anyone?

Is Assignment 11 anything we want??

Hey all! Hope everyone had a great break and ate lots of good food :) I wanted to reflect a little on the activity that we did near the end of class today when we discussed the importance of the first and last lines of poems. It is something that I think we have mentioned before and I think it's quite interesting. Many poets, including myself, try and drive an image or idea home with a stinger at the end, or perhaps a circular ending bring us back up to where we stared. Some artists may bring up a totally new idea at the end of their poem to stay our thoughts in other directions. Whatever the artist chooses to do however, what I have found is that you can tell a lot about a poem through just the first and last line. For example today, MacLeish ends his poem with "A poem should not mean/ But be.", Ashbery ends with "The poem is you" and O'Hara begins with "I am not a painter, I am a poet.". All of these examples bring us into what the ideas that these poets are trying to portray in their poems.

I thought it was such a fun activity to look through the index and pick out first lines/titles that we liked and link them together. It is always fun to take the ideas/words of someone else and put another meaning to them because of the way they are put together. I thought the last activity was cool too by taking the first and last line of a poem that we like and then swapping them and filling the middle with our own thoughts. It is amazing how many different variations we can come up with the same words when we put our own spin on it...that's poetry I guess!

Favorite Poem of the Week

I loved reading everyones blogs and I hope everyone had an awesome thanksgiving! I know that we have been talking about the starving artist and some other poems from Norton but I wanted to share my favorite! I really liked Why I Am Not a Painter because I could see myself writing a poem just like it. It also reminded me of when we went into the art gallery and looked at the art which was mainly composed of words. When reading the part about sardines, it reminded me of how poets start their work, just as painters may do. There is a word, or a memory, that jolts the painter or writer that makes the person interested in investing in the subject. It may be covered up by the end and compleatly be changed and on a different topic, but it just reminds me that inspiration can come from anywhere and be rapidly changing. In this poem he begins to write and write and write about this orange and in the end it ended up not even being soley about the orange itself. I know that that can also happen to me where an idea may blossom but become something entirely different. When the man in the poem went back to see his friends work, he saw the title, the main word that he ended up taking out. This also reminds me of titles and how hard they may be to come by. I know that I have issues with them but this could be a good technique; to take a word that you may have taken out, or didnt think was that important and use it as the title of work or of your poem. It may bring a different element into the picture and make the reader or viewer look at your work with a different lens.

12/1/09

First of all, Happy belated Thanksgiving everyone! And yay for the first of December and our first real snowfall! Just first commenting on Kathleen's post, I think that I agree with you on your thinking and have had similar questions, I too have no answers but they are interesting inquiries. I also wanted to quickly comment on our assignment that was due over break. I don't know about anyone else but I thought the assignment options were very interesting but for me I found it kind of challenging at the same time. I am really interested in seeing how well received my poem actually is. But onto our readings for today, I really liked the Ars Poetica and the Why I am Not a Painter poems. The Ars Poetica is one that I'm not entirely sure I grasp with understanding of how to construct but it is very different from poetry I read and therefore intrigues me. The "Why I am Not a Painter" poem really made me smile at the end. I think it well written and playful and I love looking at art and paintings and so therefore I can appreciate the topic in general. I think having art be the absence of something is an interesting way to look at things and go about creating poetry or paintings. Overall, I enjoyed all of our readings for today's class.

response to the starving artist...

Love the topic Shaunie. You bring up some good points about the starving artist but I think that my position on the subject is that this notion of the starving artist is somewhat sacred and preserves the authenticity of artists everywhere. While obviously in some ways I wish we lived in a world where art was valued above finance and all that other boring stuff I can't help but appreciate the way that the artist lifestyle is unique in the sense that it is a choice people make based solely around what they love to do. Maybe I was just being too hard on the math wizzes a second ago. I don’t really have anything against people who love math or accounting or science or anything for that matter. I guess what I’m trying to say is not that we should necessarily place a higher value you art in our world but the idea behind why and how artists make the lifestyle decisions that they do. I think it is an extremely admirable way to go. I’m kind of rambling but my conclusion is that regardless of what you love and regardless of how much money what you love can provide you with, your lifestyle choice should be based on love and not on money. That being said can we really blame people for choosing a job that makes them more money over doing something that they love if say their priority above art (just an example) is providing for their family? Or is demonstrating love based decision making more important to a blossoming family than money? I don’t really know the right answer except that this is a good question.

The Starving Artist

I’ve been thinking a lot about the point professor Hummer made last class regarding how, though it is possible for a fiction or memoir writer to make a living solely by writing, the same feat is not an option for a poet. The more that I consider the topic, the more it becomes impossible for me to decide whether or not the fact that it is hard to make money from writing should sadden me. After all, one could look at the struggle writers face as positive, especially if considering it as an indication that language – and especially poetry -- is hard for the market to turn into a commodity.

I also think it’s important to consider that this financial struggle seems to be inherent within most art forms. Yes, it is possible for a fiction writer to have a career based solely on her stories, but is it likely? When I started freelancing at my town’s local paper one of the first things my editor told me was that most of the journalists around the office were English majors in college; they wanted to write books, but realized they couldn’t realistically spend 40-hours a week writing novels and still eat. Likewise, art majors rarely fall into a life that allow them to do nothing but paint, draw and sculpt. Like many writers, they need jobs on the side in order to be able to do both what they love and to survive. This has, for a long time, been the life of an artist, and it’s been widely accepted, however regrettably.

So, I thought I’d throw it out there for discussion what this all means. Do you guys think we live in a world that, in a sense, punishes those that are creative, and is this particularly true for poets? Is it hard to make a living from poetry because the craft has become under-appreciated in contemporary society?

...ARS POETICA

I really enjoyed reading the ars poetica assigned for class today. I really enjoyed the Dylan Thomas like everyone else however my favorite was the Archibald MacLeish. To me the poem was total magic. Every turn of phrase worked so well and really got his message across in a way that I know I never would have been able to achieve. His ars poetica really embodied him as a writer, which really has inspired me as I start to write mine. I went from his ars poetica and continued to look for some of his work. While his others don’t really reach the level of “masterpiece” that I would consider his ars poetica, the poems mean more to me after having reading this first because you really can find examples of what he describes within his other poetry. While I’ve taken many other English classes that taught a lot of poetry I’ve never really come across Archibald MacLeish and so I’m really glad that I have. The best part of this poem is the last phrase:

A poem should not mean
But be.

I absolutely love this. I think this alone could be an ars poetica. Perhaps this ending is so strong because of the build up to it but I really feel like I benefitted from this as a young poet. A poem should not mean/ But be. I can’t get over how well put that is. Maybe my struggles to articulate what poetry should be are what leave me so amazed at just how eloquent and succinct this is but regardless I think that these seven words are certainly a poetic achievement and I hope that they will continue to inspire me not just as I write my ars poetica but also as I continue to revise my work.