reflections on a class well spent.

This will be my last post as an English 340 forker. I must say it has been great. quite an experience. I am now embarking on a new journey, one that has yet to be written.


I have a newly active word in my vocabulary.
Frame. Framing. Framed.
It's a noun. It's a verb.
an adjective too, I suppose.
I guess it depends on how you frame it.

There's another one too.
Also begins with an F.
Fork.
I learned it's a theory.
but that it's limited.
and that I can't trust the spoon.

I like to learn new words.
especially when they come with mardi gras beads.

finding symmetry in "America" by Allen Ginsberg

another response to symmetry hunting.

He's carrying on about America (we can only assume the United States of America, although he fails to specify exactly which part of America he is speaking to...), questioning it, commanding it, calling it out. He wants something. But then he says this:

It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
(p. 368, Poems for the Millenium)

Symmetry. This idea of speaking only to oneself, of being the very entity you are fighting against, reminds me of three posters on my wall. These posters were acquired at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit during an exhibit entitled Words Fail Me. The poem below explains the symmetry I have found...



I have three posters on my bedroom wall.
One in each of three languages.

Arabic.

English.

Hebrew.

I like them because they say the same thing,
because their meaning is symmetric,
meaning we are all saying the same thing,
all hoping to die for our homeland,
a wish, a dream that leaves us all dead
and a bunch of land with no inhabitants
and no visible borders
only a near-forgotten memory of political separatism,
human division.

finding symmetry in "The Culture of Saving Cindy's Face"

another response to symmetry hunting.

Here the symmetry of faces travels throughout.

The face, the feature we so prominently display
to the world, perched atop the body,
an untilted globe,
symmetric.

Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils.

Medical students cut right down through the middle
of the face, to find the brain,
also symmetric.

The face is repeated.
Spacial symmetry. Each
of us born with a face
somehow learns to resemble all others.

I imagine Cindy Song much resembled me
and you
and all the characters Moss lays out
in The Culture of Saving Cindy's Face.

one week in a city. several weeks of contemplation. this is what you get.

This is my (semi)final project for English 340. Included are the both the sonic and text versions of my work.

I have always been a poet. at least since the day I first began to think. It was difficult for me to take my poetry from the page to audio. I like paper. I like poetry on paper. I feared what such a translation would mean. I feared what my work would lose. I wondered what it could gain. Taking my work from paper to the air has been both constricting and limiting. I want so much to convey all the meaning, for each word to be hear and understood. I suppose that's the same with paper. And the fact of life (the life of a poet, that is...) is that we will never be understood fully. I have taken the simplicity of the world, and found in it the metaphor, the meaning, the symmetries and the beauty and tried to express as well as I find myself able, all that is on my heart. readers, listeners will hear what they will hear, they will think what they will think. I have done what I can, tried to help the world see through my eyes the wonder, the despair, the hope.

I spent the week of February 24th in the city of Detroit, MI. There I experienced the highs and lows that come with a time of service in a city as troubled, yet hopeful, as Detroit. I was inspired. deeply inspired. and here is the result. both for your ears and for your eyes.

I would say that this piece itself is finished. It took a great deal of time for me to find resolution within the work, but one afternoon, it came, and I knew it was finished. (although the investigation of translation I have undertaken is far from finished)

I longed to find hope in the city of Detroit. I wanted to express that. I hope this can affect you emotionally and inspire you to never lose hope. Please enjoy, it was certainly a pleasure to create.





I first learned of the earth as a globe
in my youth. I worried
that seeing the world as a rotating sphere
would remove all the mystery,
all the wonder,
from the sunsets
I cherished on the shores
of what I’m told are great lakes.

There was little reason for me to fear.

That week, in the Cold City
there was no subconscious relief
from trivial pursuits or petty concerns.
Twilight or dawn,
sunset or sunrise,
it made no difference,

I ceased to inhabit that secret world of slumber
and found my home on a cold carpet
and shivered silently through each night.


I have insomnia in a city that’s been sleeping for years.


We situated ourselves atop the wall,
the canal lined with the stone-cold hearts of man,

letting our toes dip into the separating sea,
feeling the cold and hopeless weeping
of eyes brimming with injustice,
we cried,
the light was gone.

