Reading, Writing, and Digging Literature

On Wednesday, Professor Hanley polled the students on which poet they like most. Here are the results:

Levine: 3 mere students
Rich: 17
Soto: 18

Soto & Rich have the most pull because students find their use of language more accessible and more grammatically clear. They also found Rich & Soto more referential than Levine, as well having more interesting imagery & clever, funny statements.

What does this say about our perception of language and grammar? Why does Levine’s language make us uneasy? What does this say about what today’s generation of students need in terms of identification with the materials they are faced with?

\”Creep\” – Radiohead

What the hell is she doing here? She doesn’t belong here. In a society where everyone else around her is so aloof and where there is so much and too much for a mind like hers to repress, the only avenue in which she can be free is to utilize her Imagination–numerous of windows and possibilities–…

The narrator now exists as a psychological construct in the text. If she is disallowed to write, then as an artist it is her imperative to make use of whatever is available so that she can create and be creative. And in doing so, she is able to produce and pro-create: the woman and women in the wallpaper are creations of the narrator.

And so she creeps.

http://micklestreet.rutgers.edu/CBF/closereading/closereading.html

“Creativity comes from trust. Trust your instincts.” Rita Mae Brown.

Ideas taken from Professor Hanley’s lectures…

Do we suffer from “book abuse”? Have we failed to create? According to Emerson, institutions control people by setting limits on what they can do. Can this be said about today’s state of education too? How true is this for you and I? Emerson’s ideas from 70 years ago as a profoundly anti-institutional thinker still have deep resonances in our contemporary lives: how many of us perform creative reading and writing? How many of us can claim to possess and contain true knowledge, if knowledge begins in self-trust, independence, and creativity? It is only when we start from these points of creative independence that we can branch out to contain and share the bigger experience with the rest of the multitudes……

“Whitman gives us the technicolor, 3D, Blu-ray, HD version of Emerson’s ideas.” Lawrence Hanley.

More to come on Whitman…

I love Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd.” One of the images that came to mind when I read it is a painting by German Dada artist George Grosz.

Here it is, the city with its crowds, nameless faces, clerks, “wretched inebriates,” “roisterers,” populous avenues, noisome quarters… The streets of London filled with “human bustle and activity”:

Other Poe-related websites that may be of interest:

Poe’s works compiled online by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore for your reading pleasure. It also houses lots of interesting information about Poe’s life (such as where he died, etc.), as well as essays on Poe.

A sampling of Poe’s poems.