sleeping with the dictionary blog

Bi lingual instructions/ Harryette Mullen review

Sleeping with the dictionary is a collection of poems, many of them fairly odd. The one I’m going to talk about is the weird instructions one, called “Bilingual Instructions”.

If I had to guess the poems purpose it’d probably be that this was meant to be some political satire about Americans not knowing how speak other languages other than English, or even caring/ and also a look into stereotypes. From the discussion in class, it seems that this was a common thought, and I assume most others who read it would kind of get the same thing as well.

           

This poem is broken up into two parts, the bilingual instructions (literally written bilingual instructions, English than Spanish the line below) describing what I can assume to be gardening, and the first part, starting with “Californians say” and the line below saying to what. Essentially, the poem says Californians don’t want bilingual ballots or schools, but do want bilingual instructions on trashcans, and then it goes to the instructions about how to use a trashcan. To be perfectly honest, there is nothing spectacular about the actual writing of the poem, it seems to be literally stuff that it was copy and pasted from other stuff. However, the idea around the poem is something that is thought provoking and interesting for the very least.

           

This poem attempts to look at how Americans look at the bilingual community (by that I mean those who don’t speak English, or speak it as a first language, specifically Mexicans), as lesser. There is a common stereotype that Mexicans are gardeners, and that Americans only see Mexicans as such; This poem is essentially making a statement, “we don’t want them to do anything other than the lawn”. 

I find that it’s odd that the first part of the poem starts with what appears to be polling statistics, and the second just seems to be an instruction manual. This is how the poem is made, and with it being the way it is done, even something that is hardly literate can understand what is going on.

This poem is very short, and for once that’s a good thing, because it is easy to read and understand.  The Spanish part is a translation of the English, and part of me wonders if there are grammar errors put in as a joke. The style is very exact 2, 2, 2, style which I liked.  In addition, there are dabbles of humor I sensed, with the poem ending “yard trimmings only”, making me feel 

I'm not a poem guy, so I'm not going to say this was the greatest thing I've ever read, however I can appreciate it's purpose. 

doing my paper/ assignment one process

Finishing my paper

            So I decided considering that it would be a good idea to do this blog on the process of completing my final paper, and what went through my head and all that good stuff.

            For starters, I had no idea how to write something like Frank O’Hara’s “Second Avenue”. The man must have been born with a photographic memory and read the dictionary at one point in his life because I was looking up half the words.  As this assignment is open to interpretation, I wanted to write something generally unique, something that wasn’t hard to read but at the same time wasn’t meant for a third grader. It then occurred to me that it would be fun to do a poem about something that most people are uncomfortable with; mast********.

            Once I came up with the topic, I began writing it. Yes, there is visual image with in the poem, but I thought again it would be fun to write a poem where you don’t want to see the visual image. After all poems that I have read about animals, nature, and love, I thought it would be in my best interest to write something that I have never seen before, and hence, me coming back to the topic of choice.  The goal now was to write this in a way to easy to understand, but not to simplified, hence the easy four line stanza’s, with occasional rhythm in almost a sound poetry kind of way. I wrote it almost like I would write a song, easy to follow, but open to some degree of interpretation.

            Next, I wanted to add a little more spice to the mix, having a poem about just the said topic I felt like would be weird. I decided on putting a confused person as the person writing the poem, explaining how he was no good at writing poetry, and finally deciding about writing about such a ridiculous topic. I italicized all the lines that his character wrote, and wrote the one’s he didn’t in a normal fashion. While I was wondering if I should do a one italicized one not, and so on type of pattern, I attempted this and was easily discouraged. I decided on shear randomness on splitting the parts, which made sense considering the content of the poem.

            Finally, my poem was complete. It was something I had never wrote before, and oddly enough I was proud of this little poem. I felt like it had a good sense of humor, something that seems to be largely lacking in other poems that I read. So that is all that went into my poem, and trust my, “I have no idea what I’m doing”, but I’m willing to try anything.

Frank O'Hara

     After reading Second Avenue by Frank O’Hara I came into a few obstacles. For starters, it is one of those difficult poems that I've heard so much about. In fact, the first time I actually read it I had absolutely no idea what was going on. While I tried to understand everything most of what I read went right passed me. There was a lot of hallucinating imagery, and a few more swears than I've been used to in a poem. There was a lot of anger that I sensed, and a weird amount of eroticism that I found tense and awkward. However, after the analyzing it in class, and spending a good 45 minutes looking at a few more than a dozen lines, I can say some things about this poem.
     I couldn’t tell you what was going on in the entire poem, I read it twice, and it kind of sounds like jibber jabber to me, so for that I failed. However, I did get something out of the second stanza after analyzing it to hell and back. After I tackled that, I was able to look at it in a different light. However, there isn’t enough time in the world to look at the whole thing.

