Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a very fascinating phenomenon. I can remember, when I was in elementary school I associated several colors with some of my class mates’ names. For example, I associated the name Kai with purple combined with green stripes, Christian with red, etc. Strangely, I did not associate all of them with a color.

I don’t know why but today I’m not able to combine colors with names anymore. So if I would hear, for instance, the name Kai I would not think of purple anymore, but just remember what I felt once hearing this name (as one example).

I’d like to have the ability to associate words or music with colors. It must be very helpful to see sounds or to hear colors in order to create poems or fiction.


In the following, I tried to pick out some lines from one of my poems and turned them into Synesthesia.

* (and escaped from the bitter paradise) where red roses are shrilly screaming…

* (the nights on the lake) when the dark water softly embraced us...

* the cruel pen who tears red wounds in the soft, white paper...

Resonse on Capter 11

Chapter 11 gives an overview of the different stages poems need to go through until they are finished. These stages are called “Exploring“, „Trying Out“, “Focusing“, and “Shaping“.
In my opinion, the most difficult step is to focus on the content. As the book explains in this stage it is important to “Sharpen[…] fuzzy spots- unintentional ambiguity, exaggerations, private meanings, confusing omissions, and especially purple passages“.

Another important step is the shaping of a poem- a process in which the words of the poem must be deployed into lines. The writer has to decide whether he or she wants to use free verse or meter, rhyme, or non-rhyme, etc. The structure of a poem makes it often more vivid and relates to the content especially in Marianne Moore’s poem “The Fish”. Shape and content represent an entity. The arrangement of the particular lines and stanzas, respectively, mimic the fluidity of water or even waves. This poem strongly reminds me on a German poem called “Das Karussell” by Rainer Maria Rilke. It is a poem about a carousel in which the speaker observes a carousel that features through miniatured copies of animals such as a “white elephant” or a “lion”. The striking formal feature is that the reader can perceive the carousel’s rotation since the “white elephant” occurs repeatedly and at frequent intervals.

Returning the Moore’s poem I think she did well in making poem and structure an entity. Trying to create an appropriate and challenging form makes a poem even more special, I guess.

Response on: Carson McCullers' The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories

Actually, I had some problems interpreting the excerpt. To begin, the story seems very odd to me: a hunchback and a strong woman fighting with each other. The excerpt can be divided into three parts. First, the speaker is describing the people watching the two protagonists wrestling with each other. The second paragraph deals with the woman almost winning and pushing the hunchback down. In the last part, the hunchback regains control of the situation.

It is interesting how language is used to describe the characters in this story. The protagonists seem to appear as creatures rather than human beings. The man, Marvin Macy, is characterized as “hunchback” with “clawed little fingers“. Besides, Miss Amelia is described with “strong big hands“. Both are fighting with each other while making “deep hoarse breaths“. The whole scene is observed by other quests in the café who are making “strange noises“, too. So the characters feature through their animal features which make them appear rather inhuman.
Besides their outer appearance which strongly reminds me on animals, their behavior is not human as well. They act like beasts: “It was a terrible thing to watch […] At last she had him down, and straddled; her strong big hands were on his throat“. Another passage underlines these animal features: ”Yet at the instant Miss Amelia grasped the throat of Marvin Macy the hunchback sprang forward and sailed through the air as though he had grown hawk wings. He landed on the broad strong back of Miss Amelia and clutched at her neck and his clawed little fingers”.As I mentioned at the beginning, this excerpt is very odd. But the way the author dehumanized the characters so that we rather think of a fight between animals than humans makes it quite interesting.