Fluorescence 6-19-12

          Today in class we talked about and went over poems from the book "fluorescence" by Jennifer K. Dick. in our group, we managed to discuss three poems: "she feels very small", "Anatomy", and "I Want to Take Back". the first one i want to talk about it "she feels very small". during the first read through, i felt it was a very random poem about a couple having sex, then a flood comes and the woman finds and apple and eats it, then it snows and the women hate each other. when we read and talked about it in our group, we noticed a few things that i hadn't noticed on the first run through. first off, we noticed that the fact that the women in the tunnel are innocent, until she eats the apple, then they are enemies. this could be a biblical reference, or a reference to Eris (Greek goddess of chaos) and her apple of chaos, which reads: "to the fairest". we also noticed that the title was not capitalized whilst other titles were. we assumed that it was because the girl felt so small and insignificant that her story didn't even deserve to be capitalized.

          looking at the poem "Anatomy" we assumed from the white pole and the tight-rope that they were in a circus, with two intersecting ropes for the walkers to walk on. at the end of the poem there was a lot of speak about eyes eyeing things, and we came to the conclusion that one of the tight-rope walkers fell and their eyes were staring up at the living walker. usually when people see a dead body for the first time, the sight that haunts them most is the blank stares that infect the eyes of the dead. the beginning was all very structured, then it drastically switched to:

     "as here, his voice behind my own larynx vibrating

     behind me eyeing the rail, no, between the rails, the wooden

     crossties. eyeing between. my voice eyeing, eyes eyeing me and it

     was there, slowing, our train so that"

we believe the man screamed as he watched his fellow walker fall to his death and then stare up blankly into the sky.

          when reading "I Want to Take Back", i'm not going to lie, it doesn't really roll off the tongue, but it does have a certain flow to it. we talked about the "figure" she was trying to take back, and we concluded that it was the ghost of her lover that she was either trying to get back from the dead, or forget about by moving all the furniture around.

Fiction Packet 2: 6-6-12

          For the fiction packet this week, i would like to talk about the story "Internal"  by Brian Evenson. i really like this story because there are a lot of different things to look at and a lot of different evidence to support a few different view points. The first and probably most obvious viewpoint to see in this story is a perfectly healthy intern at a psychology clinic, who, through the mind games of the doctors, gradually loses his sanity. The first doctor gives him the task of watching over his "brother" who is very mentally disturbed. Dr. Rauch sends him to a crappy apartment and orders him to take notes and psychoanalyze his brother who is in the adjacent room. through the time he is in this apartment he begins psychoanalyzing himself and eventually realizes that there is no one in the apartment, no brother. the next doctor sends him to a different apartment with holes in the walls (for observing) and tells him to watch over the person in the other room, who is in turn watching him. when he realizes that he is being watched he begins to doubt everything and is quite unhappy with the idea of being watched. he gradually loses himself in thought of being constantly watched and he tries to act how he thinks the other wants him to act, shown in the passage: "I am being observed. Make no false moves. Always gestures brimming with health" he gets violent and paranoid, yet he continues to move: "Observation must continue. close notebook, wait for the dim flicker of eye at hole again... Six drops of ink, all that remains to bring me to the cure. Forward."
          Another way to see this story, is through the eyes of a patient who is imagining all of it. some evidence for this hypothesis is the fact that everyone refers to him as "hardly the typical intern". the fact that both doctors send him to worn out apartments and all he is given to eat is corn chowder. he sits in these rooms all day thinking except when he meets and talks with a doctor. in the room with the holes in it, when he discovers someone watching him, he starts thinking about jabbing a pen through the hole into the other man's eye. he gets very paranoid and cautious when he discovers he is being watched as well as his thoughts seem to dissociate from reality. in the beginning of the story, when he talks to the doctor, he immediately assumes the doctor does not like him. also, when looked at from a far, the story is about authority figures giving him strange and pointless tasks that are designed to break him down. over all that sounds like the delusion of a mad man. 
          A third and final way i have found to look at this story is a way to make fun of psychology. the first doctor he goes to feels the need to analyze everything into types: "the nervous type, the squeamish type, the distracted type, the codswallop type, the broken-nosed type, the gangrenous type, the rubbed-purr type, the resurrective type, Eater of chowder type, gill net type, ect." some of these terms are ridiculous and don't make any sense, just like it doesn't make any sense to try and generalize the inner workings of a mind that varies greatly from person to person. the second doctor thinks that "gestures are the most accurate definition of mental heath" which is again, ridiculous. no person stands with a perfectly straight spine, not one has the perfect posture and everyone has different mannerisms that shape how the walk and talk and gesture. and finally how through trying to conform to these "standards" of mental health, our intern drives himself insane. i picture him at the end of the story, curled into the corner of the room, perfect posture, clutching his notebook and murmuring to himself: must keep observing, must move forward...

