English Final passages and terms
"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
"A Rose for Emily"
A literary device in which literal persons, objects and events are used to symbolize abstract concepts or ideas, or a political or historical situation - an enormously extended metaphor.
Allegory
a verbal description of a work of visual art (painting, sculpture etc.)
Ekphrasis
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 -
Emily Dickinson "A narrow Fellows in the Grass"
"I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing glorious and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
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 ...."
Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
"The marvelous thing is that it's painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts."
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.
Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"
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.
Hart Crane "At Melville's Tomb"(1926)
Cross referencing another text and inviting the reader to bring relevant information from that other text (The Tempas by Shakespeare is relevant and is being related to this poem) This serves to pull the fragments in the poems together
Literary Allusion
"now" means the airplane "then" means Great War (1914-1918), Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922), Postwar German inflation, Avant-garde in Paris
Modernity in The Snows of Kilimanjaro
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.
One Art (1976) Elizabeth Bishop
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. - each sentence of the poem is a caption to a photograph, written by Perelman, from a book he found at a stationery store in Chinatown
"China" by Bob Perelman
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 [....]
"Of Modern Poetry" Wallace Stevens
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 —
"Tell all the Truth but tell it slant" Emily Dickinson
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
"The Day Lady Died": Frank O'Hara
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.
"The Emperor of Ice Cream" Wallace Stevens
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.
"The Idea of Order at Key West" Wallace Stevens
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.
"The Snow Man" Wallace Stevens
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?'
"The Wasteland" T.S. Eliot
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."
A Long Day's Journey into Night's Modernity
"When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral ...
A rose for emily -- who is we
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.
Dream Song #29 John Berryman
"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— Thirty white horses on a red hill, First they champ, Then they stamp, Then they stand still.
Emily Dickinson "My Life had stood- A Loaded Gun"
Influenced by the work of Marcel Proust and Ezra Pound, Perelman's poems disrupt sense and syntax as they search to connect body and language amid layers of commercialization, violence, and literary memory One of the "language poets" Language poets' adoption of "schizophrenic fragmentation as their fundamental aesthetic"
Features of Bob Perelman's "China"
-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
Features of ts eliot's wasteland
... 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 turnaround 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
Frank O'Hara "Personism: A Manifesto"
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
John Cheever "The Swimmer"
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.
Literary Allusion to Heart of Darkness
statement of a group's intentions, motives, programs plans
Manifesto writing
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
Modernism in "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
Modernity in "A Rose for Emily"
A literary or artistic practice in which a procedure is determined or invented in advance of composing; the work or works is produced in accordance with the pre-established procedure.
Proceduralism
... 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.
Robert Lowell For The Union Dead
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.
Robert Lowell Skunk Hour
"Mistah Kurtz—he dead. A penny for the old guy"
T. S. Eliot "The Hollow Men"
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!
The armadillo by Elizabeth Bishop
... 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 ....
Toni Morrison "Recitatif"
The highly structured villanelle is 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
Villanelle
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.
Wallace Stevens "Anecdote of a Jar"
Abrupt beginning, deferred exposition; the reader fills the gaps Alternation between inner and outer realities Fragmentation vs. integration; "leakage" between realities
the Hemingway style
