Sunset on the Bridge

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Katie B

Although I was incredibly intrigued by all of the poems in Striven, The Bright Treatise by Jeffrey Pethybridge I would have to say the two I found most interesting visually were the pull out poem The Sad Tally on pages 149-150 and the “final” poem Fathom-Line that starts on page 168.

I found this book deeply personal which of course made me very taken with it, wanting to know the story and meaning behind every single poem.  The Sad Tally reads side to side, which makes it difficult to follow and allows for different readings.  It a map of the Golden Gate bridge, with each letter supposedly representing one suicide at that certain place on the bridge, although it is not one hundred percent accurate.  In Fathom-Line, it is written in a line straight down the page which made me wonder if it was supposed to represent a person falling from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Golden Gate bridge at sunset

However, my favorite poem from the book overall would probably have to be Lower Limit Song, The Chord from page 123.  In this poem, Pethybridge is describing his brother on the day that he committed suicide in comparison to the setting and what was happening around him.  This poem is deeply sad, stating how the day was red, possibly like blood, and it was rainy and dismal outside.  Pethybridge notes how the birds “sang their tired vesper strain.”  Vespers is a sunset prayer service within the Catholic church, so this possibly means that the setting was red because the sun was setting, which is a very sad time of day.  The repetition of the word tired to describe the birds’ song and his brother’s hands emphasize the feeling in the moment.   This poem’s repetition of certain words such as red, tired, sentry, departed, etc. really allows the reader to visualize the San Francisco bay as he committed suicide.

I would love to know how this book of poetry worked as a healing process for Pethybridge.

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Marriage and Death in “The Railing / The Loom”

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Brooke Fortune

In the poem, “The Railing/ The Loom,” Jeffrey Pethybridge focuses on the image of hands, and how the tasks hands fulfill play into life and death. The poem begins with the idea that “there is a formula for the earth blackened by the bloody deaths of men; it has a rhythm and a ring.” The formula itself is perhaps less important than that of the ring, which becomes very important to the remainder of the poem. It is a word play referring both the sound ring that goes along with rhythm, but also a wedding ring on “the fat hands of the bride weaving the fiction of the burial shroud,” an act Pethybridge calls a mixture of “heroic dexterity” and “heroic deceit.” Pethybridge envisions these hands upon his brother, typing out a suicide letter and a will, “letters of apology and farewell… letters of law and execution.” He then links the loom upon which the shroud is woven to the poem’s title and further to his brother’s death when he asks if these were “the bride’s fat hands you climbed the bridge’s railing with.”

This poem reverts back to a rather macabre, but fascinating tradition of linking marriage and death. The woman weaving the burial shroud isn’t represented as an old woman. The term bride generally connotes someone young entering a new stage of life. But instead of weaving material for the marriage bed, the bride weaves a funeral shroud, implying that the bride is preparing for union with death rather than life bound to another human, exiting life rather than entering a new stage. Pethybridge envisions his brother’s writing of his final letters as similar to a bridge weaving a shroud, and his ascent of the bridge like the bride’s work on a loom, preparing almost ritually for a deliberate, ceremonious union with death.

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“Red Light” an imitation of “[bridge, you’re]” by Jeffrey Pethybridge

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Connor F

 

I found myself drawn to this poem very early on in the reading of this book. This was because the poem was so simple and bare, yet each word carried a great amount of weight to it. The voice is so powerful that I found myself coming back to this poem again and again. I wanted to try that in my own writing.

Red Light

Red light,

you stop

people only until

someone

decides

to

run right through you.

 

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Productive year of 2013

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Victoria C.

I thought it would be fun to do a Chronos for the year of 2013. A lot of the times we live the year and don’t even realize that it had happened or realized how fast time went by. As I look back at this year it’s hard to believe that only a year passed by since it was 2013. There has been so many things that happened then that either surprised me or re-jogged my memory.

Arts and Culture: The 55th Annual Grammy Awards were presented at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on February 10, 2013. The band that won New Artist was Fun, Record of the Year went to Gotye and Kimbra’s Somebody that I Used to Know, and the Best Pop Solo Performance was given to Adele’s performance of “Set Fire to the the Rain.”
On February 24, 2013, the Academy Awards of 2012 was presented at the Kodak Theatre. For Best Picture Awards the top 9 movie nominees goes out to Armour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings

Brave

Playbook, and Zero Dark Thirty. The winner for this was Argo. The Best Animated Picture nominees were Brave, Frakenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and Wreck-It Ralph. The winner of this award was Brave.
The actor that one best actor in a leading role was Daniel Day-Lewis from Lincoln, and for female Jennifer Lawrence in Silver Linings Playbook.

