English 2291 Final Exam

Anne Sexton, Sylvia's Death

"(In Boston the dying ride in cabs, yes death again, that ride home with our boy.) .... And now, Sylvia, you again with death again, that ride home with our boy.)"

John Ashberry, Soonest Mended

"Barely tolerated, living on the margin In our technological society, we were always having to be rescued On the brink of destruction, like heroines in Orlando Furioso Before it was time to start all over again. There would be thunder in the bushes, a rustling of coils, And Angelica, in the Ingres painting, was considering The colorful but small monster near her toe, as though wondering whether forgetting The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution. And then there always came a time when Happy Hooligan in his rusted green automobile Came plowing down the course, just to make sure everything was O.K., Only by that time we were in another chapter and confused About how to receive this latest piece of information. Was it information? Weren't we rather acting this out For someone else's benefit, thoughts in a mind With room enough and to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem), Our daily quandary about food and the rent and bills to be paid? To reduce all this to a small variant, To step free at last, minuscule on the gigantic plateau— This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free. Alas, the summer's energy wanes quickly, A moment and it is gone. And no longer May we make the necessary arrangements, simple as they are. Our star was brighter perhaps when it had water in it. Now there is no question even of that, but only Of holding on to the hard earth so as not to get thrown off, With an occasional dream, a vision: a robin flies across The upper corner of the window, you brush your hair away And cannot quite see, or a wound will flash Against the sweet faces of the others, something like: This is what you wanted to hear, so why Did you think of listening to something else? We are all talkers It is true, but underneath the talk lies The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor. These then were some hazards of the course, Yet though we knew the course was hazards and nothing else It was still a shock when, almost a quarter of a century later, The clarity of the rules dawned on you for the first time. They were the players, and we who had struggled at the game Were merely spectators, though subject to its vicissitudes And moving with it out of the tearful stadium, borne on shoulders, at last. Night after night this message returns, repeated In the flickering bulbs of the sky, raised past us, taken away from us, Yet ours over and over until the end that is past truth, The being of our sentences, in the climate that fostered them, Not ours to own, like a book, but to be with, and sometimes To be without, alone and desperate. But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal. These were moments, years, Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts, But like the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression Not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day When it had been outgrown. Better, you said, to stay cowering Like this in the early lessons, since the promise of learning Is a delusion, and I agreed, adding that Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned, That the learning process is extended in this way, so that from this standpoint None of us ever graduates from college, For time is an emulsion, and probably thinking not to grow up Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. And you see, both of us were right, though nothing Has somehow come to nothing; the avatars Of our conforming to the rules and living Around the home have made—well, in a sense, "good citizens" of us, Brushing the teeth and all that, and learning to accept The charity of the hard moments as they are doled out, For this is action, this not being sure, this careless Preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow, Making ready to forget, and always coming back To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago."

Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus

"I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it— A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. .... So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy. I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash, ash--You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there-- A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling. Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware. Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air."

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

"Mistah Kurtz—he dead. A penny for the old guy"

Hart Crane, At Melville's Tomb

"Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath An embassy. Their numbers as he watched, Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured. And wrecks passed without sound of bells, The calyx of death's bounty giving back A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph, The portent wound in corridors of shells. Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil, Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled, Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars; And silent answers crept across the stars. Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps Monody shall not wake the mariner. This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps."

Flannery O'Conner, Good Country People

"Southern gothic" "black humor"

Elizabeth Bishop, One Art

"The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster."

John Berryman, The Dream Songs

"There sat down, once, a thing on Henry's heart só heavy, if he had a hundred years & more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time Henry could not make good. Starts again always in Henry's ears the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime. And there is another thing he has in mind like a grave Sienese face a thousand years would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly, with open eyes, he attends, blind. All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears; thinking. But never did Henry, as he thought he did, end anyone and hacks her body up and hide the pieces, where they may be found. He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody's missing. Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up. Nobody is ever missing."

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

"They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand."

Emily Dickinson

"Thirty white horses on a red hill, First they champ, Then they stamp, Then they stand still."

