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)
andrewjshields
Tuesday, October 15, 2024
Monday, October 14, 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)
Sunday, October 13, 2024
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)
Friday, October 11, 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.
Thursday, October 10, 2024
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)
Wednesday, October 09, 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)
Tuesday, October 08, 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)