Ross Gay's Bringing The Shovel Down

This poem in particular resonated with me. Not just because it's the manuscript's title poem, but because of the way it's written: though the narrator is talking to a loved one throughout the entire poem, it feels like he only is talking to him/her at the beginning and the end. The middle is the narrator telling a story, ostensibly to the loved one, but truly, to no one in particular. He just had to get the story out, since it felt like "a river burns inside [his] mouth."
And I love how the narrator wants to get as much emotion out of the story as possible. At one point, the narrator says, "unnamed it leads to less heartbreak, so name him Max." Ross Gay is making it obvious here that he is saying: I want you to feel this.
As the devastating story continues, we get lost in the narration. We (or at least I) forget that the narrator is talking to a lover. Then, in the last couple of lines, there is an abrupt transition where he begins to talk more obviously to the beloved. This switch in tone reminds me of a manic person trying to pretend he's sane. It says "I am fine" with a crazy-eyed smile. I'm not sure if my reading is accurate, but I think that the "unnamed boy" is the narrator himself and that this abrupt switch in tone mimics the mania of the narrator after having "brought the shovel down," so to speak.

Bringing down the Shovel - Ross Gay

I am exhilarated by the constant theme of violence and human fragility in Ross Gay’s poem in “Bringing down the Shovel.” Many of his poems address a wider consciousness of the world as well as individual stories that shield light on pity, rage, terror, and grief in order bring the realities of these emotions embedded into the human condition. Gay also employs a variety of voices in his subjects that bring to life the multifaceted emblems of our sentiments.  Love, You Got Me Good is especially condescending in the juxtaposition “couples names” and the descriptions of how they make the subject feel. One of my favorite lines form the poem is “When I dream of you / I hear footsteps on my bones” (line 5,6). I like the utter morbidity of this allegory and the variety meanings it may suggest. My interpretation is that when he thinks of this person, he hears him/her/it crunching on death. In this instance, there is either something really wrong with him or something not quite right about the third person.

Week 12 blog post

In the poem, "Love, You Got me Good," Ross Gay mixes traditional terms of endearment with horrible scenes of death and war to show that love is hard and not always what it's cracked up to be. I think that my favorite line is "When I think of you / I see fire." I like that you read the line, "when I think of you," and believe that the next line will be something pleasant, but it ends up being the opposite.

I am also deciding to respond to "Isaac" because I found this poem to be confusing yet completely enthralling. I found it effective that Gay uses descriptions of animals in the first stanza and juxtaposes that with scenes of a father abusing his son in the second stanza.  By the third stanza, I am clear that this poem is supposed to be about the Bible story, but the scenes depicted in the final stanza confuse me. I think that Gay is saying that Isaac's brother rode on a horse and threatened to kill the father with an arrow if he killed Isaac. Therefore, this would mean that the father's lie is when he told Isaac that an angel sent from god told him to sacrifice his son. I have no idea if I am completely off base here, but I figured I'd give it a shot.

Ross Gay #1

I actually was surprised to find that I enjoyed Ross Gay's style of writing. I am honestly not a big fan of long poems but I was appreciative of the underlying themes that he covered. I feel that Gay's poetry allows the reader to re-imagine different aspects of the use of power. These poems give a sense of how all humans, despite wherever they are in the world, are united in the emotions that they possess. I am interested in the philosophical meaning behind each of his poems and I am excited to see each page contributes to one/a few underlying meanings.

David Bowie

Although I never heard of him before Monday's class, I was happy we got a chance to listen to David Bowie. His song "Five Years" was really amazing and intriguing. The song was about the world ending which scientist have been trying to predict for decades now. His description of the last things he would do and see really cause on to think about what would they do if they knew life as they knew it was ending. One thing that I did not notice until it was brought up was the significance of the third section. With the end of the world being near chaos is bound to occur. So he has a woman, usually known as being a caregiver, attack children. On the contrary he has a black man, stereotyped as being violent, is the one protecting them. As the end of time he also expresses life regrets like not spending more time with his mother and kissing his "crush". It was a great song to listen to and he showed a significant amount of emotion.