First Fiction Packet 5-30-12

          The fist story i want to talk about is "Survivors" by Kim Addonizio. The story is about a gay couple who are both dying of AIDS. being a biochemistry major, the first thing that caught my eye was the line "He and his lover were down to their last few T-cells" call me crazy, but i love it when authors use science in their writing, even when it is something as small as saying "down to their last few T-cells" instead of "dying of AIDS". the story goes on about how the one lover wants to die first, mainly because he does not want to deal with the other lover's homophobic family. in a way, i understand where the guy is coming from: when a gay couple is diagnosed with AIDS, people just assume that being gay killed their son/brother or whatever. when this is in fact not true at all.it seems as if in this story, the man is almost ashamed of himself and the way he lives, afraid of the judgement and assumptions that the other people will make. Usually when it comes down to a couple dying, if one wanted to die first, it would be because they didn't want to have to live without the other, not because they fear being judged.
          The next story i found interesting was "The Talking Cat" by Sharon Krinsky. the story is very short and reads: " i go to a performance . a man is talking about a woman and her cat. after the show, i meet the cat and he extends one of his front paws to shake my hand. he tells me he is happy to meet me and we have an instant rapport. the woman seems jealous" at first i had decided that the author was simply on drugs, then, upon a second reading i noticed that this may be referring to the fact that women tend to be jealous of everything, regardless of whether or not they are actually being threatened by it. example: a man getting along with her cat. is he gonna sleep with the cat? no. (if he was, she would have much bigger problems than being jealous) is he attracted to the cat? no. (unless you include the adorable fluffyness that most cats tend to possess).
          The last story i would like to discuss is "Resident" by T.J. Beitleman. because i plan on going to medical school, and the natural thing that follows med school is residency, i was intrigued by this story about a man who is doing his residency and feels overworked, empty, and all together burnt out, but still he keeps his dreams alive and pushes through. his apartment is a mess, which is to be expected when you are working constantly and come home only to eat and sleep, sometimes. it is often said that the residency is the hardest part of becoming a doctor. but still he pushes through. you gotta do what you gotta do. whenever you are faced with something that you don't want to do, if you don't have to do it, don't. but if you do, suck it up and get it over with, everyone has to do things they don't want to do. just keep your mind open and your dreams free.
         

Roberson Poem and Response 5-29-12

          The poem that i want to talk about is from the City Eclogue by Ed Roberson on page 101 titled "A Sampler". i really like how this poem goes into how non-verbal communication can say everything without saying anything. a lot of people fail to realize just how important non-verbal communication is to our language. i see a really good example of this when it comes to texting and smiley faces. adding different faces can add entirely different meanings to a sentence. for example: "i can't wait to see you" can become: "I can't wait to see you ;)", "I can't wait to see you :/", ect. each implying different meanings. you see this kind of thing a lot in conversations over the phone with different tones of voice as well as facial and body language when in person. the mind reads these different forms of language, but you do not always notice them until they aren't there. most of our language is non-verbal, and it is fascinating to me.

          My response reads:

no words escaped her lips,

no sound rolled from her tongue,

but all that needed       to be said,

was said,

words are, 

not needed      when,

a touch,

a scent,

a sight,

can say it all.

everything spoken,

through nothing,

everything said,

through light.

i think i did a pretty good job highlighting how important non-verbal communication can be if used right. playing around with the spacing and the words, in the end, i think it sounds pretty good, as well as highlighting and accenting the point i was making.

