Performing “Apparently with no surprise” (Fr1661): The theatricality of Emily Dickinson

In an essay I discussed with my students last week, Brenda Wineapple characterizes Emily Dickinson as "original, difficult, theatrical, perceptive, witty". We found the idea of Dickinson's theatricality especially helpful in discussing the late poem "Apparently with no surprise" (Fr1661, 1884), which we even performed with three students and me playing the roles of the "happy Flower", the "Frost", the "Sun", and the "Approving God":  "Apparently with no surprise / To any happy Flower / The Frost beheads it at it's play - / In accidental power - / The blonde Assassin passes on - / The Sun proceeds unmoved / To measure off another Day / For an Approving God." (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 15 October 2024) 

Donald Trump demonizing “illegal immigrants”, all immigrants, naturalized citizens, and all citizens who oppose him

Ever since he began campaigning for President in June 2015, Donald Trump has demonized immigrants to the United States – mostly those he considers "illegal", but sometimes also those who enter the country legally. On Friday, 11 October, though, Trump's advisor Stephen Miller called for "denaturalization" of immigrants who have successfully applied for and received United States citizenship. And yesterday, on Fox News, Trump even called for the National Guard or the military to be used against those citizens he sees as "radical left lunatics." As I noted after a burst of similar rhetoric from Trump last November, anyone who opposes him can become an object of the violence he calls for. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 14 October 2024)

 

• I take the recent points from this post by Heather Cox Richardson.
• My post from 14 November 2023.

Metrical variation in Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023)

Terrance Hayes's poem "How To Fold" ("So To Speak", 2023) begins with dactyls: "Seated alone at the edge of the bed". The poem is in couplets, so the second line could balance that tetrameter with dactylic trimeter, but it turns to troches instead: "grasp the finest fabric first". That could establish a pattern for the poem: alternating lines of dactylic and trochaic tetrameter. But Hayes's third line shifts to iambs: "the shrunken sock or silk softest to touch". "Softest" is a trochaic substitution, but that's not unknown in iambic pentameter lines. The continuous movement between several meters in Hayes's poem models how "free verse" can make use of variable metrical effects. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 13 October 2024)

 

  

Terrance Hayes’s poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm”, PechaKucha, proper names, and Isamu Noguchi

Terrance Hayes calls his poem "Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm" (from "So To Speak", 2023) "an analogue PechaKucha", a Japanese presentation form that involves making twenty-second statements about twenty slides. In my Contemporary Poetry seminar, we discussed the proper names in Hayes's poem: Kafka, Whitney Houston, Dionne Warwick, Matisse, Picasso, Hitchcock, and Isamu Noguchi. As none of us had heard of Noguchi before, I gave the students two minutes to prepare a twenty-second statement about what the poem says about him, and then called on students at random to make their statements. Afterwards, we looked him up: Noguchi (1904-1988) was an Usonian artist, furniture designer, and landscape architect. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 October 2024)

[Hayes’s poem is online, but he revised it considerably for book publication, so here’s the poem as it appears in “So To Speak”]

Do Not Put Your Head Under Your Arm

Terrance Hayes, "So To Speak", 33-36

 

An Analogue PechaKucha, 2020

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

It appears I will never be remembered

as a great singer nor extravagant eater.

Either I am standing or I am dreaming.

Or I am standing near the mouth of a theater.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

One early & deeply progressive symptom

of the Kafka Virus: a stream of movies seeps

into the shell of the infected individual's sleeping.

Dream factors greatly in the disease.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I accept I may never get over the ways my mother

loved me poorly. She is close to god in me.

On a planet without surefire

gods & mythologies, there is family.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Inside the stream of Whitney Houston's

voice, Dionne Warwick warns,

"You're gonna need me one

day. You're gonna want me back in your arms."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

There are no ugly people, only expressions

of uglinessm when the mouth is set

this way or that. It's best to think of time

the way a miser thinks of money.

 

¯\_(' ')_/¯

Matisse liked to have the nude near to see her,

but Picasso liked to close his eyes upon her.

