appropriate because Heaney and Wordsworth share a preoccupation with memory and connection to the land.

Original post by emcla6ep

My blog temporarily broke the internet, it seems,
and this is what it said
over and over again…
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare wp_unregister_globals() (previously declared in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-settings.php:7) in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 22

alas, found poems:

Original post by Whitney