Science, Technology, and Ideas: We had a quite productive year in Science and Technology in the year of 2013. In January 2nd, astronomers made a discovery that the Milky Way Galaxy contains at least one planet per star, which means there are 100-400 billion exoplanets. On January 3rd, physicists created a potassium-based quantum gas that can be manipulated by lasers and magnetic fields to reach negative temperatures. On February 5th the scientists at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University developed the first 3D printer, which produced actually live stem cells. This invention was quite success, it let to so many other great inventions. On February 14 the University of Oxford engineers built an autonomous car, which allows itself to drive without an actual driver. It can be switched back to manual with a simple witch of a button. On February 20th NASA reported Kepler-37b to be the smallest exoplanet to ever be known, which is the size of Earth’s moon. On February 21 Cornell used the invention of the scientists at the Scotland University to create a living artificial ear from collagen and ear cell cultures with the 3D printer. On April 15, the Massachusetts General Hospital successfully used a kidney that was grown in the lab to use on a rat. It was such a breakthrough for the nascent field of regenerative medicine. Later that year, Japanese scientists were actually able to clone a completely healthy mouse just from the cells of one single drop of blood.

Social Change (issues of gender, race, class, immigration): Towards the of end of 2012 and beginning of 2013, a large crowd in San Fransico protest about same-sex marriage, a more progressive tax system, and to have stricter gun laws. In 2013 we had a lot of massacres, one being the movie theater massacre during a midnight premier of Batman in Colorado that made gun control an urgent issue.

War, Politics, and Nature: On January 21st President Barrack Obama began his second term. On February 11, Pope Benedict XVI announces his resignation from being head of of Vatican City state, effective the 28th of February. On November 1st the Thai start to protest.

Thai protest

There are so many things that happened in 2013 and I feel like that year really flew by so it was really interesting to go back and review and even learn a few extra things that happened last year.

Posted in Chronos: Arts & Culture, Chronos: Science, Technology & Ideas, Chronos: Social Change, Chronos: War, Politics, & Nature, Wildcard | 1 Comment

Men swear, the bitches!

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Sarah Norvell

I thought I’d try my hand at analyzing one of Mullen’s poems from Trimmings. As there is so much ambiguity in her poetry, I decided to have a little fun playing around with the way the poem reads aloud instead of just purely basing my analysis on the words as they are written. Upon my first read of “Menswear…” (page 28) in Trimmings, I saw an obvious description of pants: “britches,” “flies,” “jeans,” actual “pants,” and “slacks.” There is perhaps a girl, “Rosie,” who seems to be flustered and upset. She could literally be riding a bike, and “fl[ying] off the handle,” as in physically falling, “pant[ing],” from the bike ride, and wanting to “cool out,” as in cool down and relax. However, as we know, Mullen tends to suggest alternate interpretations of her poetry, inviting readers to let their imaginations wander to more promiscuous, if not darker, readings. When I first read “Menswear, the britches” aloud, I heard “Men swear, the bitches,” as in men complaining about women, most likely feminists, or just wild women who are “out of line.” This poem could also simply be describing the fashion changes occurring for women as pants became more popular, and not just for men. I interpreted “Rosie flies off the handle” as expectant men ready to bust out, if you will. “Rosie,” reminds me of expectant mothers for whatever reason, perhaps because of their flushed rosy cheeks, which also has a sexual connotation. I quickly began to interperate this poem as a description of a brothel, or sleazy jazz club. Hear me out. “Jeans so tight, she pants” has me picturing a promiscuously dressed woman who is literally out of breath because of her tight jeans, or even a transvestite who has exploded (“flown off the handle”) and finally decided that dressing like a woman is too much work, and begins “slack[ing] off.” I got the jazz club feeling by the phrase “cool out,” and “slack off,” perhaps solely because it reminds me of the poem “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks. If I continue on the sleazy jazz club/brothel track, “want[ing] to cool out” could mean wanting to go do the deed, thus the “slacks [coming] off.” In summation, men watching women dancing in tight jeans, viewing them derogatorily, panting, rosy with anticipation, practically exploding, wanting to escape up to a bedroom, where the slacks will come off. Perhaps my mind is in the gutter, but as we have read in Mullen’s other poems, any interpretation is fair game.