Week 12 post about "The Museum of Obsolescence"

I really enjoyed reading the poem "The Museum of Obsolescence". Museums are always very interesting places especially for science. The idea of preserving our past even if in an artificial manner. The lines "Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books/ Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars." really stand out to me. Mostly because war itself is the direct reason for many advances that have been made in the science fields. Wars cause many injuries whether they be mental or physical. With new war techniques always developing medicines and treatments had to be created to cope for them.

My favorite line/phrase in this poem has to be "The replicas of replicas". It was brought up in class how this is closely related to the theory of being removed from the truth. Things lose valuable and meaning the more they are separated from the original. It is similar to the game "telephone" played by children.  

Week 12: Science Fiction Poets

Tracy K. Smith writes haunting poems that projects herself as a judicious agency of the collective unconsciousness, and a great sense of unknown vastness and uncertainty. There are themes of race, politics, and meditative speech throughout "Life on Mars." She speaks largely the conception of what it means to be American, in addition to attached to particular religious, political, and economic statuses. She often comments on the decline of culture and de-evolution on the human race. She deals with the parse dichotomy between irrationality/illogical notions and the 'ordered' world. Her poetry leads the reader into experiences that expand their understanding of a vast variety of topics and conflicts.

One of Tracy's poems that I liked the most was Cathedral Kitsch. Kitsch refers to something of showy cheap design, appearance, or content crated to appeal to the popular on nondiscriminatory taste. I thought the connection between things 'kitsch' and grandiose embellished cathedrals. However, I did not agree with her assigning a specific gender to God, unless it was intentional to the meaning of the poem. It is interesting that churches are intended to make you feel like a community and secure, however many of them are built so vast and tall that they end up making you feel small and insignificant. I believe it was a commentary on the major expenses poured into architecture and possibly the some of the corruption within the church in the recent years. He also references the organ of the church as an ominous presence.  I had difficulty comprehending the last two lines of the poem.

Week 11 blog post

After class on Monday, I noticed a lot more things about the poem. I now enjoy the fact that he made such short stanzas. I find it effective because it keeps a continuity throughout a poem that has random line breaks. Beyond that, I find it effective, but ultimately frustrating that he does not use punctuation like periods in his work. It is hard to get a foothold when everything is one continuous sentence. I found his discussion of terminal cancer in the latter half of his poem to be moving due to its conversational tone and introspective result on the part of the speaker.

Ammons

After discussing a bit of Ammons' poetry in class, I have gained a larger appreciation for his style of poetry. I think when I first read his poems, I felt there was no depth to his poems and was extremely confused for the most part. However, after we discussed his style in class, and his intent NOT to make everything funny on purpose, I really started to develop an appreciation for the way he writes. After reading Ammons' second portion, I felt that his message is a little more clear, yet at times I feel he digresses from his original intention. To be honest, I was quite confused once again in reading this, but I felt more connected to Ammons' personal style. I feel that his style is essentially a type of food you try at first and hate but after a while start to appreciate.

Week 11: Matter, Motion, Garbage

I found the dissection of his comfortable fear of death and his time between his current age and what still remains a mystery. The perspective he presents almost seems surreal due to his age, whether I will approach the a friends terminal brain cancer as apathetic and the state of my existence. I liked the shifts between mundanity and philosophical questions about the state of our language and what it means about us and to us. I identify as an introvert, as constant interaction tends to exhaust me, however sometimes I think to much to myself. Therefore a line that I particularly liked and connected to was

"You may sit this way for several minutes till the

void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient
with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself. "

An awareness of existence is necessary at times but to think about it before going to bed disrupts your sleeping cycle. He also talks about how we concentrate on feeling. Being about to Feel and Empathy makes us human.

"Garbage" isn't actually Garbage

Ammons book was not received very well by the class. I did share some of its sediments about its work. I agree that it was quite difficult to follow and quite confusing to understand. Part of the reason for this is that despite it being in a book format, it still is indeed is a poem. Much of the prose is difficult to dissect. He talks about many prominent issues that Americans face today. He discusses some science, a lot of Political Science, but I believe it still counts.

