One of the Frost poems I got really into was “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” The idea of uniting vocation with avocation is something that plagues/captivates me regularly. This poem urges me to continue evaluating that, particularly in the last four lines:
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is [...]
Here are some of the pictures from my trip. I can’t remember if I mentioned this in class, but when I first got to her grave, I spent a while wanting to clean it off, but feeling really uncertain about whether that was respectful. It didn’t seem kosher to be taking stuff (even [...]
If you’re getting too dizzy reading “Patriarchal Poetry” by yourself, you might want to check out this video of a couple of students reciting some of it. It looks like they just did it as a school assignment, so it’s not like theirs is a recitation/reading style you necessarily have to follow, but it’s [...]
When we started reading Stein and Dr. Scanlon mentioned that she thought “Poetry and Grammar” was hilarious, I was thoroughly relieved. I too was laughing and reading sections of it out loud to anyone in my house who would listen, but later I worried that I was patronizing Stein and not taking her seriously. I’m [...]
One thing I’ve been asking myself about Stevens is why he thinks poetry is so superior. Or does he? He writes so many poems about poetry, and he has an essay that I think grounds us to understand where he’s going in his poetry. I think without the essay, his poetry would be too ambiguous [...]
I really enjoyed our conversation today about Hughes’s “Democracy.” The message that racial equality shouldn’t have to be something that takes so long to attain really struck a chord with me, especially thinking about how behind we still are, however many years after that poem was written, judging people based on race and other qualities.
I [...]
Check out this other presentation of “The Weary Blues.” It was done by a group called Four Seasons Productions in their Moving Poetry Series, which you can look into here: http://www.4seasonsproductions.com/
YouTube says this one is narrated by Dr. Allen Dwight Callahan, an author and Harvard professor.
I wanted to extend a comment Alison made in my last post. I really like what she said about how she sees H. D.’s use of couplets to convey Modern messages as a woman working in the structures of a masculine world, in contrast to how I described H. D.’s style as a modern individual [...]
I know this post looks really long – I got a little carried away with H. D. But a lot of the space it takes up just contains sections of the poem reprinted, and I think you could probably just read a couple paragraphs anywhere in what I’ve written and still have something to [...]
After Dr. Scanlon mentioned that there’s a movie with H. D. in it, but it’s silent, I went searching for a recording of her voice. Here’s what I came up with. I’ll post my reaction in a comment so everyone has the opportunity to listen before reading my perspective. Take note that [...]