Bob Perelman, China

"We live on the third world from the sun. Number three. Nobody tells us what to do. The people who taught us to count were being very kind. It's always time to leave. If it rains, you either have your umbrella or you don't. The wind blows your hat off. The sun rises also. I'd rather the stars didn't describe us to each other; I'd rather we do it for ourselves. Run in front of your shadow. A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister. The landscape is motorized. The train takes you where it goes. Bridges among water. Folks straggling along vast stretches of concrete, heading into the plane. Don't forget what your hat and shoes will look like when you are nowhere to be found. Even the words floating in air make blue shadows. If it tastes good we eat it. The leaves are falling. Point things out. Pick up the right things. Hey guess what? What? I've learned how to talk. Great. The person whose head was incomplete burst into tears. As it fell, what could the doll do? Nothing. Go to sleep. You look great in shorts. And the flag looks great too. Everyone enjoyed the explosions. Time to wake up. But better get used to dreams."

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

-Difficult because there are different voices/sources that are not identified. -Original title was 'He Do the Police in Different Voices' which is alluding to Charles Dicken's 'Our Mutual Friends' -Poem has hidden order under the surface of disorder on a topic of modernity (condition of Europe in the aftermath of the first world war, they all loss close friends in the war). PTSD was nameless at the time, so this is the modernity he is trying to achieve Literary Allusion: Cross referencing another text and inviting the reader to bring relevant information from that other text (The Tempest by Shakespeare is relevant and is being related to this poem) This serves to pull the fragments in the poems together The missing narrative frame is Jessie L Weston From Ritual to Romance which uses Mythic Method: Eliot claims Joyce created it

John Cheever, The Swimmer

Suburbanization Breakdown of Social Hierarchy

Postmodernity

SuburbanizationUrban crisisGentrification •Late-century mediascape Television Remediation (representing one medium in another medium; e.g., representing television in a print story or poem.) Drug culture

Gertrude Stein, Objects

Toilet Humor Coded Sexual Content

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"'Son, after I'm gone I want you to keep up the good fight. I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy's country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion's mouth. I want you to overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open .... Learn it to the younguns,' he whispered fiercely; then he died." "whenever things went well for me I remembered my grandfather and felt guilty and uncomfortable. It was as though I was carrying out his advice in spite of myself. And to make it worse, everyone loved me for it. I was praised by the most lily-white men of the town. I was considered an example of desirable conduct -- just as my grandfather had been. And what puzzled me was that the old man had defined it as treachery. When I was praised for my conduct I felt a guilt that in some way I was doing something that was really against the wishes of the white folks, that if they had understood they would have desired me to act ust the opposite, that I should have been sulky and mean, and that that really would have been what they wanted, even though they were fooled and thought they wanted me to act as I did .... The old man's words were like a curse. On my graduation day I delivered an oration in which I showed that humility was the secret, indeed, the very essence of progress. (Not that I believed this -- how could I, remembering my grandfather? -- I only believed that it worked.)" "I was confused: Should I try to win against the voice out there? Would not this go against my speech, and was not this a moment for humility, for nonresistance?"

Robert Lowell, For The Union Dead

"... One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. Two months after marching through Boston, half of the regiment was dead; .... Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die --when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown .... The ditch is nearer. There are no statutes for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease."

Toni Morrison, Recitatif

"... the town they remembered had changed. Something quick was in the air. Magnificent old houses, so ruined they had become shelter for squatters and rent risks, were bought and renovated. Smart IBM people moved out of their suburbs back into the city and put shutters up and herb gardens in their backyards. A brochure came in the mail announcing the opening of a Food Emporium. Gourmet food it said - and listed items the rich IBM crowd would want. It was located in a new mall at the edge of town ...." "There were a lot of photographers from Albany. And just when ABC was about to send up a news crew, the kids settled down like nothing in the world had happened." "Were you on dope or what that time at Howard Johnson's?" .... "Maybe, a little. I never did drugs much. Why?" "I don't know; you acted sort of like you didn't want to know me then."

Emily Dickinson, A narrow Fellow in the Grass

"A narrow Fellow in the Grass Occasionally rides - You may have met him? Did you not His notice sudden is - The Grass divides as with a Comb - A spotted Shaft is seen, And then it closes at your Feet, And opens further on -"

Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream

"Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

"First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear."

