Week 8

Class, today we will review the responses you wrote to "Suffer the Little Children," by Stephen King, and the film Into the Wild, directed by Sean Penn.  Each is a story interesting in its psychological underpinnings, its portrayal of people who take extraordinary actions in the service of "reality," or their understanding of it, and of the conflicts that sometimes plague human relationships, and that sometimes climax in strange ways indeed.

We will look, too, at some student examples of final projects and performances of poetry.   Your final project will be due week 11, and the recitations.   I will also give the multiple choice final that day.

Week 7

Love one another, but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.–Khalil Gibran




Good afternoon, class.  Hope you are well.  


Last week we read from Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Minister's Black Veil," a dark, symbolic piece on the terrors of guilt and sin set in colonial America, Puritan New England.  You were to read, summarize, and respond to Stephen King's short story "Suffer the Little Children," another dark drama about a school teacher whose mind is prey to images and ideas that may or may not have any basis in outward reality, but who acts upon them in a most extreme and horrific manner.  The workings of the unconscious mind and a haunting sense of evil are themes central to each of these stories.


In today's scheduled film, we follow the true story of a young man alienated from family and society who seeks to find himself, to heal himself, too, in the truths that wild nature and "freedom" provide him.  He opts for a simple life on the road, and so leaves his comfortable life behind and sets out for the West, a place of vast landscapes and seemingly endless opportunities for adventure.  The title of the film is Into the Wild (2007), directed by Sean Penn.  


As a companion piece, you will take home and read Henry David Thoreau's "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," a chapter from Walden, a book inspired by an experiment he made in living simply and wisely,  which involved retiring to a small cabin he himself built by Walden pond in Massachesetts, "where he would front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Week 6

Lost in the woods, in darkness, the mythic labyrinth of passageways with no exit, characters reveal the terrors that haunt them, the shrinking fear of being discovered, shamed, condemned, or of being alone, abandoned by society, unloved and unloving, at the mercy of some death-dealing power.   Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Minister's Black Veil," depicts the guilt ridden aspect of a preacher in Puritan times.  What is his particular crime?  Is the veil a symbol?  Of what?  What gives it its strange power?

 And the schoolteacher in Stephen King's short story "Suffer the Little Children," what possesses her to behave in the way she does?  Why do the young children seem to wear secret, menacing smiles?  Why does she suspect them of being monsters?

 Each of these stories asks us to consider the origins of sin, guilt, paranoia, and the strange, alien force(s)  hidden within and around us.  Can the "supernatural" be explained, our sense of forces so far from the ordinary world of business and routine.  Stephen King, writer of horror stories, says "I think that we are all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better–and maybe not all that much better, after all" ("Why We Crave Horror Movies").  Stories of horror, of terror and darkness impenetrable, he says, appeal to "all that is worst in us" and allow us, for a little while, enjoyment of our "most base instincts."

Week 5

Happy Valentine

Welcome to class.  Hope you are well, and keeping up with reading and writing assignments.

I here review some of what we read and discussed last week.  I'll start with a short poetry selection, by Emily Dickinson:

Presentiment–is that long Shadow–on the lawn


Presentiment–is that long Shadow–on the lawn–
Indicative that Suns go down–

The notice to the startled Grass–
That Darkness is about to pass–

What does Dickinson do here that is unusual, remarkable?  She defines an abstract word–presentiment–by means of sound (liquid n's and long hissing s's) and metaphor.  The setting sun, casting long shadows on the lawn, brings home the feeling of imminent danger.  "Darkness"(line 4)  is near, seemingly predatory, and the "startled Grass"(line 3) betrays its fear.  We are the grass, perhaps, the suns our all in all, and Darkness the fate we flee, death.

