Has it really been twenty days since I posted anything here? How sadly I have neglected thee, o my blog.
Spring came, and spring left, spring leapt away like a deer vanishing into the trees, irretrievable. Chasing after it does no good. Like a child crying at every inevitable loss, I cried when spring abandoned me to winter again, and I whined and whined about the rain.
But like the deer who returns at dusk to nibble delicately and destructively at your garden, spring has returned, again. Spring has come bounding in so many times, and then has gone bounding out just as many times... But I think spring is here to stay this time. I really hope so. (Spring, did you hear that? Don't leave me again, don't break my heart by only staying one day. You have my hopes up now: two days of sun, light, warmth, the promise of sweat.)
It's almost May and the tulip trees are blossoming. The dandelions are out, biting my bare feet. The grass is still a swamp from yesterday's thunderstorm, but it shone in the hot sun all day today. I have high hopes for tomorrow.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
[Thesis abstract] A Lyricist Responds to the Iliad
[Here is the 330-word abstract of why I only made one post during all of March.]
Art refers back to other art, and literature is no exception. The Iliad belongs to the body of literature that has deeply shaped English writing. A knowledge of this poem and the mythology that accompanies it enriches a reader's experience of a much greater body of literature, from the Roman masterpiece the Aeneid, to Dante's revolutionary Inferno, to modern books such as James Joyce's Ulysses. Moreover, deep engagement with this poem, as with any great piece of literature, enriches a person's life by bringing a consciousness of its lasting themes into quotidian existence.
For this project, I lived with the Iliad. In reading, I first inhabited the Iliad as poetry and story and human experience, then tried to capture my emotional and intellectual reactions as lyric poems. Some aspects of this experience were familiar and easy to accept as relevant to who I am and what I believe. Other Homeric attitudes, though, are diametrically opposed to my beliefs; dwelling within those perspectives during my reading was emotionally challenging. The mix of intuitive familiarity and utter foreignness of the Iliad was fertile ground for reflection. The fruit of this meditation was a body of close to a hundred lyric poems that respond to the Iliad.
These poems first reflect my deeply held beliefs about the subjects treated in the epic, then proceed to explore my own emotional experiences from outside my reading of the Iliad. The Iliad is a war poem, taking place within a polytheistic spiritual/religious framework. Its characters belong to a patriarchal society whose culture relies heavily upon the externalization of emotion and identity, defining a man by his reputation among his peers (and defining a woman by her value to the surrounding men). My reactions to these characteristics of the Iliad fed the themes of my responsive poems. This paper discusses my poems and their relation to the epic, approaching my experience of reading the Iliad from an analytic rather than poetic perspective.
[I now have an extremely rough but relatively coherent 23-page paper as well as 75 pages of ordered and clustered poems. Huzzah! There is a lot left to do but this feels like a major accomplishment as is.]
Art refers back to other art, and literature is no exception. The Iliad belongs to the body of literature that has deeply shaped English writing. A knowledge of this poem and the mythology that accompanies it enriches a reader's experience of a much greater body of literature, from the Roman masterpiece the Aeneid, to Dante's revolutionary Inferno, to modern books such as James Joyce's Ulysses. Moreover, deep engagement with this poem, as with any great piece of literature, enriches a person's life by bringing a consciousness of its lasting themes into quotidian existence.
For this project, I lived with the Iliad. In reading, I first inhabited the Iliad as poetry and story and human experience, then tried to capture my emotional and intellectual reactions as lyric poems. Some aspects of this experience were familiar and easy to accept as relevant to who I am and what I believe. Other Homeric attitudes, though, are diametrically opposed to my beliefs; dwelling within those perspectives during my reading was emotionally challenging. The mix of intuitive familiarity and utter foreignness of the Iliad was fertile ground for reflection. The fruit of this meditation was a body of close to a hundred lyric poems that respond to the Iliad.
These poems first reflect my deeply held beliefs about the subjects treated in the epic, then proceed to explore my own emotional experiences from outside my reading of the Iliad. The Iliad is a war poem, taking place within a polytheistic spiritual/religious framework. Its characters belong to a patriarchal society whose culture relies heavily upon the externalization of emotion and identity, defining a man by his reputation among his peers (and defining a woman by her value to the surrounding men). My reactions to these characteristics of the Iliad fed the themes of my responsive poems. This paper discusses my poems and their relation to the epic, approaching my experience of reading the Iliad from an analytic rather than poetic perspective.
[I now have an extremely rough but relatively coherent 23-page paper as well as 75 pages of ordered and clustered poems. Huzzah! There is a lot left to do but this feels like a major accomplishment as is.]
Medicine
This morning I woke up 45 minutes before my alarm actually went off, but I hallucinated that I'd woken up to my alarm, and I never did get back to sleep. A headache and a new batch of colored nose-fruit greeted me. On the other side of the window, the trees were writhing. Rain battered the glass and the wind sounded angry.
My morning improved once I got out of bed: Tulsi tea, Nutella sandwich (I need to find a fair-trade alternative to Nutella), comfort from John 17. And it was better when I got back in bed and read Poetry 180, and journalled, ink bleeding through the lined paper, the notebook almost full.
But before I actually got out of bed the first time, and in flashes of sorrow throughout the morning, discontentment pervaded me. Sick sick sick, and all alone. I wanted someone to take care of me, be with me. Actually I didn't want just any someone, I wanted the person who holds me, the person whose presence reminds me--life is sweet. I thought: I am tired of sleeping alone. I want to wake up with O. (109 days...) I want hugs in the morning.
And I thought: Waah, I don't want to be sick.
But I got through the day (cancelled almost everything but made it to my German test; drank at least 5 cups of tea).
Then around 6pm, O. called. "I was partly calling to ask if you've had dinner?"
Me: "No..."
O. "I was thinking about coming by and making you dinner and trying to take care of you."
<3
So he did. He improvised dishes from ingredients I'd been worrying about cooking before they went bad, and it was all very unplanned and it was all very sweet, and much better than chicken soup or Tylenol or breathing steam or all the honeyed cups of tea.
My morning improved once I got out of bed: Tulsi tea, Nutella sandwich (I need to find a fair-trade alternative to Nutella), comfort from John 17. And it was better when I got back in bed and read Poetry 180, and journalled, ink bleeding through the lined paper, the notebook almost full.
But before I actually got out of bed the first time, and in flashes of sorrow throughout the morning, discontentment pervaded me. Sick sick sick, and all alone. I wanted someone to take care of me, be with me. Actually I didn't want just any someone, I wanted the person who holds me, the person whose presence reminds me--life is sweet. I thought: I am tired of sleeping alone. I want to wake up with O. (109 days...) I want hugs in the morning.
And I thought: Waah, I don't want to be sick.
But I got through the day (cancelled almost everything but made it to my German test; drank at least 5 cups of tea).
Then around 6pm, O. called. "I was partly calling to ask if you've had dinner?"
Me: "No..."
O. "I was thinking about coming by and making you dinner and trying to take care of you."
<3
So he did. He improvised dishes from ingredients I'd been worrying about cooking before they went bad, and it was all very unplanned and it was all very sweet, and much better than chicken soup or Tylenol or breathing steam or all the honeyed cups of tea.
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