     There was a lot of talk about anger in nature, and a loom at a dead opossum (at least I thought it was dead). The anger is vapid, as it’s description is dense. I liked to think that essentially this poem is a reflection, after seeing road-kill, the speaker of the poem looks at nature, god, and himself of the cause of this, and how it’s impact is as negative as positive. One line in particular “Is it a triumph?” had me questioning the whole stanza for a decent period of time, as I look at as a question whether or not this poor possums death was a good or bad thing.

The poem ends on probably one of the most beautifully clichéd sentiments, “laughter at desire, and disorder, and dying”. This is something I must have heard in a poem before, but nonetheless it is thought provoking.

     The poems not bad, but it’s not for me. I don’t like playing games, I like being told what’s what, and this poem does anything but.

difficult poems

            I am not a fan of poetry. I never have been, and don’t think I ever will be. My biggest problem with poetry like most people is “difficult poetry”. I don’t know if I accept it as an art form, I look at it more as busy work given by English teachers that have as little idea about what is going on as I do. I bet you know what I am talking about when I refer to these difficult poems, the long poems with random words that may or my not rhyme. These poems tend to contain words I have never heard and never will hear, skewed English that apparently is apt within poetry. However, I know I am not alone.

            Bernstein’s “Attack of the Difficult Poems” shed light to how I feel about poetry. I like how it told me that “Difficult Poems are normal” (4), and how I shouldn’t be ashamed or angry when I encounter one. Rather, I should accept it, as who ever is writing the nonsensical poetry isn’t doing it for the sole purpose to piss me off, even though that’s what it generally seems like. No, they are just writing their poems, and I have the options of either accepting for what they are or getting angry and throwing my laptop.

            I don’t really consider difficult poems to have much value, contrary towards the article. No one really writes a poem just to be difficult. Honestly I’d rather tackle a 250 pound bodybuilder than a 250 lined poem of words I can’t comprehend, but I have to accept that I am not the only person who hates reading them, lots of people hate reading them, or at the very least have difficulty with them.

            I will try to keep this reading in mind when I am forced to encounter some of this difficult poetry. Hopefully, I will be able to handle it masterfully, or at the very least with a brief amount of grace. One of my biggest fears within the creative writing program is spending the entire time analyzing poetry, then going into a world where that is probably the farthest thing from my mind to actually pursuing. However, contrary to what I said earlier, I do acknowledge poetry as and art form, even if it is a frustrating one. I want to write for a living, I have a lot of good ideas and stories in my head even if they don’t come out so great a good deal of the time. As redundant as it is, I’m using this blog post to remind me to not over react towards poetry, rather use it to become a great writer.

Blog entry one

            Hello, Jeremy here. As of now I am a senior and a triple major with creative writing, electronic media and film, and communications. I have essentially completed all the programs except the creative writing one, so for the next few semesters I am going to have quite a time essentially having only writing classes. My other programs were a lot of fun, but I am a little excited as well as nervous to get into this major, I know there will be a lot of writing and reading, and am hoping for the best.

            As far as what I want to do with the writing, I want to write screenplays (and hopefully direct them). I'm hoping all my majors come in handy, but I'm willing to do a lot of other things aside from just writing screenplays. I am relatively new to the creative writing program, I have taken the intro class, playwriting, and early American literature, so I've got a little ahead of me. So far my experience in the creative writing program has been positive, although it hasn’t been as intensive as it is about to be. I have a lot of stories to tell, and I want to tell in different ways.

            I am a movie lover more than anything, so this may become an asset as well as a problem throughout the creative writing program. I am not a fan of reading poetry and prose style material, so, again, this may come to be an issue, of course I do what needs to be done so hopefully it’ll be as painless as possible.  I did enjoy playwriting, scriptwriting, so entertainment mediums are my favorite things to work on. I admit I am not a heavy reader, so I’m hoping to improve my reading skills to a degree. I was a heavy reader a long time ago, so I feel like I could become one again.

            I personally define genre as a category defined by specific themes. I took a film genre class, so my views on genre might be distorted as film and literary genre to differ, but for the most part, genre is there to differentiate different art works to allow us to concentrate on the ones that we would find most entertaining.

Genres generally have ongoing themes. Science fiction usually has some sort of social message imbedded within the story, and it usually takes the world as we know it and warps it in a realistic fashion (unlike fantasy which takes an unrealistic fashion). These themes are generally ongoing, and carry throughout the story within the genre. They help us to narrow down what we like, if you like suspense, read a mystery, if you like romance, read a romance, the combinations are infinite.

            In a broader sense, genre is the overview, for example, fiction is something that isn’t real, poetry I define, as writing with some specific pattern or prose, and a biography is a story about a specific person that does or has existed.

            No matter what sort of genre I write in, I am a big fan of black humor and use it to massive extent. I have written a play (for the play class) and it was a comedy suspense, I have been writing a screenplay (forever), and it is a dramedy. No matter what the overview is, I like humor as a subgenre. I don’t think I’ve ever tried writing anything outside genre categories, but I am wiling to try. Hopefully, everything will work for the best within this class.