How Strange

[Poem Transcript]

You spent a week at my place
rolled in and out of old vices
conversation layered in dust.
But for you, nothing settles-
your pulse, itching to a rise
tells stories of men like us
who, evading long gazes
could not escape a club
left red and chattering,

Like this.

He’ll be a cowboy for pay,
He’ll ride through Las Vegas
shouting freedom from the street
bare-chested, swanging to sides
claiming frontier and victory.
But we know, in the scope,
what happens in meadows
growing too out of reach
and yanking the trigger back

Like this.

Cursing the old boys down south
we share hollow jokes, knowing
no matter the pasture, vernal pool
neither party is faring greener.
(We giggle in California while
one man rounds a corner
in pursuit of one woman
step shoulder step step and
quick breath falling down
bang bang bang bang bang
then, there were two men)
And even in our hobbled union
shame pervades every gesture
opening for when you go

Like this.

Your reel sits on the counter
Un-reviewed, a violent vision
You’re passing like a death
each new day, a murder.
I’ve met the victims, seen it happen
In and out, in and out
of the doorway, voice trailing
farther and farther West
until you finally left
“Goodbye”, a limp sound
from mouth to floor

Like this.

Somewhere in this nest
of cable, flat obelisks,
and false horizons
beyond the paddock
cattle became conscious:
Gridlocked, set to parallels
striking the walls of adjacent cages
all of us, receding, unable
designed, institutionalized
How strange we must show our love

Like this.

How strange our bodies shrivel and shadow

Like this.

[Review]

To my friends who lent their voices for this assignment,

I have no doubt that you all are really, really confused. But I promise there is a method to my madness. My parody of Rumi’s “Like This” retains the free verse structure and repetitive use of the titular words but keeps little else. I cannot identify with, nor relate to, the perspectives espoused on love in Rumi’s poem. You all intimately know how little faith I put into religion, or for that matter, behavioral ideals. The speaker’s frequent allusions to Islamic culture (Christianity, if reading Coleman Barks’s translation) and idolization of the poem’s subject were quite literally lost in translation when I first read the poem. This is the primary reason why I chose to modernize the poem’s dated depiction of love to one that I could relate to, thus resulting in the odd amalgamation I produced today.

The decision to use video as the primary consumption format for this poem is largely symptomatic of the video essay’s rise to popularity. YouTube channels like Nerdwriter, exurb1a, and Button Poetry all take the written page and transform it into a visual experience. Though I have some reservations on the viability of video essays from an academic standpoint, I find this format to be one of the most successful ways of engaging contemporary audiences. The creative freedoms allowed by video made it possible for me to literally “pay homage” to previous points in history while giving a visual stimulant to viewers. In the background of “How Strange”, I reference two movies, a television interview, and a home video of questionable origin. They each provide context to the poem or supplement the themes embedded within it.

My biggest departure from the source material, however, was the element you all are a part of: the conversational interludes. Initially introduced to combat the fatiguing caused by my expansion of the stanzas (which are lightly worded in Rumi’s poem), I used excerpts of our conversations to ground my poem in your feelings and experiences. The poems I’ve read over the course of this semester have all been singular efforts— one individual, and perhaps their publisher, laboring and toiling alone through the revision process. For this assignment, I didn’t want to operate in a creative vacuum. I wanted to include other people, other voices, as a collaborative and illustrative force rather than an exercise in compromise. Though one could accuse my poem for being too derivative in its constant use of external reference and homage, I instead argue that it is my driving motivation: I want my audience to understand how nebulous and in-congruent my experiences and identities are in relation to each other, even if that means stringing together a multitude of other works.

Shadows and Scores

A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self, 1980, Kerry James Marshall

All three of the blog posts utilized different approaches to analyze McKay’s poems with varying degrees of success. They are all alike in one aspect, however: these blog posts shared a common underutilization of the creative freedoms permitted by the medium. That is not to suggest that the content of these posts were lacking, but quite the opposite! Though “Tropic Shadows” does not supplement its argument with media, the development of its concepts and well-composed structure leaves little to be desired. The other two posts present original and novel ideas about the poems they analyze, but could benefit from a bit more time in the drawing room.

