The rings on your fingers are lies,
You don’t nessearily know that
The dots inside your eyes revealed all your deepest secret.
You didn’t notice.
cut out nails and lost eye lashes had star-dust in them,
We both decided to ignore that.
darkness under eyes
Talks about broken dreams.
We couldn’t hide them.
Gravity didn’t matter
Because we stopped living long back.
We wait in forever earning
To die or to hide.
Words are mistaken all over the world.
You sighed.
Audrey Lorde, being a “black-feminist-lesbian-mother- poet” explores her identities with vivid themes and imagery in her poem Coal. In this poem she breaks out the silence and speaks out about herself and how words can be used to give name to new feelings. In the title poem “Coal” she asserts and celebrates her blackness. This poem is a reflection of Audre Lorde’s personal relationship with society and herself as she understands them.
In her essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Lorde says that poetry is the ways we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. “As the poem starts she continues describing the process in which things and words come into being. The poem begins with an “I”, and continues in the second line to say “is the total black”. She separates herself from the total black here, indicating that her true self is not necessarily within that “total black”. The “I” she states have a double-consciousness; the coal is the outer from and from the coal, from the darkness the diamonds and lights comes into being.
Like a child coming from mother’s womb, like diamond from coal and like words coming out as sound she emerge from her black self, she comes from earth’s inside. Our true self is not colored, just like diamond it shines. She goes on explaining and naming words and how some words feel like an ill pulled tooth with a ragged edge, and how some words feel like passing crash of the sun, how some words bedevil her. These imageries indicate her personal struggle as a black woman and how society with their power names someone black or white, and judge them with their origin of being. She delivers a perspective to create a better understanding of an individual and that individual’s growth and realizations of self-worth. Because of her black color she is no less, her true self is as pure and beautiful like diamond. Even though societies label makes her angry but still she love herself, she is celebrating her marginalized identities with strong resistance and power that is hidden like diamond. ? Lorde, in her personal life, alludes to elements of “Coal” in relation to her womanhood. She explains, “For each of us as women, there is a dark place within (Coal), where our true spirit rises, ‘beautiful/ and tough as chestnut/ stanchions against our nightmare of weakness’ and of impotence” (Lorde)
Unlike man woman speaks a language of feelings and emotion, and society use the language of patriarchy, the rational language. Lorde suggest that woman and people who are marginalized by society should words and poetry as a weapon, to show resistance and to protest against the labels created by society.
In this poem Harjo talk about the fear of unknown. The poem builds around the word “edge” which gives idea about geographical space as well as psychological state. Hajro usually gives her poem an abs tract and concrete meaning at the same time.
In this poem she is expressing Native American people’s struggles as well as other oppressed people. There are a couple of different ways to view this poem because the language is expressed differently than how people normally speak or write.”Talk back wards” “breathe backwards” can also indicates as a form of resistance to the oppression because she is also writing back for the people who were driven to the edge from their land. Fear is an edge that her spirit, symbolized by the horses, has a desire to break through. The horses are both “in their galloping flight,” thus attempting to run free and a “shadow of horses kicking / and pulling” her out of “her belly,” thus a gothic-type ghost, ripping out her guts. Her spirit is identifiably American because it represents the conflicts associated with a desire for freedom. The horse was an important spiritual icon to the Plains Indians and symbolizes power, strength, and survival. Harjo talks about the horse in these culture-specific terms but appropriates the horse as her own personal spirit animal that breaches the boundaries between American Indian myth and tradition and mainstream Anglo society. Harjo is concerned with personal, cultural, and spiritual survival. Horse is personified as good luck and the description suggest a transcended journey to the past to reconnect with her ancestor’s spirit. From the edge she takes a flight with the Horse but not to the ocean of fear but rather she take the flight to the past. In the Native American culture stories, myth and even words is filling with meaning and spirituality. Story telling is more like a ritual they share with each other. For Joy Harjo story telling is one if the way she thinks people can reconnect. Some critics suggested that “Sunday church singing” deals with the religious repression and guilty feeling that are rooted by the society and Harjo wants to break free from that. Her cultural believe in spiritual aspect of religion.
Harjo writes about and for the people who have lost their identity, land and have stories to tell. She wants to write a different version of history through her poems. “I’m writing first of all for myself…I want to write poems that excites me, first of all. But I also write for a larger community, with a sense of who I am and where I came from-that spirit of history.”
Ms. Sexton went out looking for the gods.
She began looking in the sky
-expecting a large white angel with a blue crotch.
No one.