He brings up the prominent issue of Social Security within the book. He discusses its funding and how there is not enough money to continue to support it. He brings up medicare/medicaid as well which are also important and controversial government programs. It is very amazing how he could incorporate those concepts in the same poem where he brings up discussion about eating milk, beans, and eggs and which has the most protein.  

Mother Nature in a Pebble's Story

In class today we had some great conversations about Mr. Ammons' poems. They are indeed different and his style is very polarizing. Many students were not a fan of his long book poems, but I believe the shorter ones were received much better. The one that I believe has a direct relationship with science in particular is "Pebble's Story". It is essentially a very short poem that uses 4 lines and only two distinct words. It reads

Wearing away
wears

wearing
away away.

This is the erosion process rocks go through due to wind, water, and other elements. The rock is constantly being broken down by nature while another is being built up. Its a continuous circle that repeats itself. The true genius of the poem is how he was able to convey a message that takes up 100s of pages in science books in a simple mannerism. Part of the beauty of science is that their is a complicated jargon filled version that gets you published and studied, and a simple version that helps people understand.

Feeling As a Foreign Language

A.R. Ammons describes garbage in his poem Garbage, as a sacred image of our time. He implements borderline sacrilegious descriptions of a monumental landfill alongside I-95 in Florida.  While describing the aesthetic and action surrounding the garbage, he is able to sustain multiplicity in his diction and surrounding topics. His chose of language in describing the landfill revamp the language of what he is illustrating, explaining it in a new light and exploring vocabulary oddities.  A parallel I found compelling are the religious undertones he designated to the landfill. Ammons first alludes to ziggurats on section two page 18:

“the garbage trucks crawl as if in obeisance,

as if up ziggurats toward the high places gulls

and garbage keep alive, offering to gods

of garbage, of retribution, of realistic

expectation, the deities of the unpleasant

necessities: refined, young earthworms,

drowned up in the macadam pools by spring rain, moisten

out white in a day or so and, round spots”

The automated machine is crawling up the mount of putrid and neglect to pay homage to the “gods of garbage.” Ziggurats were massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley; it forms a terraced step pyramid of receding stories and levels. The comparison seems fairly loose considering the utter chaos landfills inevitability tend to be. I am having difficulty unwrapping this passage because there can be so many interpretations. Possibly that we are not sacrificing enough to God?

There are many other allusions to religion imbedded in the poem, another instance that Ammons suggests religious creed is on page 27 (pyramid), and page 30 (priestly plume rises above the junk).    

On Alice Fulton

Alice Fulton's poems "The Fractal Lanes" is very interesting to me. For one, the diction she chooses are rhythmic. She makes use of alliteration to stick a point to the reader's mind. For example, in the poem, she writes, "Can it be our comfort's / Derived from our dumbness?" Not only does this line please our ears and eyes, but it pleases our mind as well. It makes us think. Similarly, her line, "the ground we glide on then reside in holds more oxygen than the air" has a good rhythm too. The 'g' in both ground and glide, along with the beat of 'glide on then reside in' make us happy to read the line, while the idea of the ground holding more oxygen than the air makes us think. Reading her work makes me remember how important syntax and diction is, not for the sake of the sound alone, but for the purpose of enhancing meaning, which is the most important part of any poem.

Week 10 blog post

In the work, The Uncertainty of the Atom, Jordan makes the abstract physics concept of an atom something tangible through his ability to equate the atom to a superhero. By making the atom a superhero, Jordan normalizes its functions for the reader. For example, the phrase, "When I move, I deceive the eye of anyone looking," explains the concept of atoms being invisible to the human eye on a more understandable scale. Jordan is able to balance the ambiguity of the concept of an atom through his use of physical descriptors as well. For example, he says, "I can shrink to the size of a particle" and "I'll float like a leaf." By comparing the functions of the atom to objects people can see in their daily life, Jordan is able to get his message across.

