Derrick Brown - The Kurosawa Champagne

I think the performance of this poem is very unique. I like the way the poet added music to his poem and the passages in which he sang his poem. It is very extraordinary way of reading one’s poem I guess. So music plays an important role in his performance. But it’s not just the music which makes it so special. It’s also the way he reads the poem and the way he stresses certain words in combination with his gestures. It made me feel his affection to that woman and involves the listeners I guess.

Actually, this poem is about the love of a man to a woman. However, through his language one can hear how desperately he loves her. His feelings to her make him even suffer and let him act in a rather self-destructing way. He totally surrenders himself to her which is emphasized through several passages in this work. Actually, he uses many negatively connotated words such as ‘hate’ or ‘die’, for instance, in the following passage: “You’ve a daily pill case but there’re no pills inside. It holds the ashes of people who died the moment they saw you.”

The way he described his’ woman’s beauty is also great: “The mathematical equivalent of a woman’s beauty is directly relational to the amount or degree that other women hate her. And you dear are hated a lot. You’re boots are soundtracked with adultery...” I like his formular of the beauty of women since I think it makes perfect sense.

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.

Writing Fiction, Chapter 4

I think developing characters can be very difficult. Especially, when writing, for instance, a short story one has to know before how the character is supposed to look like, how he feels in certain situations, and the general traits the author wants to portray. Generally, authors are assumed to “have the lucky, facile sort of imagination”. However, not every writer has this ability. Chapter 4 provides a good approach to this problem. It introduces a so-called Character Journal. How this is supposed to look like is described the following:

“Use the journal to note your observations of people. Try clustering your impressions of the library assistant who annoys you or the loner at the bar who intrigues you. Try to capture a gesture or message that physical features or clothing send.”

Honestly, I have never heard of this technique before, but I like this idea very much. Gestures can reveal so much about oneself without even knowing it. And many of these gestures are most likely recognized by the reader.

To conclude, integrating a character journal during the writing process helps the author to describe the character. And how, for instance, a character acts or how it looks like reveals the specific traits this particular character has. So this is a much better way to describe these traits. A text becomes more interesting when the reader is challenged I guess. That is why the author should avoid serving the character traits on a silver plate but rather show indirectly the character’s personality in the story.

Response on "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg

The poem is very special since it reminds me more on speech than on a poem I think. For instance, the long sentences, the repetitions, and the length of the poem itself. Moreover, it has a very persuasive tone I guess trying to make people aware of social issues. For instance, there are a lot of images revealing social criticism: there are passages dealing with crime, violence, drugs, madness as well as sexual references, for example:

“in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword“

“who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a candle and fell off the bed“

“who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts, who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy“


Moreover, the text is full of references which make it rather hard to approach its full meaning. However, I like the third part most where he directly addresses his friend Carl Solomon whom he met at Rockland. I have read that Rockland refers to a psychiatry. It’s interesting how the speaker experiences visions and hallucinations and how this is expressed through very unusual choice of his words or language in general.

Finally, Ginsberg’s language is very radical and violent. I think that is concerning the time this poem was created. I would have expected such kind of poetry some years later I guess.

Response on Joseph Heller's "Catch-22"

This excerpt is very different from what I’ve read before. What struck me most on the story were the last few lines. It made me want to know how this story ends. Why did the man punch the doctor’s nose? Actually, the doctor helped them and explained to them how to have sex. So why is the man that mad with the doctor?

Actually, there are more incidents in the story that are odd. Another thing was the sequence of Saint Anthony. I had to look up who this saint was. I found that he helps people against infectious diseases especially herpes. So does the woman suffer from an infectious sexually disease? If so, why doesn’t she know who St. Anthony is? And if not, why would she wear this necklace of this saint? Besides, I’m wondering why the doctor has no practice anymore? Is it because of the rubber dolls since he narrator tells that he had to “keep (them) locked up in separate cabinets to avoid a scandal”?

So what wants the author us to tell? I think there is some critique in this excerpt. I mean the narrator calls the newly-weds a „couple of young kids”. They have been married for one year and she is still virgin, moreover, both are thinking they have had sex without even knowing what sex is. So I think society has not prepared them for their adult life and marriage, respectively. Maybe that’s the point of this story.

However, I would like to know how this story ends and will probably read the full version of Catch-22.