We held our breath through tunnels as we retreated
to coffee shops a thousand times more arrogant,

as we lined up to cross the bridge of prideful steel,
we took the second way on a one-way street
and jumped in horror as the autos flew toward us
just as fast as the industry flew
just like the white people flew
right out of this place
so few years ago.

I don’t know why we were surprised.

Our tongues burning
with that bittersweet taste of automobile success,
with that pungent air we propelled across invisible borders.

Our eyes failing us,
endeavoring to gauge the void,
unable to grasp the distance,
deceptive.

We’ve encountered the fallacy of the other world.

In one world,
one life,
I am safe
while in the next
I must
never
be
alone.

We’ve been taught to describe these as
places worlds apart
but somewhere these worlds are divided by
a single line,
a single language,
a single border,
a single street I should not cross,
lest I find myself in another world.

How fitting they call it Alter,
it changes everything.


The windows are empty,
empty as the hearts of our leaders
who guide us nowhere but astray.

Ornate doorways, walls, and rooms fall in line
places where life once thrived
places where people once longed to be
but divided themselves along lines of colors
and flew away like birds at the first sign of winter
in hopes of forgetting their sisters and brothers
in hopes the remnant would steadily kill one another,

only to return to the bloodstained streets
and have the world for themselves.

Somewhere between sunset and sunrise
between yesterday and tomorrow
between Telegraph and Alter
we disregard the meaning of humanity.

Yet, there is no reason for me to fear.

Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus.
We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.

The earth as a globe doesn’t have
a single divisive line,
and the sun rises everywhere,
just not at the same time.

By the light of the morning sun
the dark alleys would illuminate
calling out the beauty from the profane
and symbols would no longer divide,
the walls of the crack houses would melt away,
the shards of glass from shattering flight dissolve,

our human skin,
broken and spilling
like milk on a kitchen floor
the died red blood of hope
and life long lost,

our wound
would heal.

I’d forgotten how to sleep but never how to dream.

I laid in bed long enough to watch the shadows change
long enough to watch the sun fall out of the sky
long enough to watch the sun run and hide
long enough to see the shadows disappear into themselves
folding inward like this city once collapsed on itself,

but soft and calm is the morning light as then
the sun began to rise.

SuperVision.

another response to symmetry hunting.

Such a book opens windows I've never opened before. I've never thought of symmetry as nature repeating itself before. It's intriguing to see the patterns that all objects have taken on, the ways that (with slight addition of color) we can see the some of the greatest artworks of all time already occurring in nature, painted by God's own hand.

Here is a poem inspired by the symmetry found between the art of Van Gogh and the super vision of Ivan Amato.

Patterns.
Symmetry.
It's all repetition.
repercussion.
reverberation of the soul's cries.

If a sunflower painted by a man long dead
can equal the moss growing, rootless on cables;
If a night shining, swirling, by light of far flames
can equal the cancerous cells of canine skin;
cannot the cries of a broken heart be dismissed
as echos of crickets in fields dampened with dew?
cannot the ache of separated souls be blurred
as the soothing murmur of the hummingbirds' wings?

symmetry hunting.

a response to symmetry hunting.



I decided to hunt for some symmetry of my own. This is what I found. man-made symmetries, things we've convinced ourselves are pleasing to the eye. I can't help but wonder how different our world would look if we had chosen to like asymmetry more.

These benches are not the same. But their images are somehow symmetrical. Could it be the reflective symmetry that was created when the second bench was flipped?



I think we like symmetry because it seems to balance. When the world is symmetrical, we don't fear that we'll tip over.

merging.

another response to surface delights.

Yannis Ritsos: The Meaning of Simplicity (p.92-93, poems for the millenium)

I hide behind simple things that you may find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand touches,
the imprints of our hands will merge.

The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a pewter pot (it becomes like this because of what I tell you)
it lights up the empty house and the kneeling silence of the house-
always the silence remains kneeling.

Every word is a way out
for an encounter often canceled,
and it's then a word is true, when it insists on the encounter.

I really enjoy this poem. It makes me wish I knew Greek like I do French so I could go to the original text and experience it as it was created. The idea of a surface being able to carry the touch from one person to another is fascinating. I am currently seated in an old chair my roommate bought at a garage sale. The bottom is stamped Jan 15, 1959. I am unaware of the number of individuals who have seated themselves on the very vinyl I am now touching. But I touch what they touched. The imprints of our bodies have merged. I wonder, who I sit with, whose imprints mine have merged with.