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

"I had never seen so many black people against a background of brick buildings, neon signs, plate glass and roaring traffic -- not even on trips I had made with the debating team to New Orleans, Dallas or Birmingham. They were everywhere. So many, and moving along with so much tension and noise that I wasn't sure whether they were about to celebrate a holiday or join in a street fight. There were even black girls behind the counters of the Five and Ten as I passed. Then at the street intersection I had the shock of seeing a black policeman directing traffic -- and there were white drivers in the traffic who obeyed his signals as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Sure I had heard of it, but this was real. My courage returned. This really was Harlem, and now all the stories which I had heard of the city-within-a-city leaped alive in my mind. .... now as I struggled through the lines of people a new world of possibility suggested itself to me faintly, like a small voice that was barely audible in the roar of city sounds. I moved wide-eyed, trying to take the bombardment of impressions."

Frank O'Hara, Personism: A Manifesto

"I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures .... I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep".... But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? .... Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and [Hart] Crane and [William Carlos] Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal .... Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person ... and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it .... What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything."

Emily Dickinson

"I like to see it lap the Miles - And lick the Valleys up - And stop to feed itself at Tanks - And then - prodigious step Around a Pile of Mountains - And supercilious peerIn Shanties - by the sides of Roads - And then a Quarry pare To fit its Ribs And crawl between Complaining all the while In horrid - hooting stanza - Then chase itself down Hill - And neigh like Boanerges - Then - prompter than a Star Stop - docile and omnipotent At its own stable door -"

Sylvia Plath, Daddy

"I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw. It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-- Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through. If I've killed one man, I've killed two--The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of a Jar

"I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee."

Emily Dickinson, My Life had stood- A Loaded Gun

"In Corners - till a Day The Owner passed - identified - And carried Me away - And now We roam in Sovereign Woods - And now We hunt the Doe - And every time I speak for Him - The Mountains straight reply - And do I smile, such cordial light Upon the Valley glow - It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through - And when at Night - Our good Day done - I guard My Master's Head - 'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's Deep Pillow - to have shared - To foe of His - I'm deadly foe - None stir the second time - On whom I lay a Yellow Eye - Or an emphatic Thumb - Though I than He - may longer live He longer must - than I - For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die—"

Frank O'Hara, The Day That Lady Died

"It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don't know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing"

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

"It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores."

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

"Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull... It can be two bicycle policemen as easily..."

Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man

"One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

Amiri Baraka, Black Art

"Poems are bullshit unless they are teeth or trees or lemons piled on a step. Or black ladies dying of men leaving nickel hearts beating them down. **** poems and they are useful, wd they shoot come at you, love what you are, breathe like wrestlers, or shudder strangely after pissing. We want live words of the hip world live flesh & coursing blood. Hearts Brains Souls splintering fire. We want poems like fists ... ... we want "poems that kill." Assassin poems, Poems that shoot guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys and take their weapons leaving them dead with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. .... Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets Clean out the world for virtue and love, Let there be no love poems written until love can exist freely and cleanly. Let Black people understand that they are the lovers and the sons of warriors and sons of warriors Are poems & poets & all the loveliness here in the world We want a black poem. And a Black World. Let the world be a Black Poem And Let All Black People Speak This Poem Silently or LOUD"

Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

"Reading while waiting for the iron to heat, writing, My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun— in that Amherst pantry while the jellies boil and scum, or, more often, iron-eyed and beaked and purposed as a bird, dusting everything on the whatnot every day of life."

Wallace Stevens, The Idea of Order at Key West

"She was the single artificer of the world. In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,Whatever self it had, became the self. That was her song, for she was the maker."

Raymond Carver, Cathedral

"Something about the church and the Middle Ages was on the TV. Not your run-of-the-mill TV fare. I wanted to watch something else. I turned to the other channels. But there was nothing on them, either. So I turned back to the first channel .... The TV showed this one cathedral. Then there was a long, slow look at another one. Finally, the picture switched to the famous one in Paris, with its flying buttresses and its spires reaching up to the clouds. The camera pulled away to show the whole of the cathedral rising above the skyline. There were times when the Englishman who was telling the thing would shut up, would simply let the camera move around the cathedrals. Or else the camera would tour the countryside, men in fields walking behind oxen. .... The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff" "First I drew a box that looked like a house. It could have been the house I lived in. Then I put a roof on it. At either end of the roof, I drew spires. Crazy .... I put in windows with arches. I drew flying buttresses. I hung great doors. I couldn't stop."

Emily Dickinson, Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —"

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

"The marvelous thing is that it's painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts."