The two general classes of letters, vowels and consonants, have particular attributes:  a vowel can be perfectly uttered alone, but a consonant cannot until joined with a vowel.  Semivowels are consonants that can be imperfectly sounded alone, and which sound protracted at the end of a syllable, as with l, n, z,   in al, an, az.  Semivowels c, f, g, h, j, s, or x  require strong breath or air– aspirates they are called.  L, m, n, and r are called liquids, as they seem to flow.  K, p, t,  in ak, ap, at are called mutes, for they cannot be sounded without a vowel and stop the breath.  The feeling accompanying these sounds, here only briefly discussed, is used to certain effect.
 Hush!  Be quiet!  Shut up!    The abruptness of the t and p makes for a connotative difference in the sound of each of these imperatives.  Like the difference between rock and stone, word sounds_even letter design– may correlate to the meaning or connotation of a word.  The play of sound effects noticeable in alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia (buzz, bee, rumble, roar) is one of the resources to which poets' ears are tuned.

The Word Plum       by Helen Chasin (b.1938)

The word plum is delicious

pout and push, luxury of
self-love, and savoring murmur
full in the mouth and falling
like fruit

taut skin
pierced, bitten provoked into
juice, and tart flesh

question
and reply, lip and tongue
of pleasure.

Identify the sounds in the poem above that bring to mind the sounds and sensations of eating.

Week 4

Everything speaks.–James Joyce, Ulysses

Good day!  Hope you are well.

Last week we ended class discussing the free verse poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," by William Carlos Williams, a poet who strove for simplicity and directness of language, which is one means of making poetry more accessible and of showing how everyday, ordinary experience speaks to us, or can, in poetry.  The still life scene of a barnyard, "red wheel / barrow/ glazed with rain / water" (lines 3-6) at its center, arrests our eye in an act of pure contemplation.  The "white / chickens" of the final lines enliven the scene.  In what sense can the poet maintain "so much depends / upon" (lines 1-2) these humble elements?  One answer is that art depends upon our immediate sensations and perceptions of the animate and inanimate alike, and our ability to make some sense of it all, or to order it in seemingly meaningful ways.  The Imagists drew inspiration from the poetry of the East, including haiku and tanka, in which precise, concrete images, strictly limited by syllable number and line length, tell the whole story, however indirectly.  

We are fascinated by objects ("materialism" to the side) and our emotional ties to objects remains strong.  Size, shape, color, number–each is a marker, meaningful, bespeaking our collective history and language itself.

Week 3

Welcome Back!


     Last week we discussed Joni Mitchell's ballad "Woodstock," a poem about a touchstone event in the lives of a generation of American youth that makes a theme of the journey through life, innocence and experience, and the yearning for core experience and truth.  The symbol of the Garden, familiar to most of us through the biblical story of creation described in Genesis, recurs in the poem's refrain:


            We are stardust
            We are golden
            And we've got to get ourselves
            Back to the garden.  (lines 9-12)


Perhaps we are transported to the biblical Garden of Eden, the first world of Adam and Eve, according to the Old Testament.  But what does the garden mean, as symbol, to us today?  What kind of relationship(s) do we maintain with the natural world, with each other?  The subject is one that strikes to the core of our existence.  We speak of heaven and hell, metaphorically, of course, to describe states of being not literal places, and thus the images evoked are always open to investigation and interpretation, as are our experiences and states of being.  Figurative language-symbol, metaphor, personification-allows us to link the known with the unknown, and to discover through implied comparison or identity the nature of our experience.  
       "I wandered lonely as a cloud," writes William Wordsworth.  Literal and figurative language reflects the actual world of our senses and mind, our sensations and and responses to them:  "It is the East, and Juliet is the Sun!" cries Romeo, and we understand how she blazes forth from darkness, just as does the familiar sun.