What I remember of 1987, is mostly what I remember

of '88 except with different deaths & births.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

If you watch Hitchcock's Vertigo

the other way round, you may notice 

inside the movie is a whole other movie

told from the point of view of the young lady.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Each new pair of glasses assures things

never look the same, but several glasses

of liquor can create the same feeling.

Balance the morass & the molasses of jackasses.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

Even where I doubt the presence of God 

I am awed by the scale of creation. 

Any science suggesting all that happens

is coincidence, is nonsense.

 

\_('.')_/¯

"Intrepidation." "Misfortunate." "Ya-licious."

"Holy smoked turkey." "Attack of the third dimension."

I continue to half believe a fourth s

resides somewhere inside the word obsession.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Clap for a low back country road 

like a tree talking below a constellation.

A low back river talking twilight 

with the leaves clapping below a constellation.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Often right after taking a photo you immediately

crop or color the image so it seems

the doctored thing is the memory.

I'm not saying you have to lie to dream.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

I stream the sequel to a terrible disaster

movie where the protagonist searches for a lover

with the support of characters who meet catastrophe

helping the main character.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

The gun is lowered but then a toe

or two in the boot is shot & when the shoe

comes off, there's a hole a grandchild or two

a generation or two later can put a finger through.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Before the sleeping dream,

we are told to keep nickels in the glasses

of wine by our beds. The virus seems

to have some relationship to cash.

 

¯\_('.')_/¯

Clap for Tetris, the video game

that teaches you the most geometry for life.

Stacks of boxes of books, closets of hangers

and monster angels and historical fabrics.

 

¯\_('-')_/¯

I was struck by the sky of my South

Carolina. It made my mouth ache.

I was old by the time I heard the prophet

Isaiah used to preach naked.

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Ghost, the loss that broke you was so

ubiquitous, I failed to see it lingering in the ether

like the misspelled affections that go

undetected by both letter writer & letter reader.

 

¯\_(--)_/¯

Often I confuse Vivamus, moriendum est,

which means "Let us live, for we must die,"

with Bibamus, moriendum est which means "Let

us drink, for we must die."

 

¯\_(:-|)_/¯

Isamu Noguchi sculpted the marrow

of a black stone into bamboo & planted husks

of live bamboo shoots to guard it. I know

this ragged clock waits to be clogged with dust.

 

The magnificent career of Rafael Nadal

Early on, Rafael Nadal made this Roger Federer fan suffer by beating him at the French Open four years running (2005 in the semifinal; 2006 to 2008 in the final). But I learned to appreciate Nadal's compelling style, especially on the clay courts at Roland Garros, with his fourteen titles, 112 wins, and only four losses. Even though his clay-court style had been around for seventeen years by the time he last won it in 2022, only three players ever figured how to beat him there: Robin Söderling (2009), Novak Djokovic (2015 and 2021), and Alexander Zverev (2023, when Nadal was suffering from the injuries that have now ended his career). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 10 October 2024)

Finding Coover’s "The Universal Baseball Association” on a library shelf at Stanford in the 1980s

Regarding Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop." (1968), I remember now that I did not read it in school when I played tabletop baseball games, but in college a few years later. I worked at Stanford's Meyer Library shelving books, and when I shelved one by Coover, I recognized him as the author of a novel about such games, so I checked it out and read it. By then, I had already begun reading literary criticism, so I dug up an article about the novel. To my amusement, the scholar did not know those games actually exist, but thought that Coover had completely made them up. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 9 October 2024)

SwissPass, the Swiss Federal Railways, and the “enshittification” of customer service on the internet

The internet's "enshittification" (Cory Doctorow) includes how companies make it hard to contact them. I received a suspicious-looking email from SwissPass, a service of the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB). Although it wasn't phishing, I replied to mention that it looked like it was. It was a no-reply account. The SwissPass website has no email address or contact form. I found an SBB Customer Service email address. An auto-reply said it's no longer used. That reply mentioned a "help and contact" page – which has no email address or contact form. Both sites offer phone numbers to call – but not toll-free. I finally wrote them using a form for complaining about train personnel. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 October 2024)