“The Great Divide” provides a wealth of insights into the structural mechanics of the poems it analyzes. By focusing on rhyme scheme, alliteration, rhythmic patterns, and voltas, this blog post attempts to connect the sonnet form with the general ideas of separation anxiety present in the work. The writer, to my disappointment, does not fully explain what these textual features might signify in relation to the poems’ subject matters. The writer raises some excellent points about how deviation from a given form’s conventions impresses readers with careful intention, but this raises more questions than it answers. Providing an ambitious and risky interpretation of what the poems’ forms symbolizes would elevate this blog post to the next level. This reflects my own concerns when generating blog posts: what more can I offer my readers when constructing an argument? Was there anything important that I glossed over? Being holistic in my analysis is imperative.

“Tropic Shadows” and “WHITE AMERICAAAAAAAA” have their attentions set on the content of the poem, but the sophistication of the concepts presented in the former make it the best blog post of the group. The writer weaves in textual evidence and citations into their analysis with arachnid-like finesse, making their post a comfortable web of information readers don’t have to struggle through. Couple the cohesion and fluency of their composition with the proposition that McKay’s Harlem Shadows explores thematic ruminations on stasis, and the writer of “Tropic Shadows” nets themselves a win.

The same cannot be said for the latter post. Though “WHITE AMERICAAAAAAAA” provides a sweeping analysis of race relations during the Harlem Renaissance, there is not much textual evidence outside of suppositions on the intent of McKay. This idea is not developed much farther outside of its historicist lens, but the endeavor reveals far more about the argument than its guiding philosophy: the lack of textual evidence and concept development indicates this blog post would have benefitted from more interaction with the source material.

And now, for the grades! Drum roll, please—

“Tropic Shadows”: A+

“The Great Divide”: B+

“WHITE AMERICAAAAAAAA”: B-

Bite Me, Alien Boy

Recently released DLC for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

by Andrew Perez

Tate’s natural, un-bothered cadence of her performance inverts the expectations placed upon her by Tennant and the academic gravity of Shakespeare. Her character, Lauren Cooper, is a “most insolent child” that completely disrupts Mr. Logan’s lesson on Shakespeare. Lauren’s remark that Shakespeare is “pointless, repetitious, and extremely dull” sparks the polemics surrounding the classroom environment Mr. Logan tells her that she could never match the “genius” of the poet. This negative description also reflects Mr. Logan’s perception of her: Lauren’s carefree demeanor lends Mr. Logan’s position as an academic to discredit her identity as a student. The basis of this conclusion, however, is entirely incorrect. Lauren recites the entirety of Sonnet 130 verbatim with tone and delivery that would make any thespian or poet drip with jealousy.

Lauren’s choice of Shakespeare’s sonnets is no coincidence: the speaker of the poem describes a woman that does not fit the conventional image of an ideal woman by society’s standards but nonetheless possesses all of its qualities internally. Mr. Logan’s conception of “genius” affirms this parallel: he represents a community of scholars and teachers who dismiss poets and students that fall outside of what is palatable and deserving of merit. Though Lauren’s “reputation precedes her”, her capacity as a scholar and writer does not. In a final twist of sweet irony, Tate’s character reveals that the student understands Shakespeare’s sonnet far better than the instructor.

Reciting the sonnet is something Tate does with effortless grace, but her delivery pierces viewers with machine guns filled with iambic bullets. Her tone is cutting, confident, empowered, and most importantly, attention-grabbing. Lauren’s approach to Shakespeare makes his poetry a commentary on the failing methods through which poetry curriculum are designed. Sonnets should not be read off of the page like Mr. Logan’s misguided attempts, but should viscerally exude through performance like Lauren’s endeavor. By taking the plain seriousness of Shakespeare and reinventing the poem as a means of jest and imitation, one begins to realize how accessible Shakespeare’s poetry really is. If you “don’t have to be English to teach it”, then you don’t have to be a “genius” to write poetry like Shakespeare. Even problem-student Lauren can compose and transform Shakespeare into a format that is approachable, unpretentious, and impassioned.

Exclusion, The Body, and You

Page 16 of 2015: The Last Year of Ryohji Kaji by Hiroshi Yamaguchi, June 1997

by Andrew Perez

When Zamora performs his poetry orally, he brings home with him. The word “coyotes” in “Second Attempt Crossing” is defined and spoken differently on each side of the US-Mexican border. Coyotes could be taken as its linguistic representation of the animal, but this would be an analysis limited by a non-migrant perspective: Zamora’s pronunciation of “koi-oh-tez” and its cultural reference to border traffickers does not manifest in text like it does in oral recitation. These changes in meaning, coupled with the differing pronunciations between languages, demonstrate how performance ties poetry back to the physical and cultural experiences of the poet. The Spanish dialogue and terms in Zamora’s poem follow this same pattern: they are said in the native tongue of Zamora’s home, and thus take on an individual cadence and significance that is unique to him and his cultural experiences. Phrases like “pará por favor” cannot possess the same meaning when recited from a non-immigrant speaker.

