Head in the Clouds

For this envelope and postcard, I tried to explore the overlap between my dreams and my memories of the past. Many of my dreams feel like memories. I wake up fully believing I have had conversations and adventures that happened only in my dreams. Sometimes I also forget that favorite moments of my life have actually happened and believe they were merely dreams.

The psychedelic brain on the cover of the envelope reminds me of my subconscious. It emanates the waves of thoughts that make up both my everyday world and the altered world of my dreams. I found the picture in a newspaper article about hallucinations. Could a dream be considered a hallucination of memory?

The back of the envelope is cut out of a long-exposed photograph of the night sky. Night reminds me of sleep and dreams, but also of the time where I first got my interest in the sky, looking through a telescope in Pennsylvania. Around the edges of the cut-out photograph, I continued the design of the photograph with colored pencils.

The inside flap is a rubbing of the brain and sky. I like how they both became clouds (or perhaps thought bubbles) when the images were transferred through the paper.

The postcard inside is composed of three main images. The squirrel can be a symbol of home. Many of my earliest memories are of my home, the only home I have ever lived in. The squirrel could also be the small, energetic me of my youngest childhood. The central figure might be the more contemplative me. The music is an intentional reference to two things: how music triggers memory, and how it is one of the things that I remember best.

Arp Notes

After looking at Jean Arp’s "automatism" or "chance" work, I began to think about the randomness of different actions and what meaning is constructed out of random results. As a musician, I was interested in experimenting with the randomization of music. I thought about how musical improvisation is really a kind of composition on the fly. So what if I just threw notes onto a sheet of music paper?

I scattered each of my cut-out notes and other musical symbols randomly onto the music paper. While I did adjust the notes’ orientation, I tried to retain the essential randomness of the process. Because my goal was to create art rather than music, I used large blue notes.



Unfortunately, the result was just like that of trying to play totally random music. It is close to impossible to play random music; the musician’s instinct takes over and corrects for the “mistakes”. In the process of making my art, I experienced the same thing: it was very hard to put the blue notes down without thinking about the aesthetics of the result.

The result of fully random music isn’t typically audibly appealing (even though it may be an interesting concept). The same is true with a sheet of essentially random notes. While I like the idea of my artwork, I don’t enjoy the visual result.



The process of putting the notes on the page imbues the artwork with a sense of time. The visually static marks become organized in time when they are seen as notes placed on linear music paper. A page of sheet music is read left to right to create a dimension of time. This kind of artwork challenges the viewer to look at it as both a static picture and a developing piece of art through time.

Homer's Different Heroes

Homer’s epics present two conflicting images of the hero. In the Iliad and the Odyssey we see two different heroes with two different goals. Achilles in the Iliad chooses death and glory over a long happy life, whereas Odysseus chooses life instead and makes his way back home through all the perils of his odyssey.

In the Iliad, Achilles believes that without a glorious death, he will not be remembered in the far-off future.

In contrast, Odysseus lives through the war, not dying for glory, but living to (finally) make it back home. In the final two books of the Odyssey, he begins to regain his role as king and husband. He sleeps in his own bed with his wife, he reunites with his father, and he purges his house of all traces of the suitors. He begins to live the life that Achilles might have led, if he had not chosen to die for everlasting glory.

Odysseus does get fame and glory, if perhaps of a different sort. At the beginning of book 24, we see some of the dead heroes of the Trojan War, stranded in the afterlife. They are not happy; all they can do is stand in the mire of the Asphodel fields reciting their deaths to each other. After Apollo leads the suitors down to the underworld, they tell of Odysseus’s reclamation of his throne in Ithaca. Without dying, his actions are known even in the Meadow of Asphodel where his deeds are even praised by Agamemnon. Without dying in battle, Odysseus tricked the Fates and wove his own everlasting glory.

In book 11, Odysseus summons the dead and hears Achilles state he wishes that he had not chosen to die. In book 24, we hear this theme restated (which is also hinted at in other parts of the Odyssey) and expanded as we hear that Odysseus has gained the glory that Achilles sought.

Book 24 seems essential in Homer’s explanation of how glory can be achieved in a way other than death. And this theme seems essential to the Odyssey. Instead of dying a heroic death, Odysseus lives a heroic life.

MESOSTIC

So Then Order is Round, or…
The Dwindled Supposing And

     disGrace

     carElessness

      noR

         iT

     moRe

 box oUt

     kinDness

   comEs

         So

         Then

    ordEr

         Is

   rouNd

   imaGe

    splEndor

      diRty

    noT

        Resemblance

    amUsing

      siDe

      thE

             iS

             The

   dwindlEd

   supposIng

           aNd

For this project I made a mesostic using Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons” as the source text and the author’s name as the seed text.  Instead of doing it by hand, I used an online mesostic generator.

