The Solution to Global Warming

[_Blixa]

That Billy Collins poem is useful for me because students are imprisoned in some "hidden meaning" understanding of poetry and all literature. At the same time they want a poem to mean "anything" so that whatever anyone says about has the same validity as anyone else (example, a student who thinks Blake's poem The Garden of Love is about "war" because there are tombstones in it. He's skimmed over it, had one word pop out and assumed everything else..). There are "more correct" reading/interpretations than others, and its not hard to come to them if one learns to read. And that is the problem. Many (most?) american students are literalists, they cannot make sense of metaphor. They are not aware of irony apparently, or shades of meaning, or nuance or how a peice of literature might be different than an advertisement or a journalistic artilce. I usually start with Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse, when I teach intro to lit because it conjurs up every bad reading practice students have:

This Be The Verse

They Screw you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were screwed up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

The first problem is that many students imagine poetry (possibly any peice of writing) as autobiographical. There is nothing in this poem that is suggestive of that on the face of it. Nevertheless, to them this is a poem written by an angry man who hates kids. They can't distinguish between the writer of the poem and its speaker---they can't grasp that this language in this poem is very general: like an essay not like someone writing about his life (no "I" no "my"), they miss the densely packed metaphor in the third stanza (a good tutorial of what metaphor is, by the way) and of course the miss the HUMOR of the poem. And its seriousness within that humor.

Of course the first problem many students have with this poem is the work "“F”". tee hee. Oh my. I never heard this is a class before...*sigh* of course they've heard it in school! Just not said by a poem. But still, I never ceased to be amazed at the parochialism of much of the american public.

Can you tell I don't want to go back to school next week?

[_Blixa]

Anyway here's another work by that angry hateful man: (perhaps you know the tomb Larkin is writing about---its easy to Google if you don't)


An Arundel Tomb
 
Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd -
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor's sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would no guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the grass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigures them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

[_Ren]

I feel my cultural IQ increasing rapidly as I pay attention to this thread.
...keep it coming please :)

...whilst I puzzle over what any of it has to do with Global Warming...

[_Moniker]

This Be The Verse

I love it! I've never read anything by Philip Larkin.

[Guest]

Anyway here's another work by that angry hateful man: (perhaps you know the tomb Larkin is writing about---its easy to Google if you don't)


An Arundel Tomb

A love poem!

[_Blixa]

Heh. Well I'm reviewing poetry to include in class next week. Here's one more. I first came across Billy Collins's work, thusly. I had read a review of a new translation of Catullus that really reminded me how much I love his work: the bawdy stuff, the heart breaking stuff, the sheer pleasure I get from Latin poetry because its pretty much the only place I experience the joy of translation: I'm highly deficient in foriegn languages.

About a week later---so quick! I came across a Billy Collins poem about reading a review of that new translation of Catullus! Hahahha! And his poem was good evocation of Catullus's spirit:

The News Today


A landslide in Bolivia,
the marriage of two chimps in a zoo in California,
snow predicted for late in the afternoon,
and on the book review page, a new translation of Catullus.

Aulelius, you cheap bastard...
Maximus, your ass stinks from sitting all day...
Pontibus, who was that plump whore you brought to the banquet...

Is there anyone who does not admire the forthright way
in which his poems begin
and, of course, the lively gossip that follows,
the acrid smoke of contumely
rising from the blown-out candles of the past?

No room for the daffodil here,
or the afternoon shadow of a column,
not when everyone at last night’s party must be demeaned.

Who has time for sunlight falling on the city
when Capellus needs to be told he is a crappy host
and Ameania reminded that she is one horrid bitch?

Nobody does it quite like you do, Catullus,
you insulting, foul-mouthed cocksucker,

and I an thrilled to hear that once again
your words have been ferried to the shores of English,
you mean-spirited pain in everyone’s ass.

Without you Catullus,
a pedestal in the drafty hall of the greats
would be missing its white marble bust.
And so we hail you, Catullus,
across the wide, open waters of literature,
you nasty idiot, you flaming Roman prick.

[_Doctor Steuss]

[...]and I an thrilled to hear that once again
your words have been ferried to the shores of English,
you mean-spirited pain in everyone’s ass.

Without you Catullus,
a pedestal in the drafty hall of the greats
would be missing its white marble bust.
And so we hail you, Catullus,
across the wide, open waters of literature,
you nasty idiot, you flaming Roman prick.

Brilliant.

[_Bond...James Bond]

There once was a poster named Ren
Who many thought a fan of sin
To prove them wrong
He threw out his bong
And poured out the whiskey and gin

[_Ren]

There once was a poster named Ren
Who many thought a fan of sin
To prove them wrong
He threw out his bong
And poured out the whiskey and gin

Pics or it didn't happen!
(I don't know why I like that phrase so much...)

Moniker's already done ya a Limerick, so I'll go with just a bunch of nonsense:

It's Bond
In a pond
With a blonde
And a wand
'Are you fond?'
Bond responds:
'Oui! Tres monde!'

[_Dr. Shades]

Blixa:

Isn't free-verse poetry a form of cheating?