The question of who is permitted perform and consume what in poetry is a nuanced problem in all works that cross borders. Zamora’s poetry, is not, and should not be for everyone. Chino, to whom the poem is dedicated, is an informal Spanish term of endearment for friends or children. He positions his gang-affiliated guardian against “La Migra” and their “white trucks” by manipulating pronunciation to delineate linguistic exclusion. By only writing certain portions of the poem in another language, Zamora inverts the otherness ascribed to him by American society. Key cultural information, which is familiar and easily understood by Spanish speakers, is wholly unavailable to English-only speakers which oppress and threaten the undocumented existence. For documented readers who have only known citizenship for the entirety of their lives, the Spanish portions of this poem can only be half-consumed through dictionaries and inference.

Setting Fire to the Library of A-Lexicon, or Undoing 1,000 Brown Years Spent White

from Myths of Creation and Destruction Part I by Agnes Arellano, 1987

by Andrew Perez

It is a twitch. A scratching on the arm. Hairs rising like the temperature of a feverish body. Hallucinations passing in and out— of sensation, perception, and right mind. It is “My Brother at 3 A.M.”: a harrowing pantoum of drug dependency that is emblematic of Diaz’s endeavors to marry language back to the bodies that emit it.

The speaker emphasizes the symptoms of her brother lips “flickered with sores” to illustrate the bodily effects of cocaine or methamphetamine use while roping language back to the flick of a lighter’s wheel to consume these drugs. The imagery of the intermittent flashing of the lighter underscores the brevity of the brother’s high and the lasting sores that litter his mouth and lips. Diaz does not make prey of addiction to nostalgia or glorification, but represents uneasy truth through memory by using the body as a recorder.

Music for Making the Sun Rise by Agnes Arellano, 1987

Even the “flickered” layout of these sores on the body point back to the hurried and broken lamentations of the brother shouting “O God…O God…he wants to kill me” numerous times throughout the poem. The repeating lines of the pantoum are a perfect textual analogue to the scattered thoughts of an addict losing control, as it creates a circular cadence that prioritizes the repetition of previous lines. Readers are no longer witnesses, if Diaz’s return to the body is to be practiced, but interactive entities that touch and strike language rather than simply observing the addiction of the speaker’s brother.

The eyes grab and struggle with lines that narrow from short, connected clauses to the shrunk murmurings of the dialogue in the poem. This handling of lexicon allows readers to understand recovering addicts in a way that exceeds empathy into a happening— a physical experience that cannot be taken away by a controlling language which seeks to inhibit memory.

Mothra, Rayquaza, and God: Examining the Pattern Poem

a staff member from Rebirth of Mothra works on the larval prop of the benevolent monster, 1995

by Andrew Perez

George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” and “The Altar” are pattern poems, meaning that the form of the lines contribute to its subject. I stoutly refuse the proposition that the “exact match” between the shape and theme of “Easter Wings” conveys a “more powerful Christian message” than “The Altar”. The latter mentions “A broken A L T A R…made of a heart” which both identifies the speaker’s body as the tenor and positions the vehicle of the “altar” as an offering of religious servitude. This rivals, if not exceeds, the imping of “[the speaker’s] wing on [the lord’s]” in “Easter Wings”. It’s futile to elevate these two poems above each other in their endeavors, especially when they appear as sequential parts of the same work.

These two poems assign religious symbolism to their subjects through different literary modes. “Easter Wings” manifests the religious symbol and attaches it to the speaker and their subject, choosing to rely largely on aligning the human form with the mythic corpora of angels. No, the speaker did not grow wings like Mothra on the blessing of the Lord, but the image is instead meant to easily convey the spiritual biography of the speaker. “The Altar” connects the body to the familiar religious furnishing of the altar, thus using the tangible experience of the object to bolster the poem’s comparison. This makes “The Altar” a far less interpretive poem⁠— the use of the altar as a device for sacred offering, among its many other employments during the procession of a mass, appeals to the faithful realism of readers.

