ENGL 325 (Spring 2006)

     I thought that it was really interesting, and funny, about that long s that appeared in the old printing of “The Flea.”  I decided to look up older letterform and find out more about why texts appeared this way.  The practice of using the ſ in place of s died out before the 1800s in Roman and Italic type faces.  The International Phonetic Alphabet uses a similar symbol: ʃ to represent the “sh” sound.  There is even an example of a long s in the United States Bill of Rights. 

Some times French and German printing still uses ligatures for s’s though. berlin 2002

In calculus a version of the long s symbol is used to stand for the latin word “summa,” or sum.  The way it made us laugh in “The Flea” others have used the confusion between the long s and the letter f for humor.  The long s was never used to end a word.  For example the word sentiments would look like fentiments. 

            Another letterform used in the past was the “half r” or r rotunda, which was used to replace the letter r if it followed another letter.  This may have been to save space.  It certainly would not be able to give words double meanings like the long s though. 

Here you can see the half r and long s in the title Hystoriae ecclesiastica:

 

 

 

 

Cherrylog Road is a poem that depicts a boy and a girl having sex in or around Georgia during the 1930s to 1940s. There are three main characters: a boy, a girl named Doris Holbrook and her father.

What makes this poem rather unusual is the importance of the setting and situation. The setting in the story takes place in an automobile junkyard. The boy in the story exquisitely describes the different types of vehicles and automobile parts throughout the poem. The boy also gives the reader an inclination of the current weather conditions when he states “… Like a mouse in the southern-state sun.” This gives a hint that it takes place during the peak of summer in the southern United States. The situation brings suspense to the story. The boy mentions Doris; the girl he is supposed to meet may not be able to make it if she cannot escape her father’s eye. In the middle part of the poem, the boy primarily ponders whether Doris will be able to make it to the junkyard. Next, Doris arrives; the setting and situation then come together. The boy and Doris not only have sex; they do so in a place that should be off-limits to kids and only if her father knew what she was doing.

Another interesting note to make is how the author contrast’s youth and the age. This occurs in the beginning of the poem when the boy is describing the old, torn up automobiles in a junkyard. The boy and the girl represent the youth in the story. The boy is then excited further knowing what is going to happen in particular because it is risqué. It is not as if he was in bed at his or her house at night; instead, it is at an old junkyard during daytime, which increases his excitement.

The last three lines sum up how this experience had affected his life. When the narrator states: “Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever.” This shows the boy heading back home to his normal life; however, one may infer that he is changed forever.

Justin sent me this link to Brokeback to the Future, another movie trailer mashup that plays with form to produce new content. In this case, Back to the Future is recut so it looks like Brokeback Mountain–with Marty and the Doc as the starcrossed lovers.

Think about all the background cultural knowledge you need in order for this mashup to work–of form, of genre, and of course, of the original texts themselves.

Professor Matz dicussed on Wednesday’s recitation that form is how something is communicated, which depends on two things: one’s enjoyment of literature and one’s understanding of literature. Reading literature and enjoying it, he said, is responding to its form. I think this ties in well with his example of the TV series Survivor. Our enjoyment of watching the show would depend on both the form and content of the show. Its form may include the cinematography, editing, camera angles, etc. Likewise, our enjoyment of a poem is also a response to its form.

In class on Tuesday I was chatting with some peers who all agreed that “poetry sucks,” or more specifically sonnets. Having learned about the significance of form, we can see how form impacts and often dictates how we feel about a poem. Like professor Matz said on Wednesday night, when we think of a sonnet we think about the themes and its content which are often love and romance.

In E.E. Cummings’ poem [Buffalo Bill ‘s], there is no particular rhyme scheme or set pattern in which the words are laid out on the page, but the form is visually more playful and quickly-read than a sonnet. Its form ties in with its theme of youth. Space and indentation in this particular poem are important markers of a change in mood or an indicator of speed. Professor Matz discussed two literary concepts in form: close reading and genre. Both of these shape the content and the reader’s response to the literature. He defined genre as a grouping of literary works or productions that share a particular form, but also that the general rules of form for that genre may be broken or altered. E.E. Cummings’ poem is one example of a poem breaking the conventional “rules” of poetry and challenge the reader to look beyond its content and pay close attention to its visual markers.

