Poetry Extended Journal

For my Last Journal I decided to do a research paper on both Billy Collins and Mary Oliver. Since I was at my College orientation on Friday and didn't learn how to write poetry, I decided it would be best to do research rather then attempt writing in a style I don't understand.

Here are the sites I used for research:
http://project1.caryacademy.org/echoes/03-04/Billy_Collins/Defaultcollins.htm
http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/Billy-Collins
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/265
http://www.maryoliver.net/biography.html

Collins
William (Billy) Collins was born March 22, 1941 in New York City. All his life he has shown proficiency towardswriting, "From day one, his talents as a writer shined through, as he was able to express his thoughts on paper well throughout grade school" (Khoury). In his lifetime he has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and The Guggenheim Foundation. Collin's most well known book is The Best Cigarette, to which he has recorded all thirty-three poems, and released the recording in 1997. He has won a plethora of awards, some of which include; Poetry Magazine's "Poet of the Year" in 1994, Literary Lion of the New York Public Library, and New York State Poet for 2004. His single greatest award was in 2001, when he was named the United States Poet Laureate. Billy Collins is alive today, living in Somers, New York, and a professor at Lehman College. He has also taught at Columbia University and Sarah Lawrence College. Collins has produced seven published books of poetry; Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, Picnic Lightning, The Best Cigarette, The Art of Drowning, Questions About Angels, and The Apple that Astonished Paris.

Oliver
Mary Oliver was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, on September 10, 1935. Oliver never graduated from college, "Oliver attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College" (poets.org). Despite having never earned a college diploma in writing, she has had great sucess. Her first poetry book, "No Voyage, and Other Poems, was published in 1963," (poets.org) and has since published many others. Her repertoire includes; Thirst (2006), Why I Wake Early (2004), Owls and Other Fantasies : Poems and Essays (2003), Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), West Wind (1997), and White Pine (1994). Oliver's poems tend to shape themselves around the beauty and complexity of nature, and have won her many awards. Her book, New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book award. House of Light (1990) won the Christopher Award, and American Primitive (1983) earned Oliver the Pulitzer Prize as well. Not only is Mary Oliver a poet, but she is quite a professional vocalist as well; "Mary Oliver has been writing and performing for twenty-five years" (MaryOliver.net). Mary Oliver is also still alive today, and resides in her house in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she continues to create works of poetic fiction.

Poetry Close Analysis

Mary Oliver's Happiness

For my class discussion poem, I chose Happiness, from Mary Oliver's American Primative. To me, a person who does not have to find hidden "powerful" meaning in each poem, I thought it was just about a bear on her quest to obtain honey, or her quest for happiness. but through classroom discussion, I learned that others felt it was both a spiritual quest for religion, as well as a sexual encounter between two women.

I saw Happiness as just a "she-bear"'s quest for honey; the poem details 'I' whom I assumed to be Mary Oliver, watching a bear in the afternoon. At first the poem seems to have negative meanings, as Oliver details the "Black block of gloom" whilst the bear searches in many trees for honey. Once she obtains her honey, she consumes it's sweetness until "maybe she grew full, or sleepy, or maybe a little drunk." After the bear is full and 'happy', she is described as an enormous bee, "all sweetness and wings" and Oliver describes roses and flowers in a happy tone.

The first point brought up in discussion that suprised me was the poem's sexual connotations. Most of Mary Oliver's poems seem to have sexual innuendos wrapped in them somewhere, I learned after our discussions. After some discussion, Anders brought up the point that this poem's diction seems to describe the sexual portions in a female form. "She lipped and toungued and scooped out in her black nails," is one of the main sexual phrases. Describing the honeycombs as "the tree's soft caves," in freudian theology, implies that the trees are female. The interactions between the she-bear and the female trees, the poem seems to take not only a sexual side, but a lesbian side as well.

Lyndsey Guthrey brought up an idea in discussion that did not provoke much discussion, but I found it very thought-provoking. To her the poem described a spiritual quest to find religion, and the happiness truly finding it brings. This meant a lot to me, as I aslo felt the poem was about a quest. So I re-read the poem, realating it to religion. The beginning of the poem starts with the "bear", or person, in a "black block of gloom," until she found it in the deep in the woods. Upon it's discovery, she "dipped into it among the swarming bees," immersing herself in the religion she has chosen. When she is 'full'y submerged in the religion, she acts as a bee, which I saw as an angel, and "let go of the branches...all sweetness and wings." The she-bear does the leap-of-faith and falling from the tree, ascends into heaven.

I originally enjoyed this poem because I thought it was simple, but through discussion I learned that it was just as deep, if not more so, as most of Mary Oliver's poems in American Primative. Poetry is a form of literature that can read many ways, and for different readers those ways can be entirely different.

Poetry Response Journal

Poetry is something that has proved to be very difficult for me to read. My complete ignorance towards poems was proven to me as I read the first few pages of Mary Oliver's American Primitive, and was surprised that it didn't rhyme at all. I knew poetry didn't have to rhyme every line, but I thought each paragraph was supposed to have some rhyming theme or something. These two books started off as very slow reads for me, with random pauses as the poems jumped lines for seemingly no reason, but as I progressed through them I suppressed my original negativity for poetry and let the words on the page float deeper into my mind.

I will admit that I haven't yet had time to finish the last 20 or so pages of Billy Collins' Picnic, Lighting, though I plan on reading them tomorrow morning in school. I have read more than enough to notice the similarities, as well as the polar opposites, between these two poet's writings.

Billy Collins' poems are for the most part longer than Mary Oliver's, but they typically have deeper meaning as well. In "Victoria's Secret", for example, Collins goes further than just describing himself paging through a catalog, he vividly describes the unhappiness of the models exposed to any and all curious eyes. Collins' writing had the effects of a deeper understanding in some poems, as well as a deeper confusion in others. I really enjoyed reading "What I learned today", where he describes his thinking process as he reads through a single page of an encyclopedia. "I Go Back to the House for a Book" was another interesting poem of Billy Collins that I personally found both very interesting and very confusing. He explains how by changing what he was doing he has split himself into two; the man who chose to grab his book, and "another me that did not bother to go back to the house for a book" (Collins 39). Throughout this poem Collins details his feelings on this person always being just in front of him, and the paradox of him not existing at all simultaneously.

Mary Oliver's poems were much shorter and quicker to read. While Collins' poems seemed to focus on himself and other people and their interactions and reactions with life, Oliver's writing seemed to wrap itself around the beauty (or ugliness) of nature and the animals living in nature. She has many poems about ponds, or beautiful sunrises in the morning, but she also incorporates grotesque imagery of a crow's "wings crumbling like old bark. Feather's falling from your breast like leaves, and your eyes two bolts of lightning gone to sleep" (Oliver 9). For me personally the contrast she uses between different poems, or even in the same poems, has the effect of making me more connected to the text, and I felt like I had a deeper understanding of them. One poem I enjoyed reading entitled "John Chapman", was about a man whom, "Everywhere he went the apple trees sprang up behind him lovely as young girls" (24). Is this Johnny Appleseed from old legends? Why does she call him John Chapman? Another poem is called Chapp's lake, so I'm wondering if the name Chap has some significance to Oliver unknown to me?

After reading these two poem books, I've realized poetry isn't as bad as I thought. I'm not about to go and buy a bunch of poem books necessarily, but I have a better understanding of them now and can appreciate the complexity of them. Some of the poems were confusing and/or boring for me, but quite a few I found to be shockingly interesting. They had vivid imagery describing nature, as well as deeper meanings that go far beyond what is on the pages. Unfortunately, most of my favorite poems that I wanted to keep reading are the shortest, and end abruptly. Overall though, my poetry reading experience turned out much better than I had first expected.

The Sorrow Of War: Extended Journal

For my extended journal I decided to make a poster containing much of the slang and Jargon used by Vietnamese Soldiers as well as Americans. I stumbled accross a "Vietnam War Dictionary" while looking for sources for my Literary Analysis, so it didn't take me long to figure out what I wanted to do. I searched google.com and found a few sites to take definitions from. To pick what words to use and design the poster took about two hours. I found this really interesting especially what opposing sides nicknamed ranks/positions and weapons.

Here are the websites I picked my terms from:

http://www.ktroop.com/language.htm
http://www.imnahastamps.com/military/militaryterms.htm
http://www.vietnamgear.com/glossary.aspx
http://www.angelfire.com/mn/nathanlee/vietnam_dictionary.html

Persepolis: Creative Extended Journal

Persepolis 1.5: The Story of a Plane flight

For my extended journal on Persepolis I wanted to make something creative. Since I also read Persepolis 2, I know that Marji had a hard time adjusting to all the different cultural beliefs and sexuality differences. So I decided to make a comic strip of her plane flight to Austria. The goal of the comic is to get the point across that although Marji was striped of the majority of her childhood innocence at an early age, she is still only fourteen, and has a lot to learn about life outside of the oppressive Iranian regime.

It took me approximately an hour to come up with the idea for this journal and write out a basic script with the details I wanted to include. I am just beginning the process of drawing my comic, and due to my lack of artistic skill, I expect it to take another two or three hours to finish. I don't think it's possible to post it here, and I wasn't planning on presenting it in class, so if anyone is interested in looking at it (or Persepolis 2 for that matter) just let me know and I'll show it to you.