City of Eclogue 5-22-12

          Poetry is not exactly my favorite topic, but, i do love the way it opens the mind to different ways of thinking. After the discussions about the first half of the City of Eclogue, i found myself writing in my notebook. it seemed so natural, that i decided to revisit a place in my book that i had basically written myself into a corner, to my utter amazement, ideas flowed through my mind and i was easily able to answer a question that i had myself stumped with. This is the reason i enjoy poetry, the abstract ideas and concepts, that after discussing, the mind is running on different pathways and i cannot begin to describe to you how amazing it felt to feel that understanding flow through me.

          A few passages from the book really caught my eye, and piqued my interest. I want to begin with Page 41. i found the entire section of "Beauty's Standing" enlightening and mind opening. but i must say page 41 would be my favorite part of this whole section. i love how Roberson discusses the topics of Artificial vs. Natural beauty and how he so skillfully and elegantly shows how the media's ideas of beauty are corrupting the true beauty that is natural. "Into land people pour into to colonize      as artificial reef is sunk next to dying corals on the sea floor" as artificial reef is sunk next to dying corals on the sea floor. That just about blew my mind. such a beautiful representation of how the human race is killing beauty in pursuit of beauty, and how utterly pointless is seems from that angle. Amazing. it's depressing how people's ideas of beauty are so warped my modern life that they can't even understand why beauty is beautiful anymore.

          another section i would like to call into focus is page 46, again from the section "Beauty's standing". "Family values were always a disguise to hide the value a following had, to the families positioned to live outside values not profitable, to their Olympiad-- despite the toll-- values = mere votes for their pull." with the election upcoming, one can't help but see political advertisements all over the place. every candidate saying how they are going to do what is right for the people and how families matter to them. and every candidate saying how their competitors are unfit for the job. a big example that comes to mind is the accusations a while ago that Obama was a Muslim, and how absolutely horrible that was. people are looking for someone to lead them, something out of the ordinary (change), yet they are going to put down a man based solely on religion. and yet, Roberson goes to the heart of politics and the seedy underbelly that everyone sees, but no one wants to believe: politicians are going to say what they think you want to hear, in order to get votes. that is their motive. everyone has a motive for what they do, and looking too deeply into things like politics can without a doubt drive a man to deep depression, it is depressing. but as my government teacher said: it takes a power hungry politician to keep the other power hungry politicians in check. i believe Roberson used politicians as an easy target for his example, but what some people fail to see is, everybody has a motive for doing what they do, and it is not always what it seems.

Poetry Packet 5-15-12

        This week in creative writing we have been reading and discussing a poetry packet. the first page was some of the sonnets that Shakespeare wrote, i have always enjoyed how skillfully Shakespeare integrated sound and rhythm and words and concepts, as well as with his plays, how the deeper you dig the more you can find. anything that is left vague will be interpreted by each mind differently, which leads to some very interesting discussions on what different people "see" in the same piece of writing.
        On the page by Ted Berrigan (XV) i found it really interesting how he wrote his poem like a collage, to be read and understood from varying viewpoints. That is clever, because seeing things from different perspectives is what a lot of people in this time have trouble with, they can't picture and/or understand other ways of looking at the same thing. This concept is something i have worked hard to apply in my book, when you look at life in a 2D way, you are missing out on so much. At first his poem didn't make sense at all, reading in the way most people would, but when you read it from other ways, you see it come together better. i will definitely make note of how skillfully that was done, maybe i can use something like that in my own writings. when i write, i leave room for interpretation, but i also fear people not taking away from it what i want them to take away, so i feel the need to simplify it. what i will try to do and what i have been trying to do, is make my book read one way to the untrained eye, and read totally different to the open-minded.

        In an excerpt from Heather McHugh's work, a line caught my eye: "Eleven tons of hidden work, are always lurking inside words". I can see a few different ways that could be read. It could mean that there is so many meanings behind every word and every sentence that a lot of people never see, it could also mean that there is so much work that the author does to put their words together and express what they want to say. Or possibly both together? there are so many meanings for so many combinations of so many words, what you see on the surface, and what lies beneath. 

About Me

My name is Jessica Annis, i am a sophomore at Eastern and i am pursuing a major in biochemistry with plans on attending medical school. I have always enjoyed reading and writing and i have written a book. I am taking this class (CRTW 201) in order to better my writing so that one day my book can be published, as well as for my general education requirements. I have a very scientific mind and i am always up for learning new things, as well as building on what i have already learned. I am excited to see myself and my writing better over the course of the semester, and i hope that i can continue to better myself throughout my lifetime.