One thing that puzzled me at first about Archibald MacLeish’s poem Ars Poetica is all the qualities that MacLeish thinks that poetry should have, or in some cases, should not have. He says that poems should be “mute,” “dumb,” “silent,” and “wordless.” These attributes seem to be the opposite of what many people would want a poem to be—we want poems to say something, to mean something, to be filled with nuances that require multiple readings to fully figure out (if one is ever able to fully figure it out at all).

Ars Poetica, however, also seems to follow its own expressed ideas of what poetry should be. The first line, “A poem should be palpable and mute,” seems to suggest that instead of explicitly expressing an opinion or meaning, a poem should try to paint a picture with words that is open to interpretation by the reader—thus causing the poem itself to be seen as “dumb,” “silent,” and “wordless.” The poem itself does this with vivid imagery filled with tangible visual details such as the lines “An empty doorway and a maple leaf,” and “Leaving, the moon releases/Twig by twig the night entangled trees,” which both bring to mind a picture of what each scene looks like.

Another detail that caught my eye was the repetition of the stanza “A poem should be motionless in time/As the moon climbs.” Sandwiched in between the repetition of these lines are two stanzas detailing the movement of the moon in the sky. This creates the sensation that, within the world of the poem, the moon is climbing yet the poem remains motionless, just as the line states.

At first, this poem had me very confused—I thought to myself, “But what does it mean?!” And then, upon further reflection, I realized that I was looking at it in the wrong way. The whole point of the poem seems to be that the question of meaning is irrelevant—the poem is there, open to interpretation by the reader. As Ars Poetica concludes in the final stanza,

“A poem should not mean
But be.”

 I think this poem is about struggling with death, loss and the inability to relinquish control over the finite nature of our lives. There is an urgency in the poem to “not go gentle that good night” which here I think means the darkness of the unknown(beyond the physical world). Somehow, in “raging” or in making that last-stand before the defeat, it seems more dignified than just letting go.

 There are parts in the poem that I found some difficulty understanding; for example, in stanza 4, line 13-14 “Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight/Blind eyes could blaze like the meteors and be gay/Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Also, how much should we, as the reader, let the fact that Thomas’s father was dying as at the time he wrote this poem? Can we say that the speaker and the poet are the same voice?

Here were my notes on “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver with some possible interpretations about the ending toward the end of this post.

Cathedral was a story about three people, a man, his wife and a blind man. The blind man’s name was Robert; he was in his mid-40s. He recently flew to Connecticut to visit his in-laws after his wife’s death from cancer(?). The officer’s wife originally had worked with the blind man ten years ago in Seattle. Since that time, the blind man and the officer’s wife sent video tapes back and forth to one another detailing what was going on in their lives. Since the man was an officer in the U.S. Airforce, they moved around a lot between different military bases. That did not stop the officer’s wife from sending tapes to the blind man.

The part we did not discuss in class was when the officer and his wife ended up in Sacramento. She attempted to commit suicide by swallowing many pills with gin. It was interesting as her husband was said to be away most of the time but he had just come home just in time and saw her passed out in the bathtub. He then proceeded to call an ambulance.

After this, her husband is not happy about the blind man coming to visit. There was some tension that the officer showed when he found out the wife of the blind man was Beulah. The officer was shocked he was married to what he believed was an African American woman.

When Robert arrives, the officer’s wife cooks dinner for them and they have many drinks. After the meal, his wife goes upstairs to put on her robe. It is during the time, the officer and Robert smoke weed. When the officer’s wife comes downstairs, she also takes a hit. The officer’s wife tells Robert his room and bed was ready; however, Robert was not ready to go to bed yet. Therefore, the wife decided to sit next to the men and asked to be woken up if she fell asleep. They started to watch some late-night TV.

One part that is open to many interpretations is the ending, the last three sentences where he states: “My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. It�s really something, I said.”

There are probably many things going at this moment, I did have two possible interpretations. First, throughout the whole story, he did not understand and was afraid of blind people; perhaps just for a moment he wanted to put himself in Robert’s shoes to see what it was like. A second, deeper point is towards the end, the officer’s wife wakes up and asks what is going on, Robert replies to the officer’s wife what they are doing as the officer himself did not respond. Could it be a possibility that the officer kept his eyes shut to obtain some kind of insight as to why his wife and the blind man hit it off so well? Overall, these last few lines can be interpreted in many ways, just my two cents.

Justin.