Poems about Atoms

The poems about "atoms" are really intriguing and different. It is not often we think about how such small things impact our lives so much. The science of how the atoms formed and combined so perfectly and made us who we are. Knowing that our lives as we know it would be completely different and rearranged if one atom was absence or altered makes science amazing and scary. In one of the atom poems the superpower was being able to manipulate atoms. With that ability he could shrink and alter himself. Having one atom being able to have an influence on superheros and villains, and being able to pass through a door.

Cascade Experiment

Fulton's Cascade Experiment seems (to me) to be about the bias with which we see our world. Our constant thoughts affect how we see the world: how we read, how we write, yes, even you science. Nothing we see is exactly how it is, without the filter of a brain. That being said, I cannot see how we truly know anything.

I find the discussion of faith so interesting, albeit it sometimes irritating. So easily we allow our own vision to be influenced by someone else. I do not want to believe in something, or like Alice Fulton's poems illustrates, the lack of something, just because I am told.

Because truths we don't suspect have a hard time
making themselves felt, as when thirteen species
of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females
stay undiscovered due to bias
against such things existing,
we have to meet the universe halfway.

There is a reason we all see things differently, because if we all thought the same way there is a good chance those lizards would remain undiscovered. Alice Fulton uses science in a way to denounce science, or at least make it less cocky.

Week 10: Quantum Lyrics

A. Yan Jordan poetry demonstrates a great sense of ennui in addition to the persistence of memory and time. His application of knowledge of physics allows him to connect to his understanding of his past, because science gives him an outlet of some greater meaning and concrete answers his father never could give. In times of hardship or extensive contemplation about my past, having “definite” laws of the world help me cope with my ephemeral existence, such as gravity and mortality. One line that I thought was especially clever in insinuating a specific time frame without detailing the exact date was in “The Structure of Scientific Revolution,” where he states “even with digital cameras, there’s still a pointillist dotting flesh of the faces of my family.” His race seems to have a major effect on his writing. 

Week 9: Tao Lin

The poems by Tao Lin facilities juxtaposing imagery, motif of physical senses, and diction to loosely pronounce structured thoughts intermingled with a type of confessional poetry. The use of enjambments within the poem is two fold; first it splits the thought in addition giving a cheeky meaning to the cut off phrase. I admired his with references to pop culture and communication technologies that place a strain on the human interfacial projections and expectations. The confessional aspect of the poem is seem through the constant explanation of self and his possible origins, anxiety, confusion, and professed vulnerability. These confessional statements are paired with various contexts including an ambiguous relationship toward the reader and the arbitrary nature of his current experiences sitting in front of his computer screen.

Tao Lin’s poem “today is tuesday; email me on saturday”

I wasn’t sure if Tao Lin’s poem “today is tuesday; email me on saturday” was part of his “Eleven Page Poem,” but I would assume not since the addition of this page would make it a twelve page poem. Overall, this poem brought different parallels to mind. For example, the line, “i want to hold my face with your face” reminded me of a song by The Killers. There’s a line in the song, Bones, that goes, “ Don't you wanna feel my bones on your bones?” The idea of reducing desire to our skeletal features is chilling and I think Lin touches upon the same aspect, although I think The Killer’s line is stronger.

Another line that stuck with me is, “i miss you, and this describes life.” If life is all about relationships with other people and with ourselves, isn’t it fair to say that the sensation of missing, which involves thinking and reflecting, is what life is? And everything else is trying to forget about or replace what you’re missing? (Which essentially, in effect, proves the theory that life is all about missing.)

Tao Lin’s “Eleven Page Poem”

Tao Lin’s poem, “Eleven Page Poem” portrays a modern-day honesty that cuts firmly. By this I mean he does not hold back his sarcasm or thoughts, and he does not attempt to be polite. Politeness has no place in poetry. For example, Lin talks about masturbating throughout. Lines such as, “now I have to go do something to my penis,” and, “if this is to become a social situation i will be right back,” are so blatant and honest that I couldn’t help but chuckle while reading them. When he says he will be right back, I took that as he is going to masturbate, but there is a deeper meaning: he does not want to be around people. He wants to be completely alone with himself. I came to this conclusion based off his remark of feeling as though he is the only person alive at times.