      In other poems, the world of Nature, and all that is living and breathing around us but is not us, sometimes evokes a darkly sympathetic response, particularly as we realize the impacts that humans are having upon the natural world and all its inhabitants.  "There Will Come Soft Rains" is one such poem; another is "Traveling through the Dark."  The caged cat in "The Panther" and Kate Chopin's story of a liberated cat speak to us of wild things, in all their apparent innocence and magnificence, that want life as fully as we ourselves do.  As  poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in the poetry anthology A Book of Luminous Things,

Our attitude towards nature is not the same as that of our ancestors.  The Book of Genesis authorizes man “to have dominion over the fish of sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over the earth, and over every creeping thing that prospereth upon the earth.”  The line separating man from the rest of living creatures remained firm for centuries, and as late as the seventeenth century Descartes considered animals to be living machines.  With the progress of life sciences this line has become blurred.  Man now realizes that our species shares with animals their physiology and their basic drives.  Nature, as we approach it, has grown much more enigmatic:  our feeling of kinship engenders both empathy and guilt.  At the same time, Nature stands before us as the great Other, deprived of any notion of good and evil, and therefore perfectly innocent, even if it is Natura Devorans and Natura Devorata, the devouring and the devoured.  We are akin to it and yet we are alienated by our consciousness–our curse and our blessing.  And precisely this ambiguity in our relationship, marked by the warmth of closeness and by the cold of detached observation, transpires in many poems.   (11)

Identify some of the figurative devices that appeal to you in the handouts distributed and think about how you might organize an essay on the rich resource that figurative language provides in several literary pieces.




See an outline of Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey here:  http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html

Week 2

Welcome back to the site, and to class.  I will pick up where I left off in writing week one's post, describing or explicating Melville Cane's poem "Snow Toward Evening," a short rhymed poem of varying meter and line lengths.  The poem illustrates nicely the musical effects of sound devices such as end rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, particularly in the last lines with the repetition of i and e vowel sounds, and l, t, and f consonants, which lend an airy crispness to the image of falling snowflakes.  The poem describes an unexpected moment of grace which makes for an epiphany, for speaker and reader alike.  The epiphany is a moment of insight or grace, when one becomes aware of something divine breaking through to consciousness.  The late poet Czeslaw Milosz writes in A Book of Luminous Things that in ancient Greece (circa 5^th century B.C.), 

a polytheistic antiquity saw epiphanies at every step, for streams and woods were inhabited by dryads and nymphs, while the commanding gods looked and behaved like humans, were endowed with speech, could, though with difficulty, be distinguished from mortals, and often walked the earth.  Not rarely they would visit households and were recognized by hosts.  The Book of Genesis tells about a visit paid by God to Abraham, in the guise of three travellers. Later on, the epiphany as appearance, the arrival of Christ, occupies an important place in the New Testament. (4)

Indeed, the pantheon of ancient Greek gods and goddesses may be seen as personifications of the human psyche, and their storied endeavors and exploits among themselves and mortals reflect our own aspirations and temptations, our own light and the dark forces, conscious and unconscious realms of experience and imagination.  As Arianna Huffington writes in The Gods of Greece,

[ . . . ] the classic conflict that has dominated Western   literature and has even entered our everyday language is he conflict between Apollo and Dionysos­–between the Apollonian and Dionysian powers in man, between the need for order, balance and clarity, and the instinct for freedom, ecstasy and exultation.   (16)

Whether the god or goddess called Olympos home, or Hades, each represented something alive, real, and open to change.  All could trace their origin to the Great Mother archetype, goddess, called Gaia.  As Earth Mother, she represents the primordial feminine power of generation and renewal.  The goddesses Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, and others represent individual aspects of the totality of Gaia.

Speaking of symbols and stories, the myths and legends, whether of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India or the Judeo-Christian world, Joseph Campbell wrote that they refer “primarily to our inner selves” and not to “outer historical events” (Thou Art That 28), that they are psychological archtypes known to all mythologies.”  Beyond the necessities imposed by our animal nature, he writes, is “another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days” (29).

And so when we read “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” by William Blake, we may sense the great mystery of the heavenly, infinite, eternal realms evoked by his words and images. By metaphor and symbol we bridge in language inner and outer worlds, subject and object, the personal and the cosmic.

The following URL provides a link to Joseph Campbell's description of the Hero's Journey:  http:  //www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/ref/summary.html