Wallace Stevens, Of Modern Poetry

"The poem of the mind in the act of finding. What will suffice. It has not always had. To find: the scene was set; it repeated what. Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir.It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.It has to face the men of the time and to meet. The women of the time. It has to think about war. And it has to find what will suffice. It has. To construct a new stage [....]"

John Cheever, The Swimmer

"The rain had cooled the air and he shivered. The force of the wind had stripped a maple of its red and yellow leaves and scattered them over the grass and the water. Since it was midsummer the tree must be blighted, and yet he felt a peculiar sadness at this sign of autumn. He braced his shoulders, emptied his glass, and started for the Welchers' pool. This meant crossing the Lindleys' riding ring and he was surprised to find it overgrown with grass and all the jumps dismantled. He wondered if the Lindleys had sold their horses or gone away for the summer and put them out to board. He seemed to remember having heard something about the Lindleys and their horses but the memory was unclear. On he went, barefoot through the wet grass, to the Welchers', where he found their pool was dry. .... Was his memory failing or had he so disciplined it in the repression of unpleasant facts that he had damaged his sense of the truth"

Alan Ginsberg, A Supermarket in California

"What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations! What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons? I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery Boys. I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel? I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my imagination by the store detective. We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier. Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour. Which way does your beard point tonight? (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.) Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely. Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage? Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?"

Gary Snyder, August on Sourdough

"You hitched a thousand miles north from San Francisco Hiked up the mountainside a mile in the air The little cabin - one room - walled in glass Meadows and snowfields, hundreds of peaks. We lay in our sleeping bags talking half the night; Wind in the guy-cables summer mountain rain. Next morning I went with you as far as the cliffs, Loaned you my poncho - the rain across the shale - You down the snowfield flapping in the wind Waving a last goodbye half hidden in the clouds To go on hitching clear to New York; Me back to my mountain and far, far, west."

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

"death was not there. It must have gone around another street. It went in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements."

e.e. cummings

"next to of course god america i love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh say can you see by the dawn's early my country 'tis of centuries come and go and are no more what of it we should worryin every language even deafanddumb thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry by jingo by gee by gosh by gum why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-iful than these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voice of liberty be mute?" He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

"now" means the airplane "then" means Great War (1914-1918), Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), Postwar German inflation, Avant-garde in Paris

Robert Lowell, Skunk Hour

(for Elizabeth Bishop) "Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town.... My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love...." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat... I myself am hell; nobody's here-- only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare."

Realist and Modernist Techniques

- Unreliable narrator Recall: Huckleberry Finn - Withholding of information - Estrangement

Flannery O'Conner, Good Country People

A "trap-story"

Hart Crane

A letter to Harriet Monroe

Eugene O'Neill, A Long Day's Journey into Night

A play about acting. A play about a writer. "A day in the life." Literary Allusion But also: the three classical unities: · unity of action · unity of place · unity of time (less than 24 hours)

The "Hemingway style"

Abrupt beginning, deferred exposition; the reader fills the gaps Alternation between inner and outer realities Fragmentation vs. integration; "leakage" between realities Snow Quarrels bicycle

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

Atypically plain style ("Hemingwayesque") "Gothic Horror"; horror has been localized and domesticated A strand of gray hair means that Emily was sleeping with the corpse Emily is categorized from a slender figure in white to a small, fat woman in black Difficulty Who is speaking? Use of "we" "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral ... (Faulkner, p. 998)" When did the events take place, and in what order?

Thomas Pynchon, Entropy

Breakdown of social hierarchy Information --> computerization Nuclear anxieties Advertising & consumerism Drug counterculture

Thomas Pynchon, Entropy

Callisto's modernist backstory Name-checking: Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, Stravinsky, tango, Spanish flu etc. (p. 1491) "Returning to Nice after the second war he had found that café replaced by a perfume shop which catered to American tourists ...." "traditional" jazz --> "modern" jazz cartoony/slapstick vs. gothic Plural, adjacent worlds Information overload

Avant-garde writing

Connotations: military, political

Experimental writing

Connotations: scientific

Robert Hayden, The Middle Passage

Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, of his bones New England pews are made, those are altar lights that were his eyes. Deep in the festering hold thy father lies, the corpse of mercy rots with him, rats eat love's rotten gelid eyes.