I also love his misandry throughout the piece. He makes this clear when he says, “i have talked too much shit about human beings to go outside.” One of my favorite lines is, “i experience existential despair as a distinct sensation of wanting to lecture you on how i am better than you, without crushing your hopes and dreams.” Maybe I’m just a pretentious person (I can be) but I completely relate to this feeling. To further the humor in this narcisistic statement, he writes, “always remember that i am better than you, according to me.” What’s interesting about this line alongside the entire poem is that he never capitalizes “i.” I think this was an intentional artistic choice to describe the undertones of self-hatred that come along with hating mankind.

What We Are All Really Thinking

Tao Lin's today is tuesday; email me on saturday frequently mentions the idea of being classically conditioned to be without feelings or to act a certain way in social situations. This is interesting because often we are not able to point out what and how we learned how to act in these situations, through enculturation we grow up around it and it seems normal.

I read Hannah's post and I liked her idea of the poem recognizing those unable to read social cues and I think that point is interesting and could definitely be kept in mind while reading the poem. However, I think that this poem relates to how we all want to act against social cues, even though we know the "correct" way to act.

my favorite emotions include 'brief calmness
in good weather' and 'i am the only person alive'

No one says this, even though this is often enough how I feel. When someone asks 'how are you?' people will not know how to react to this answer, as true as it is. People expect an answer like good or fine, though these answers are general, unspecific, and sound often unpleasant to me, also to mention they are not emotions.

I appreciate the boldness of this poem and how it demonstrates what really goes on in a person's mind, without being fake or rational.

Week 9 blog post

Lin writes about people as hamsters because it takes personal feelings out the work and allows humans to separate themselves from the story. This tactic is similar to the mermaid poems we read earlier this year because the author used mermaids to reflect human problems back to the reader. I think that both authors do this because the separation they create between the reader and their problems allows the reader to come to new conclusions about their situation. This writing style helps people solve their problems more easily because they are not consciously thinking of themselves within the story about hamsters and mermaids, but when the problems facing those creatures pertains to them, the readers are able to solve the issues logically. Lin also uses hamsters because they show how unimportant some of our human interactions are with one another. These two friends spend their time talking about stupid, trivial things, like Bruce Lee, and fail to discuss the real depression and insecurities they face alone.

Week 9: Function Cue Cards

The way Tao Lin names states of being/feeling in the eleven page poem reminded me of working with young children who suffer from cognitive disorders. It seems like perhaps Lin is taking on a character who did not naturally understand human behavior to the extent most humans do, a character who had to learn each state of being/feeling as an item to memorize, not something that came of its own accord.
'good feelings toward you' ; 'brief calmness in good weather' ; 'i am the only person alive' ; 'angry face' ; 'people doing what they say' ; 'people thinking factually' ; 'people crying alone in bed' ; 'intense eyebrows' ; 'able to fall asleep faster at night' ; 'is accepting human dishonesty, unreliability and superstition  the same as accepting death limited-time, and the mysteries of being and existence?' ; 'is never not angry or sad'
These states/feelings are much more complicated than the cue cards I have worked with to help young kids learn to read facial expressions and understand social situations. Yet I can imagine making picture cards with a cartoon depicting each, to point at when someone got confused. Part of the magic is that the cartoon would be so hard to draw, potentially impossible.
This naming of states and feelings adds to the sense of the narrator as a sort of test subject. Another phrase that stood out was the repeated mention of "classical conditioning." It seems as if the voice in these poems needed to repeatedly practice each facial expression and situation to function to the extent that he could. These states of being/feeling are advanced, so this character seems to have learned a great deal. But even when repeating them, he doesn't seem to understand them fully as experience, perhaps just boxes with words and pictures that match something he was taught once.