She looked next in all the learned books
and the print spat back at her.
No one
She made a pilgrimage to the great poet
and he belched in her face.
No one.
She prayed in all the churches of the world
and learned a great deal about culture.
No one.
She went to the Atlantic, the Pacific, for surely God…
No one.
She went to the Buddha, the Brahma, the Pyramids
and found immense postcards.
No one.
Then she journeyed back to her own house
and the gods of the world were shut in the lavatory.
At last!
she cried out,
and locked the door.
If anyone asks you how the perfect satisfaction of all our sexual wanting will look, lift your face and say,
Like this.
When someone mentions the gracefulness of the nightsky, climb up on the roof and dance and say,
Like this.
If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is, or what “God’s fragrance” means, lean your head toward him or her. Keep your face there close.
Like this.
When someone quotes the old poetic image about clouds gradually uncovering the moon, slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe.
Like this.
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead, don’t try to explain the miracle. Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it means to “die for love,” point here.
If someone asks how tall I am, frown and measure with your fingers the space between the creases on your forehead.
This tall.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns. When someone doesn’t believe that, walk back into my house.
Like this.
When lovers moan, they’re telling our story.
Like this.
I am a sky where spirits live. Stare into this deepening blue, while the breeze says a secret.
Like this.
When someone asks what there is to do, light the candle in his hand.
Like this.
How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?
Huuuuu.
How did Jacob’s sight return?
Huuuu.
A little wind cleans the eyes.
Like this.
When Shams comes back from Tabriz, he’ll put just his head around the edge of the door to surprise us
Like this.
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“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.
A man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down.
Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himeself from a thing still too close to him in time.
The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgettin”
― Milan Kundera, Slowness
“somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose.”
Jessica Islam
ENG 445, Modern Poetry
14 December 2011
Modern Poetry: A Radical Shift from Conventional Poetry in Reference To
Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings and D.H. Lawrence
Modernist poetry in English emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. Inspired by Avant-garde they wanted to replace the typical romantics with daring originality. Modernists saw themselves as looking back to the best practices of poets in earlier periods and other cultures. Their models included ancient Greek literature, Chinese and Japanese poetry, the troubadours, Dante and the medieval Italian philosophical poets and the English Metaphysical poets. These writers believed that romantic art was over-subjective, and argued for a renewed emphasis on the object-like nature of the art work. The questions of impersonality and objectivity seem to be crucial to Modernist poetry. Modernism developed out of a tradition of lyrical expression, emphasizing the personal imagination, culture, emotions and memories of the poet. For the modernists, it was essential to move away from the merely personal towards an intellectual statement that poetry could make about the world. After World War II, a new generation of poets sought to revoke the effort of their predecessors towards impersonality and objectivity.
Writers at these time was seeking to create a modern mode of writing which would provide a flexible alternative to the Victorian mode, and satisfy a new aesthetic criterion based not on emotional indulgence but on the precision of the writing itself. In juxtaposition of subjectivity of romanticism, the idea of objective presentation style seemed more promising and revolutionary.
Writers thus took the risk of experimenting with new style, language and mainly completely changed the conventional way of poetry.
Modern elements in writing of some prominent writers will be discussed here.
Ezra pound was one the pioneer and major personality of modernist movement. His poems were the first glimpse of imagism and his experiment with style made people think outside of the box. He tried to capture a single moment with direct simple language in a way so that the aesthetic value of the moment remains true. The problem with romantic poets was their subjectivity ignored the total dilemma of life. So Ezra Pound presents the idea to write about the whole picture. He was influenced by the Greek language and Japanese haiku poems.
Greek inspired him because of the directness in the language and haiku poems mainly 3-5lines poem that holds Simplified version of truth and dilemma of life and express inexpressible Zen philosophy.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
In a station of the metro is one of the imagist poem of Pound describes a moment in the underground metro station in Paris in 1912; Pound suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro were best put into a poem not with a description but with an “equation”. This poem does not have any verb or apparent rhyme scheme and simile. In this poem we can see that a ghostly crowd moving and the two beautiful faces are compared with nature here. Interestingly here we can find almost all the modern elements, e.g. urbanization, eroticism and dehumanization.
Cumming’s typical style was blizzard of punctuation, the words running together or suddenly breaking part, the type spilling like a liquid from one line to the next. He hardly even paid any attention to the syntax of things. Cummings once declared,
“So far as I am concerned, poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality [. . .] Nobody else can be alive for you; nor can you be alive for anybody else.”