While I won’t choose one poem over the other, I can offer an all-encompassing judgement on both: they’re great historical pieces, but are an ancestral remnant to any non-traditional religious practices performed today. I, much like any other pre-teen child who was forcefully dragged to the steps of a church at some ungodly hour, would have rather slept in and played Pokémon Emerald than listen to the “word of the lord”. The root of this is two-fold: not only does the church refuse to evolve from the archaic and rigid traditions which dangerously antiquate the faith, but also consequently reject any worship that doesn’t involve regular Sunday attendance. These pattern poems are a staunch reminder of those geriatric institutions: any un-metered word or out-of-place syllable are in opposition to the order of the whole and must be brought back or eliminated altogether.

See everything and see nothing, see-saw!

from lain illustrations by Yoshitoshi Abe (2006)

by Andrew Perez

I prefer H.D.’s poem because it shows an attempt at trying to leave this hopeless cycle of desperate validation both of these poems depict. Although the sea rose does not achieve a grandiose victory against the systems it ferociously rebelled against, it doesn’t need to. To have reached the ocean, to have persisted, and to have hoped for a better tomorrow, is what makes “Sea Rose” most effective in challenging the traditional symbol of the rose.

H.D. and Puente are separated by a near half-century of social change and feminist thinking that cannot be ignored by the comparison and evaluation to follow. To contemporary readers, H.D.’s poem usurps a tired cliché we have already discarded in the pencil boxes of our middle school backpacks. But to flip the metaphor of the “rose”, one which rejects the feminine objectification of Victorian society and proposes a new kind of feminist tenacity, was an incredibly novel idea for H.D.’s time. She removes the rose from its usual congregation in a garden bush to a lone existence on the tides of a beach. Caught between the “drifts” of the ocean waves battering against “the crisp sand that drives in the wind”, the speaker illustrates the transitionary period many women of the Victorian era were braving despite the various patriarchal institutions shackling them down. This struggle for independence and autonomy has left the sea rose “marred” and “thin”, but is precisely what gives it value over the patriarchal convention of the “spice-rose”. H.D.’s sea rose is beautiful because it does not aim to please the men who behold it, but instead confers a reality of conflict and suppression they have injured it with.

Puente’s “The Rose and The Poppy” feels like a mirrored continuation of H.D.’s “Sea Rose”, in which the battered subject has resigned itself to a quiet and invisible existence. She makes a comparison between the amorous passion of the rose to the sedated sleep of the poppy. “Forgotten”, “rarely chosen”, and “rotting into umber”, the speaker’s outlook on the future is colored by feelings of hopelessness and death. They no longer wish to be a vehicle of relationships and memories cherished and forgotten, but to instead expire alone in the vast expanses of nature and its many orchards. The final stage of this poppy’s life is particularly morbid: its corpse is collected and displayed at the table of all the people who have ignored it in life, eventually to be discarded once the fragrance of its “potpourri” has vanished into thin air. Thus, the sad existence of this poppy terminates as it started: unloved, unseen, and expendable.

Adam Lives in Theory

from Page 28 of The Virgin by Yoshitaka Amano. 2004

by Andrew Perez

I must preface this analysis with my distrust, and yet complete reliance, on the translated word. There have been too many occasions where a work of non-English literature or other has captured my imagination and passions, only to later discover that the translator has irredeemably disfigured and tampered with the author’s original intent. Witnessing this kind of brutal violence has made me timid, perhaps laughably so, in performing a close reading of these poems by Hafez and Rumi. That is to say, more appropriately, that I am interacting with the miasmatic work of Richard Le Gallienne and Coleman Barks in addition to the original poet.

For Hafiz, intoxication could signify an escape from strict religious codes and the irrational, “drunk” nature of love itself. “Ode 487” and “Ode 44″ employ a variety of figurative language techniques to examine the tense relationship between romance and religion.”Ode 487” personifies wine in the first line with it “still singing in [the author’s] head” (a nod to the musical nature of an ode, as it is meant to be sung), later identifying it as a “holy city”, and then finally through a metaphor as a “good ark”. “Ode 44” continues this metaphor in its first stanza, describing this woman akin to “tilted glass” of alcohol with “wine-red lips”. In the latter poem, this intoxication leads the poet to a potential god-like figure, who “arching [her] eyebrows like a bow”, warns our subject that his self-centered nature will prevent him from reaching “Anca’s nest”. Anqa, or Simurgh in Persian mythos, is depicted as a motherly bird that raises heroes and kings in the tree of knowledge. Thus, Hafiz’s inability to spiritually ascend could indicate that his current ways of alcoholism and blind lust are out of accord with the governing religious power. These poems approach love with the same “puritanical” shame one might reserve for a vice like alcoholism, unlike Rumi’s “Like This”.

