Classmate Response: Week of 1/24/11

Yeeva Cheng: Random Impulse Week 2 (January 29, 2011)


This really caught and held my attention from the first paragraph. I thought it blended movement (action) and imagery (scenery) perfectly to give the reader a specific sense of time and place from the get-go, as well as an instant emotional investment in the characters of the story. I felt the build-up to the scene in the school, the revelation of the photographs, and the quiet gap between the narrator's realization and the final lines was beautifully done, with a very solid grasp of pacing. It was a very concise scene, yet it expressed a great depth of emotion and for the narrator, a great range of emotion, too. That's very hard to do well, and you nailed it! In fact, I think you have such a well-balanced delivery of time and place that you could strip it down a little, use less descriptions, and build an even stronger atmosphere. I felt a few times in the third and fourth paragraphs that some of the imagery was veering a little into "poesy" prose. I felt perhaps the final line of the fifth paragraph could be trimmed, too, as it felt a little redundant. The imagery and symbolism had already been delivered so well that I felt this line wasn't necessary anymore.

This was a beautiful read!

Reading Response 2: Week of 1/24/11

Writing Poetry
Form and Structure
The Q&A, pg. 29

I really enjoyed this exercise, although I am finding it hard to utilize in my own writing. Self-edit has always been my stumbling block, and without anyone else to bounce this exercise off of, I find myself thinking too much of how I should answer and not letting my imagination run free. This seems like a wonderful exercise to loosen the mind, so to speak, and let the ideas pop out and expand, but even putting myself in the mind of someone else (a character of mine, or some celebrity) is proving difficult. I would love to do this in small groups in class, maybe when we get into prose. I have a feeling, though, that self-editing will be my downfall no matter what I'm writing. I'm such a slow writer!

Reading Response 1: Week of 1/24/11

Writing Poetry
Form and Structure
Susan's Poem, pg. 42

I have to disagree with the final verdict on the sonnet version of this poem. It felt jarringly stilted in comparison to the earlier drafts and completely diminished for me the original impulse, so much so that it was as if written by someone who was watching a documentary on Susan rather than feeling her dreams from the inside out. Even the fact that it was given such an expositional title took me out of the moment before I even dipped into it. The newly structured poem stumbled into form, whereas the earlier drafts flowed naturally and, by the very lack of structured design, took me with Susan to her imagined worlds. It had a lack of self-awareness that led me to see as she saw, whereas the new form felt like receiving an engraved invitation to a sleepover party. When we discussed the issue of form in class, and David brought up the point of how it challenges the poet to use phrases that he or she might not otherwise have played with, I felt in agreement with him but viewed this particular experiment with Susan’s poem as one such attempt where the poet failed the challenge. I’m a little disconcerted to find the sonnet structure of Susan’s poem labeled “enhanced” by the text, with particular attention given to the “chatting at work” (one of the changes I disliked the most), but I suppose these are the areas in which it’s clear that the impact of poetry is nothing if not subjective. I wonder how I would have responded to it had I not seen the editing process at work. I doubt I would have been moved by Susan’s poem in sonnet-form, but I don’t think I would have wanted to see it in unstructured form, either. I think I probably would have just passed it by as a poem that didn’t do much for me one way or another, which would have been a shame. I love how evocative of childhood dreams this poem is.

Random Freewrite 2, Week of 1/24/11

Game

some frenzied meat

caterwauls

its sweetness to its own

on crusted wind

and battered brawn

while judiciously

in placid nips

a stork is gorging

on simmered wits

and frozen stone

Junkyard Quotes: Week of 1/24/11

1)

"They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments."

–Wislawa Szymborska

A co-worker of mine repeated the subject argument of Szymborska's statement, almost verbatim and without irony. We were discussing religion. It was one of our many discussions on religion, which I have learned to try to avoid but he remains intent on discussing it, with a critical eye on anything contrary to Christianity in other world religions. I’ve tried to express my opinion that learning about is not the same as subscribing to, but it doesn’t go anywhere, and I don’t know how to express without rudeness that, in my opinion, willful blindness is not the same as faith. I don’t think it will ever end between us.

2)

Metaphors We Live By

This is a book title that struck me a few months ago, and I had to buy it. It's has been an excellent read so far.

3)

Driving home the other day, I saw a wooden sign alongside a fence on one of the back roads that read, simply, "WHO PAID?" It was just a random sign along the road, but I couldn't stop thinking about it and all of the different directions it could go, how very different an interpretation it could have depending on who was reading it.

4)

“But that's where Big Ben gets off the hook, because it's our fault for believing that how well star athletes do their jobs somehow equates to the person they are off the field. … En route to being great again, by association you are somehow seen as a good person.”

Hearing over and over how Ben Roethlisberger is redeeming himself of his off-field "misfortune" by on-field play made me feel a lot of things, primarily negative, but specifically from a writing standpoint, it reminded me of the irritatingly prevalent theme of a character who commits some grave wrong in one area only to be forgiven in the narrative by doing something entirely unrelated on a much, much smaller scale. A frequent offender is the show Supernatural, which I used to watch religiously but can't even stomach now. It's common to see one of the appointed heroes kill an innocent person or otherwise cause severe harm to an innocent entirely without remorse or even any hint of attentiveness, only to be given a sympathetic pat on the back in the script, which resolves him of having to atone in any productive way and furthermore allows him to continue on in this manner. That he feels bad and is misunderstood is apparently atonement enough. Making deals that damn the world is easily pardoned because the poor hero had a bout of insecurity and felt bad about lying to his brother that one time. Or something. There are a lot of four letter words for how I feel about that. It's a million times worse in real life. But then, it also makes me think of how we paint sports heroes, other celebrities and politicians in a certain light and are married to that light, and anything contrary to it is given hardly any attention at all. So Roethlisberger is a triumph of perseverance while Michael Vick is lower than slime, Rudy is the inspirational hero of millions while Joe Montana is a dick, George W. Bush was Satan 2.0 and Obama is now Satan 3.0, and Johnny Depp is always and forever some kind of sex god. (I'm okay with that last one. Now I feel like watching Ed Wood again.) I love Elton John's “Candle In The Wind,” but that he wrote and recorded that song sort of embodies the view he was ostensibly putting to shame. We love our icons to remain as we imagine them, for better or worse. We hardly ever allow them any texture. I would hate to do that to a character of mine. I would consider it the ultimate crime against realistic characterization.

5) The last word goes to Soundgarden again:

"One day this guy from another label walks up to me and says, 'I really like that song 'Seasons'. You should write more songs like that.' I just wanted to punch this guy. What a stupid thing to say. If I wrote more songs like that, who would care about that song? 'You should write more songs like that because I like it.' You should fuck off because I hate you. Probably why people would single out a particular song they like on this record is because it's the only song like that on the record. And if there were 15 songs like that on the record, it would be a lame-ass record. It would suck."

-Chris Cornell, in Guitar Player (June 1994)

Random Freewrite 1, Week of 1/24/11: draft

Wasting

The trees pour down.

The leaves bleed out.

Scrap paper.

I wish I was the way I were.