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Jeffers in the Canon

Posted on April 4, 2014 by dixmt

For my final, final project I would like to trace Robinson Jeffers’s place within the literary canon by analyzing the book reviews and criticisms contemporary with his work along with the recent reviews of scholars who attribute the poet with a larger role in the influence of modernist poetry and subsequent poetic movements of the twentieth century. My thesis is quite mutable at this stage—but I ultimately aim to take a stab at responding to why these fluctuations of popularity occur/ed.

I plan to relay my research in a typical research paper format. Other topics I wish to explore in addition to Jeffers’s vacillating interest include his influence on contemporary poets and poetic movements as well as on the popularization of Bay Area writers late in the twentieth century.

Tentative Works Cited

Gelpi, Albert. “The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry.”

Southern Review 26 (1990): 517-541. Web. 4. Apr. 2014

 

Robinson Jeffers: (1887-1962) Biographies, Criticism, Journal Articles, Work
Overviews. n.p. Farmington Hills, Michigan: Gale, 2003., n.d. Web. 4. Apr. 2014

 

Critical Essays on Robinson Jeffers. ed. Karman, James. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990.                         Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

 

Jeffers, Robinson. The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers.

Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

 

Boswell, Jeanetta. Robinson Jeffers and the Critics, 1912-1983: A Bibliography of

            Secondary Sources with Selective Annotations. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow

Press, 1986. Web. 4 Apr. 2014.

 

Vardamis, Alex. The Critical Reputation of Robinson Jeffers: A Biological Study.

Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1972. Print.

Jeffers on Hawk Tower

Jeffers on Hawk Tower

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The Sapphire Sings

Posted on April 4, 2014 by L'Kai

I decided to pursue a critical read of Recyclopedia because I was interested in what others had to say about the collection. In attempt to understand the reasoning behind each collection, I found interpretations of these poems that incorporate Mullen’s own explanation for what the poems communicate. Both readings touch on the ideas discussed in class.

Harryette Mullen offers an explanation for her poetics in the preface of Recyclopedia to give the reader an idea of how she meant for the poems to be interpreted. Mullen admits the her poetry stems from interaction with reader, writers, scholars, editors and publishers whose work helped establish writing the communities she took part in. She shares that the Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T sections consist of prose poems that “use playful, punning, fragmented language to explore sexuality, femininity, and domesticity”, inspired by Gertrude Stein. Muse & Drudge was inspired by the thought of a chorus of women singing gloomy and humorous music all at one time. According to Mullen this text is sync between blues and lyrical poetry that “unite audiences often divided by racial and cultural differences.”

In her critique, Catherine Wagner echoes Mullen’s preface when she says that Trimmings evaluates objects and S*PeRM**K*T assess food and the supermarket, the content of both addressing the topic of various cultures. She describes these sections as sexually seductive and militaristic, drawing an example from Trimmings with language to support her argument. Wagner goes into more detail about Muse & Drudge, asserting that the title refers to “poetic inspiration and physical labor,” the Muse being a woman and drudge is everyday toil.  Wagner again echoes Mullen when she recognizes Muse & Drudge to be a collection of women’s voices, “reminiscent of Sapphic and the blues.” She offers this critique of Muse & Drudge, “These layered punnings challenge the traditional image of lyric inspiration by illuminating its complicity with traditional silencing of women, laboring, people of color.”

Wagner’s assessment along with Mullen’s preface gives me a more clear understanding of the collection and what it aims to accomplish, I personally like the ideas behind the content, I think they accurately reflect the ideas Mullen sought to address in the way that she wanted to express these ideas.

 

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Setting Poetry to Music: Initial Thoughts

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Marco Frey

Amiri Baraka was a way in. There’s something to be said also for the Beat poets. There was this one passage in Invisible Man about smoking marijuana and listening to Louis Armstrong and how the blues is both a riot and old lady.  Then there was this album of Charles Mingus’ music set to Langston Hughes. Writing about music. Or just writing musically. Writing music poetically. As human art is the synapses connecting constellations, then it was bound to happen. It’s difficult to talk about. The connection is inevitably there. But is it just something we see in the toast? Or should I say, something we hear in the toast?

The connection between poetry and music is, in all sincerity, tenuous. Sure, there’s spoken word, which is making poetry musically. But then again, most poets set themselves apart from the spoken word crowd. And it’s true, the two are almost different art forms. The quiet Dickenson ideal of the inward poem hardly belongs in a crowded club in Manhattan. And the poems that have the pretense of being musical, often fall short from seeming so. And yet, humans will inevitably here rhythm in the line. And poets, too, often write with only a rhythm or flow of syllables and strong beats and soft, passing beats and the way a line begins and the way you come up off it, and so, you see, we get to talking as if this is a jazz solo. I know lately, I’ve been writing poems with a sort of incantation behind me, not worrying so much about how my voice may seem in the poem to others.