In “Like This”, Rumi goes intimately vis-à-vis with the reader by placing their body, lips, and face into a variety of metaphors. By likening the reader to “the nightsky”, “perfect satisfaction”, and “God’s fragrance”, among others, Rumi reveals a view of the sexual body that has more positive charge than Hafez’s. Unlike the unhealthy cycle of repression and chaotic release Hafez points out in his odes, Rumi justifies sexual needs as an extension of faith, not in opposition of each other, especially in the rhetorical questions regarding Joseph’s miracle of healing Jacob’s sight through the fragrance of his garments.

I doubt these poems are untainted by the influence of their non-muslim, non-iranian translators, and as such, I think these poems are a stark departure from the source content. The conundrum is so: translators can bring new literary experiences to audiences outside original author’s scope at the risk of butchering the meaning and context surrounding the untranslated text.

Mr. Whitman’s Topology

The Sky with a Floating Cube and Dining Table by AGES 5&UP, from the LOVELY SWEET DREAM Dream Diary by Hiroko Nishikawa and Osamu Sato (1997)

By Andrew Perez

In reading “We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/to/My/Your/Self”, one will discover Ambroggio has achieved the same stretching of the reader’s eye that Whitman did in “I Sing the Body Electric”. Ambroggio repeatedly focuses on things that are diminutive in size, like “This Self”, “virginal atom”, “seed in its newly bloodstained earth”, and increases the scope to much bigger textual items such as “dispersed far and wide”, “the uncaged cosmos”, and “the savor of oceans, the smell of sweet jungles”. This continuous manipulation of perspective, the rise and fall, the twist and bend, the beckon and retreat— this is the rhythm one can similarly find in Whitman’s poem. “I Sing the Body Electric” starts its enumeration of body parts with the face, much smaller relative to the rest of the human anatomy, and then swings the reader around “strong shoulders”, the “inward and outward round” movement of the “hip-sockets”, and finally to the vast, abstract entities of “sexuality” and “womanhood”. Both of these poems tug and pull readers between the myopic and macro in free verse, which in its own form seems to spill over the edge of the page and retract in the same breath.

While one could identify similarities in the sprawling indexes of things and commas in these poems, which seem to unfold in tandem with the lateral movement of the reader’s attentions, it is not the true translation of rhythm Ambroggio derived from Whitman. It is the branches in a hierarchy of objects and aspects, chaotic in impression and linear in examination, from which Ambroggio and Whitman scale and descend in metrical fashion.

Dissidium

Head (Sketch) by Gerhard Richter

by Andrew Perez

Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick both agree that perfection in art doesn’t necessarily equate to beauty or the sublime, but is found in the imperfections in both the work and the artist. They both use the image of a woman onto which Herrick and Jonson project their views on poetry and art. The approach that these two poets take to illustrate their points is the separating feature.

Herrick, in “Delight in Disorder”, writes about a more chaotic description of his subject’s beauty. The woman is disheveled in appearance, having an “erring lace” and “ribbons…flow[ing] confusedly”, but still retains her “wild civility”. The poet’s intent seems to emphasize the raw energy over “precise” beauty seen in contemporary art and beyond. Because Herrick describes himself as a “crimson stomacher”, this poem may describe the aftermath of a violent and passionate encounter that is sexual in nature. Despite this poem’s messy subject matter, it still maintains order and rigidity in its use of dactylic tetrameter and couplet rhymes.

Jonson captures his interpretation of beauty before his subject readies herself for public entrance in “Still to Be Neat”. Though this poem finds its subject in the same bare state as Herrick’s, there appears to be a larger contextual argument from the mention of a “feast”. Jonson appears to argue that the harsh, contemporary standards for dress and behavior can restrain wilder and unrefined beauties. Jonson identifies the woman as a “Lady, to be presumed” despite her “Robes loosely flowing, hair as free”, which nobody besides Jonson can see in this condition. This suppression of intimacy and perceived indecency outside of domestic spaces is what Jonson argues most fervently against. His use of anapestic tetrameter reflects forces the reader to rush towards the last word, almost as if rising to the pedestal Jonson’s elevates this kind of beauty to.