Jane Kenyon: Assignment #2

In a March 1993 interview with David Bradt, Kenyon says about her poems:

"Almost always if I search I can find something in the natural world -- an objective correlative in Eliot's phrase -- that embodies what I'm feeling at the moment. That's when a poem really takes off. For instance, I wrote a poem recently called 'Coats', in which I'm going into Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital and a man is coming out of the hospital with a distraught look on his face, carrying a woman's coat over his arm. I see that, and I know what's happened. That poem threw itself at my feet: 'Write me! Write me!' I found that my talking about the coats -- the man's coat and the woman's coat -- I was able to write the poem. I made up the part about the man's coat in this poem. I say that even though the day was warm, he had zipped his own coat and tied the hood under his chin, as 'if preparing for irremediable cold.' It's only three stanzas long, about twelve lines, and it's all about the coats. Maybe he was taking his wife's coat to the cleaner. I doubt it; the emotional truth for me was that he had lost his wife. Lots of people would walk past that man without seeing his situation. I couldn't help seeing it!"

After carefully reviewing the definition of Eliot's objective correlative here, look at one Kenyon poem in the packet and discuss, much in the way she herself discusses the creation of "Coats," how the situation/location/thing in the poem evokes an emotion.

You also have the option of picking one poem and arguing why you think Kenyon fails at the objective correlative. What is it about the situation/location/thing in the poem that doesn't translate into an emotion? Or does the poem simply state the emotion too explicitly? How would you have altered the poem to produce a deeper reader response?

Remember, you must post by noon on Tuesday, and you need at least 500 words to receive credit.

Anna Akhmatova: Assignment #1

After you have read through the packet of Akhmatova poems, please respond to one of the following two prompts in the comments section of this blog. You need at least 500 words to receive credit. Doesn't it look like these instructions are coming straight from Akhmatova's mouth? Yes, yes it does. So pay attention.


Prompt #1: In her introduction to Twenty Poems, Kenyon writes "Because it is impossible to translate with fidelity to form and image, I have sacrificed form for image. Image embodies feeling, and this embodiment is perhaps the greatest treasure of lyric poetry." Do you agree or disagree? Pick one of the translations by Kenyon in this packet and discuss her use of imagery. What are the images in the poem? Are they symbolic or, as Gumilev proposed with Acmeism, simply literal ("a rose is beautiful in itself, not because it stands for something")? Do the images succeed in the poem, or leave you unsatisfied? Why?

Prompt #2: I have provided you with side-by-side Kenyon and Kunitz translations of "The Guest" and "Heart's Memory of Sun." Pick one of those two poems and explain to me, citing specific words or lines, how two translations of the same poem affect your experience of it. (Do you like one translation over the other? Why?) What do you like/dislike about Kenyon's linguistic choices? Can you trace the reasoning behind the different decisions each translator made?

Remember: you have until noon on Tuesday to post your response -- although the earlier you post, the easier it will be for me to note your comments before class. You are encouraged to agree/disagree with each other as well. Just be respectful, and if you piggyback on someone else's response, don't simply rehash his/her argument (or you won't receive credit).

Finally, I found a video of Akhmatova reading her poem "To the Muse" in 1946. It's only 39 seconds worth of footage, but gives you an idea of what her poems sound like in Russian. You can hear a musicality lacking in the English translations.

Welcome!

I am proud to unveil the ENGL-233 class blog. Very few of you proposed names, so it came down to either "Fantastic-Super-Happy-Fun Blog" or "Spiders" (I found the latter to be a bit ominous, but maybe that's just my arachnophobia). Check back Thursday night for the prompt on Akhmatova.

Here is a list of the poems (with links if possible) you chose as memorable. The only two poets still living are Maya Angelou and Melissa Underwood, so I look forward to introducing you to more contemporary writers.

"Richard Cory" by Edwin Robinson
"A Poison Tree" by William Blake
"Only a Curl" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"The Will to Win" by Melissa Underwood
"Continuities" by Walt Whitman
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou
"The Hollow Men" by T.S. Eliot
"Sniper's Serenity" by Robert Baird
"Dream Deffered" by Langston Hughes
"Phenomenal Woman" by Maya Angelou
"If you were coming in the fall" by Emily Dickinson
"Footprints in the Sand" by Mary Stevenson
"Bluebird" by Charles Bukowski
"I had a guinea golden" by Emily Dickinson
"The Daffodils" by William Wordsworth
"Let America Be America Again" by Langston Hughes
"Journey of the Magi" by T.S. Eliot
"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe
"Sick" by Shel Silverstein
"Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas
"Whatif" by Shel Silverstein

A poem that continues to matter to me, with increasing resonance, is "I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds. Sharon was my instructor in my N.Y.U. Graduate Program, and I was her assistant for a year. I admire how the poem is simultaneously specific and expansive. The speaker uses a particular photograph as a spring-board for reflection; in just 30 lines, we learn of a troubled parent-child relationship and a destructive marriage, and most interestingly, past and present overlap. The poem is also a kind of "Ars Poetica," or statement of poetry's intentions: that it bears witness to the difficult, that art sublimates pain ("I say/Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.").

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

Here's a clip of Sharon Olds reading a lighthearted poem on Def Poetry Jam: