N+π: The Raven

When we first mentioned constrained poetry in class, my thoughts immediately jumped to the poem "Near A Raven," Mike Keith's takeoff on Poe's "The Raven."

"Near A Raven" begins thus:

            Poe, E.
      Near a Raven

Midnights so dreary, tired and weary.
Silently pondering volumes extolling all by-now obsolete lore.
During my rather long nap - the weirdest tap!
An ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber's antedoor.
"This", I whispered quietly, "I ignore".

Perfectly, the intellect remembers: the ghostly fires, a glittering ember.
Inflamed by lightning's outbursts, windows cast penumbras upon this floor.
Sorrowful, as one mistreated, unhappy thoughts I heeded:
That inimitable lesson in elegance - Lenore -
Is delighting, exciting...nevermore.

Keith has imposed a purely mathematical constraint based on the number of letters in each word. Beginning with "Poe, E." and continuing throughout the poem's 740 words, each one represents a digit or two of pi. One through nine letters indicate the digits 1 to 9, ten letters indicate a 0, and eleven or more letters represent two consecutive digits (usually 11 or 12).

N+7: The Roanoke Not Taken

A few notes on form:

What follows is inspired by Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled." I have taken each noun - pronouns of four of fewer letters not included - and replaced it with the word found seven later on the wiktionary.org word list (link to "R"). If this word is not a common noun, I have advanced to the closest word that is.
A special case arises for compound words nearly right off the bat. There are 54 words on the list that begin with "road", so I have taken the last such word and advanced seven from it. This principle will be followed when the word given in the previous paragraph has the original word as a root.



Two roanokes diverged in a yellow wool,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one travois, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undeservedness;

Then took the otitis, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better clair de lune,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morocoy equally lay
In leaks* no sterculia had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another dazzlement!
Yet knowing how weakening leads on to weakening,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sighting
Somewhere aggies and (ggies hence:
Two roanokes diverged in a wool, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difficultness.

*Leaks, the plural of leak, replaces leaves, the plural of leaf. Leaves does not appear in the list.

I think I'll try this sometime with an abridged dictionary -- it should separate the original and the result a bit more.

Feeding the Pear

"Feeding the Pear" in Waldrep, Disclamor, Rochester, N.Y.: BOA, 2007; page 64.

In high school AP English, the guiding light of our poetry analysis was "stay as literal as you can for as long as you can." That approach is nearly useless here -- no logical person would attempt to feed a pear, which of course means it is the perfect subject for a poem. Similarly, carrot sticks are the first things offered to the pear; even without questioning why the poet has carrot sticks at church, I would have tried countless other things (up to and including Carrot Top) before carrot sticks.

Will we ever know for certain why the poet chose carrots and sugar as foodstuffs? Short of finding G.C. Waldrep on the street in Lewisburg, Pa., quite likely we will not. Will we ever comprehend what the pear represents or why it must remain in the room (or, for that matter, how the poet obtained sugar from the fellowship hall given that constraint)? The same answer above also applies to all three of those.

Of course, that will never stop me from making (slightly-)educated guesses. I think the pear could be an ego, soft and easily bruised; of course, if those had to stay in one place, the world would be much simpler ... and we'd stay out of Alaska. Is it a debate? Those, too, hurt feelings, but similarly are nearly omnipresent.

The identity of the pear hasn't yet come to me. Maybe it will soon. Or maybe it will come in a dream during the next 5 a.m. downpour.

Maybe that's too grandiose . . .

Maybe

. . .

"Battery Alexander" - Waldrep

After several read-throughs of G.C. Waldrep's "Battery Alexander," the clearest thing to me was that George Calvin Waldrep's first two initials are identical to those of Goshen College. Then I wondered if the poem would make more sense written backward -- though I did not know it at the time, this reformatting technique is similar to one used by my classmate John Miller. In a fit of 1:30 a.m. rage, I made the rather strange decision that this would be a good idea to test and see what happened.

I decided to simply invert the order of the stanzas rather than the words within them to avoid creating a hodgepodge of random sentences in out-of-order groupings. The result is linked here, as Blogger cannot properly handle the spacing required.

I feel like the reversed version tells more of a story than the original does! True, this may be a placebo effect induced by the fact that I had actual influence in the revised production, but the flow feels greatly improved when the stanzas (stanzae?) are reversed.  The spacing is unorthodox and really rather annoying, but I do appreciate the stairs-landing-stairs effect of the descending lines directly above the final dividing symbol.

Waldrep used a different symbol there -- I replaced it with the radioactive sign because it was the closest thing I had.

Moodle Cross-Reference Guide

Below I have linked the responses I cross-posted from Moodle. The dates with which they appear on PPP are the dates on which they were posted, but this provides a place-marker for them when they were added to this site.

9/11 Poem Responses (Jan. 19)
T.S. Eliot Responses (Jan. 28)
"Heritage" vs. J. Alfred Prufrock (Feb. 4)

Welcome to PPP!

What is PPP? If you said purchasing power parity, points per possession, or perfect passive participle, you'd be right. Sort of. While all of these would fit the acronym, this PPP stands for Peculiar Poetry Philosophizing. It's a lengthy title, I realize, but that is why I made it alliterate -- therefore, the unofficial abbreviation will be PPP (or P³ if you prefer).

Peculiar Poetry Philosophizing is an offshoot of my English 210 class, Modern and Contemporary Poetry, taught by Ann Hostetler at Goshen College in the Spring 2011 semester. Here I will post various musings as they transpire (or are assigned). Sometimes the posts will even be at odd hours such as this one — although I suppose 2 a.m. is technically even, it would be 1 a.m. if Indiana understood the geographical basis of time zones.

As the previous sentence shows, I make no guarantee that my logic is perceptible to anyone else.

Until next time, keep the creative juices flowing!

"Heritage" vs. J. Alfred Prufrock

CROSS-POSTED FROM MOODLE -- 3/6/11 23:28


I think that “Heritage” seems less American at first glance than “Prufrock” does. But upon closer inspection, that would imply that people of African descent were non-American, and clearly that is untrue. So perhaps the better statement is that my first response was that “Prufrock” seems to fit more into traditional Western thought than “Heritage” does. That could be interpreted to mean that non-Westerners cannot assimilate to our culture, which was not my intent. At any rate, you have my initial reaction – now I am going to stop before I wedge my foot further into my mouth.

Moving on, I don’t see a whole lot of new in either poem; maybe it’s my definition of new that is skewed. Before I wrote this post, I intentionally put aside these poems for a couple of days to see what about them would stick in my memory. For “Heritage,” it was the memory of thoughts of Africa, which Cullen speaks of in the past – almost as if he were expected to be more nostalgic for it than he is. In “Prufrock,” the major mental image is of the middle-aged, balding guy with parted hair walking by the seashore in rolled white pants while eating fruit. That image, I think, remains in my head more because it is rather disturbing than for any poetic reason whatsoever. It reminds me of my grandfather – or would if Grandpa liked fruit and owned white flannel trousers.

For something known as “modernism,” harkening back to Africa, white flannel trousers, and mermaids seems relatively outdated. And in this era of political correctness, it seems strange that I’d have stuck my foot so far into my mouth so far that it’s hit my stomach. Extricating that before class could be a challenge.

T.S. Eliot Responses

CROSS-POSTED FROM MOODLE -- 3/6/11 23:22

A response to the number of questions in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":


I count twelve occurrences of questions, but only nine questions, as variants of "how shall I presume?" occur thrice; "Do I dare?" is written twice in the same line.

This is not at all related to questions, but were I a mermaid, I would have no desire to sing to an aging man with his hair parted, eating a peach, and walking along the shoreline in rolled white flannel trousers.


"The Wasteland," sections IV and V (originally posted 49 minutes after above)


I agree with Daniel's assessment of Section IV to an extent, but it almost feels like the intensity of the cautionary tale is almost magnified -- not a warning that this CAN happen, but that it WILL.

Similarly, there is no denying that Section V is disjointed and discomforting. As I read it, my first thought is of someone perishing in the desert, like Jeremiah's vine (with added vultures for cinematic effect). Continuing, then, along those lines, is it possible that the first part of the final stanza (lines 425-7) are a sort of final flashback? Fishing does not seem logical as an action for the life stage at which the rest of the section places the protagonist, nor a likelihood that near to an arid plain, nor something one would do from London Bridge.

9/11 Poem Response

(CROSS-POSTED FROM MOODLE -- 3/6/11, 23:13)

My first thought upon finishing "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" is that Zagajewski never mentions how the world is mutilated -- the second thought was that I usually see the negatives (the exiles whose homes are overrun, for example) rather than the positives, perhaps more of an optimist/pessimist dichotomy than Zagajewski would have preferred.

In "Alabanza," coming to the poem with a knowledge of baseball history, the juxtaposition of the 9/11 airplane with Roberto Clemente's DC-7 in 1972 struck me. Clemente was flying to Nicaragua for relief efforts after an earthquake; his plane went down and all on board were killed, but it had no effect on the intended recipient. The attackers of September 11 knew into what they were getting, but the recipients had no clue what was to come.

"Dropping Leaflets" feels almost more like a collection of phrases than a more traditional poem; I think that enhances its mood, as especially in moments of crisis but often in the rest of our life as well we think not in long chains but short bursts. Particularly in the aftermath of 9/11 as I recall it, the only length to be seen was the path of those who (figuratively speaking) ran around in circles screaming.