So I reached out to Marcus Amaker, a local poet known for his perfomative style, who showed interest in setting down some recordings. I plan to keep it casual and relatively low-fi. I plan to play drums behind him reading certain poems I find musical. I want it unambitious in this one way, you see, keeping the musical and recording side simple. This way I can really have an entry point between music and poetry. To be honest I’ve done both for so many years and yet I’ve had all kinds of pretenses about combining the two. Ultimately, this is a crucial healing of my two selves, and a bold experiment. Will they hold water?

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1991: Year in Review

Posted on April 3, 2014 by helmsjl

Arts and Culture

The Physicality Impossibility of Death

Contemporary artist Damien Hirst opens his first solo exhibition at he Institute of Contemporary Arts. The gallery space consisted of two works of art: Butterfly Paintings and Ashtrays and White Paintings and Live Butterflies. In the upstairs space butterflies would emerge from their pupae, which was attached to a white canvas. The work was meant to capture the life cycle of the insects. Downstairs, there were monochrome butterfly paintings surrounded by ashtrays to give the feeling of a private show. The exhibition proved to be his most important one and gave him an emerging career. The usual themes of Hirst’s work, life, death, and symbols are incorporated into the art. Fueled by his success in these representations, he later created his most infamous work about death, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Science, Technology, and Ideas

In 1991 the Super Nintendo Entertainment system was released in North America. The console brought a revolutionary change in gaming capabilities. It introduced advanced graphics and sound functions. The 16-bit design allowed for simulated 3-d graphics that was uncommon. Nintendo later released enhancement chips that made the quality even better. It was the best selling console of the time and still remains one of the best ever designed due to its improvement over the competition.

Social Change

Peg Yorkin donated 10 million dollars to the Feminist Majority Foundation. Yorkin, the chair and co-founder of the foundation, set a record for the largest contribution ever made for women’s rights. The donation set in motion a call for women to take action and to ensure the feminism legacy. The gift lead to two major movements of the foundation. The first was an endowment to help make an anti-progestin drug more readily available to women. The second was a new campaign for gender equality in the Los Angeles Police Department. They called for an investigation of the relationship between the gender composition and police brutality, citing that research shows women in police departments reduces violence and increased responses to domestic violence.

War, Politics, and Nature

1991 saw the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The political unrest led to the fractionalization into separate twelve republics of the Soviet Union. It also led to the end of the Cold War and Communist rule. The dissolution allowed NATO and the Warsaw Pact to end hostilities and therefore ending the Cold War.

Posted in Chronos: Arts & Culture, Chronos: Science, Technology & Ideas, Chronos: Social Change, Chronos: War, Politics, & Nature, Wildcard | 1 Comment

What the Heck is Trimmings?

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Taylor Dixon

For my wildcard post, I was interested in how the academic world responded to the publishing of Trimmings by Harryette Mullen. Gertrude Stein, the poet whom Mullen drew much inspiration from, was a controversial figure in her own right, and I expected to find a similar reaction to Trimmings.

harryette-mullen

A little bit about Trimmings: A collection of “prose poetry” characterized by lists, descriptions of women’s clothing and accessories in such a way that comments on femininity, stereotypes, and the marginality of women. Inspired by Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Mullen chose to use lists because she “thought of as a form congenial to women, who are always making lists.” At surface-level, these poems might seem trivial and straight forward but the multitude of puns and other play on words contain far deeper implications for Mullen’s thoughts on society.

In the article “Tender Revisions: Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings” by Deborah Mix, Mix investigates the influence from both Stein and experimental black poets on Mullen’s writing. Mix says, “Mullen intervenes not only in a feminist literary tradition, but also in an experimental tradition that has often excluded the voices of women and writers of color”(84). She writes that this is, in fact, in opposition to Gertrude Stein, who was mostly concerned with a feminist approach. Outside influence from African American writers, such as Langston Huges and Zora Neale Hurston, encouraged Mullen to be even more radical than Stein in her approach. Mix believes that Mullen “points her readers towards the possibility of moving outside a consumer-driven culture” (88). She writes about consumer goods in order to point out the flaws they bring to society and how they affect our perception of social order. Mix says, “consumer culture teaches us to desire this kind of sameness as a resolution of economic, social, geographic, and racial distances” (77). Mix celebrates Mullen’s ability to push back this sameness, and even the consumer culture that seems to drive us to be this way.

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