Robert Hayden, The Middle Passage

Different voices. (Whose? What situation?) I, Captain's log, 1800 Hymns Catalogue of slave-ships Court deposition II, Slaver-trader's reminiscence III, Slaver-trader's account of Amistad mutiny, 1839 Juxtaposition. (No "connective tissue.") Allusions. (Clicking on a link.)

Elizabeth Bishop, The Armadillo

For Robert Lowell "This is the time of year when almost every night the frail, illegal fire balloons appear. Climbing the mountain height, rising toward a saint still honored in these parts, the paper chambers flush and fill with light that comes and goes, like hearts. Once up against the sky it's hard to tell them from the stars— planets, that is—the tinted ones: Venus going down, or Mars, or the pale green one. With a wind, they flare and falter, wobble and toss; but if it's still they steer between the kite sticks of the Southern Cross, receding, dwindling, solemnly and steadily forsaking us, or, in the downdraft from a peak, suddenly turning dangerous. Last night another big one fell. It splattered like an egg of fire against the cliff behind the house. The flame ran down. We saw the pair of owls who nest there flying up and up, their whirling black-and-white stained bright pink underneath, until they shrieked up out of sight. The ancient owls' nest must have burned. Hastily, all alone, a glistening armadillo left the scene, rose-flecked, head down, tail down, and then a baby rabbit jumped out, short-eared, to our surprise. So soft!—a handful of intangible ash with fixed, ignited eyes. Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!"

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland

I. The Burial of the Dead 'April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled, And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow. Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu, Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du?'

John Cheever, The Swimmer

Irrealism: Fantastic and or Allegorical

T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

Literary allusion to Heart of Darkness

Mina Loy, Feminist Manifesto

Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited - at present they are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the others sexual dependence. .... The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman, depends entirely on chance, her success or insuccess in manoeuvering a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her— .... The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride & consequently jealousy must be detached from it.

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Post-Harlem Renaissance

Eugene O'Neill, A Long Day's Journey into Night

Technological modernity. a. chauffered Packard, b. electric lighting, etc. 2. Immigrant experience. a. Jamie (Act 1, Norton p. 859) "I know it's an Irish peasant idea [that] consumption is fatal. It probably is when you live in a hovel on a bog, but over here, with modern treatment— " 3. A play about addiction. a. Edmund to Mary (Act 3): "It's pretty hard to take at times, having a dope fiend for a mother!" (Norton, p. 898) 4. A Freudian play. a. Mary to Edmund (Act 2; Norton, p. 872) "It's wrong to blame your brother. He can't help being what the past has made him. Any more than your father can. Or you. Or I."

John Ashberry, They Dream Only of America

They dream only of America To be lost among the thirteen million pillars of grass: "This honey is delicious Though it burns the throat." And hiding from darkness in barns They can be grownups now And the murderer's ash tray is more easily— The lake a lilac cube. He holds a key in his right hand. "Please," he asked willingly. He is thirty years old. That was before We could drive hundreds of miles At night through dandelions. When his headache grew worse we Stopped at a wire filling station. Now he cared only about signs. Was the cigar a sign? And what about the key? He went slowly into the bedroom. "I would not have broken my leg if I had not fallen Against the living room table. What is it to be back Beside the bed? There is nothing to do For our liberation, except wait in the horror of it. And I am lost without you."

William Faulkner, A Rose for Emily

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral ...

Thomas Pynchon, Entropy

[Callisto] saw ... the younger generation responding to Madison Avenue with the same spleen his own had once reserved for Wall Street: and in American 'consumerism'[he] discovered a similar tendency from the least to the most probable, from differentiation to sameness, from ordered individuality to a kind of chaos. "When Dave was in the army, just a private E-2, they sent him down to Oak Ridge on special duty. Something to do with the Manhattan Project. He was handling hot stuff one day and got an overdose of radiation. So now he's got to wear lead gloves all the time." She shook her head sympathetically. "What an awful break for a piano-player." "this hothouse jungle ... had taken him seven years to weave together. Hermetically sealed, it was a tiny enclave of regularity in the city's chaos, alien to the vagaries of the weather, of national politics, of any civil disorder." "[Aubade] lived on her own curious and lonely planet ...."

Villanelle

a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem's two concluding lines

Ekphrasis

a verbal description of a work of visual art (painting, sculpture etc.)

Manifesto

statement of a group's intentions, motives, programs plans