As a painter he adopt a style which was difficult to analyze but easy to feel. It’s hard to put any syntactic meaning to his abstract style of poetry. Cummings was also an artist, and took great pains with the layout and typography of his poems. He was a rebel who spoiled the young with his art but was not taken very seriously at his time. E. E. Cummings, for all his unconventionality, made use of many classical poetical associations, metaphors and devices: Spring – love-flowers and the contrast of love and joy with death and the human condition.
His ideology was that love, feelings, passion these are far more important than rational, constructive intellectualism.
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
…
kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
“Kisses are a far better fate than wisdom” might well be his goal, similar to romantics but he wrote in the language of modern man.He was driven by the idea “make it look easy.” The cynical tone and intellectual concern was missing but that does not mean that his art was any less than the other poets. The lack of formal conventional versification and of obvious rhythm and rhyme, conceals the great efforts that Cummings often made to ensure that the music and melody of his poems were perfect. These are evident in his readings, and indeed, several of his poems have been set to music.
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
The line is abstract and talks about distinct feelings. There can be many interpretation of the lines but no logical analysis. Use of unique figure of speech, lack of punctuation, grammatically incorrect, fragment and of course the use of lower case alphabet made him a rebel even among the modern poets.
Cummings’ poems, like the rain, and roses and stars and the magic of love, are there for readers to enjoy and feel.
D.H. Lawrence’s poetic work is often described as visionary, prophetic, and Romantic in intent. Furthermore, Lawrence insisted that his work be read as an autobiography. His poems are written in a very free verse form, unbounded by traditional structures. The results are fresh, arresting, and full of verbal dexterity. He was especially fond of writing about animals, flowers, and other aspects of nature – usually in a deeply symbolic manner. He was intrigued by the Freud’s psychological analysis and human mind.
Lawrence appealed to the Modernists because of his love of natural speech rhythms (a major part of Modernism was getting away from the stilted vocabulary and artificial language of the poets of the late nineteenth century) and also because his poems use a scientific objectivism when they describe animals Ezra Pound called this ‘direct treatment of the object. Pre-modernist poets usually described animals in a flowery and sentimentalized language, modernist tried to be as objective – even scientific – as they could. In many ways Lawrence’ animal poems go even further than the Modernists did.
In his poem “Snake” talk about a real story with the collectivity of myths, religion and physiological note. He was also influenced by metaphysical poets like George Herbert. He adopted the idea of shaped poetry from metaphysical poets and rather than showing the connection with god and human beings, he reveal the psyche of modern man. In the poem “snake” he show us that modern man is torn between the cultural education, religion and his own mind. How people lose control over the consciousness and unconsciously his primitive perversion for snake take over. Lawrence’s motive arises from his “accursed human education,” which teaches not only that venomous snakes are to be killed on sight but that the earth itself, creator and destroyer, is terrible. We see the procrastination of a man in this poem, the indecision if he should hit the snake or not. He indicates snake as one of the lords of life who is waiting for a second coming. The poem depicts a living creature that might remind one of the Christian God. Christ prepares for his second coming in which he will judge the good and the evil and send the former into heaven, and the latter “into outer darkness”; and the snake, Lawrence, suggests, is “Now due to be crowned again” like Christ.
His poem can also be read erotically, as Lawrence’s vision of a phallic serpent, the demonic seducer of Eve in the Garden of Eden, hanging out of and re-entering the body of a firy procreative Earth. Given Lawrence’s extraordinary visions of sex and death, such a reading can no doubt be sustained, although children of all ages, in and out of school, might be forgiven for missing the point, believing that he really did meet a snake one day at the water-trough and wrote the poem. Interestingly at the end of the poem he think for repentance and probably suggest that how modern man should seek salvation.
As Ezra pound declared “make it new” modern poets tried to break away the conventional way of writing poetry and moreover brought poetry to a new era.
Work cited
A Brief Guide to Imagism . poetry.org.web.
Bradbury,Malcolm and Mcfarlane, James. “The Name and Nature of Modernism”. P.19-55
Lancashire,Ian Commentary . 9.9.2002.
Kirsch,Adam.”The Rebellion of E.E. Cummings”.March-April 2005. Web.
“Reading and understanding E. E. Cummings.” Yu-hu.com. web.
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
~Sylvia Plath
“Strip me of my laugh, strip me of my smile,
Strip me of everything I wanted to be;
Strip me of my false pretense, and
Then all you’ve got left is me.
Take away my masks, take away my pride,
Take away all the things you only see;
Take away my fake disguise, and
I’m the only thing I can be.”
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