In the first stanza, the awkward syntax of the lines mirrors Stein’s language play. It starts with two negative traits, “disgrace” and “carelessness,” which seem to be magnified by “nor it more.” If one can “box out” that negativity, kindness can come in. This makes me think about Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter where Hester’s shame and disgrace gets her boxed out of society. Interestingly, though, The “A” boxed on her chest for all to see eventually gives her the gift of both strength and kindness.

The second stanza makes complete sense syntactically as well as poetically: “So then order is round.” Although we think of order as being a straight line, it always bends and twists, circling back on its self. This idea seems to complement Gertrude Stein’s poetic style.

The third stanza tells us that while the images we use in our poetry might seem to be full of splendor, Stein is no imagist. Instead, she recognizes that in reality the image is “dirty” and not an expression of true resemblance at all. The poem is suggesting that it is through experimental language, not some naïve goal of the exact image, that poetry can come alive.

One of the most interesting parts of the third stanza is the sixth line. Although the word chosen by the mesostic generator is “amusing,” the capitalization of the “U” (from GERTRUDE) gives the word an additional meaning: “am using.” Perhaps this is Stein speaking through the mesostic to tell us again that language gathers new meanings by sounds and space rather than mere meaning. I’m sure she’d find it “amusing” that I “am using” her sounds to generate new sounds, her language to generate new language.

The final stanza concludes with “the dwindled supposing and.” We imagine what is to come, what is to be added, but our suppositions become limited even as we try to expand them. We circle back in our round order to that initial cycle of disgrace to kindness.  I love the slant-rhyme words that end the two STEIN stanzas: "round" and "and." This happy accident joins together the ends of the circle.

What's for Lunch? Sardines and Oranges

 

Frank O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not a Painter” displays many of the features of New York School poetry. First, it uses a modified “I-do-this, I-do-that” style. It is not a list of daily behavior but the poem does have a conversational, even improvisational tone suggesting the poet is sharing his thoughts as they occur to him. In addition, “Why I Am Not a Painter” is exclusively in present tense, adding to its immediacy. This approach allows O’Hara to use the NYS’s classic wit.

NYS poems often make use of references. Here, O’Hara refers to modern artist Mike Goldberg, whose work hung in the MOMA where O'Hara worked. The fact that O’Hara talks about a museum in New York City illustrates the movement’s reliance on both the both the urban and urbane. The intellectual quality combined with the casual tone adds to the humor of the poem.

O’Hara makes use of the NYS technique of pastiche as he plays off of the work of painter Michael Goldberg. He combines the two meanings of pastiche as ironic stylistic copying and as jumble. Goldberg’s sardines and O’Hara’s oranges are both simple everyday unromantic objects, both words which become dissociated from their meanings, and both ideas that motivate the production of creative art.

It is this dissociation between letters and art that leads O’Hara to explore the concept of palimpsests. O’Hara watches Goldberg paint sardines (both the object and the painting), then sees him remove the object in order to complete the painting. The echo is heard in the painting by leaving the visual “letters” of the word “sardine” in the work. And if one views the actual painting, one sees that O’Hara means quite literally that the letters remain. For the poet, the color orange works in a similar way. The idea of the color orange allows him to write multiple poems, poems about subjects as deep as life itself, even though the poet finished without ever actually discussing the color orange itself. His use of palimpsest is to use the plural “Oranges” to title the collection of poems inspired by the color. Interestingly, the pluralization of his inspiration implies a shift in meaning: the food (oranges) rather than the color (orange). In a sense, this is an example of the traditional use of polyptoton (use of repeated versions of the same word), another feature of NYS poetry.

Perhaps the most obvious NYS style used in this poem is parataxis. While the title of the poem promises an explanation of why O’Hara is not a painter, or perhaps a direct statement explaining why he does not paint, we never get a straightforward answer. Instead, we get two images, that of the painter and that of the poet, that we have to work to reconcile. Although O’Hara makes it clear that he is making a comparison between the two, his argument is unclear. The two seem similar in their usage of palimpsests and in their reliance of words in their art. The two seem different since the painter has to remove from his work while the poet simply stops adding. Unlike the limit the painter felt when he removed the original sardine (“It was too much”), the poet has infinite freedom to write with no restrictions on how much to put into his poems.

I love that the poet best known for his “lunch poems” writes about sardines and oranges even when his bigger theme is the analysis of different approaches to creativity and art.

Jackson Pollock

830 Fireplace Road

by John Yau

“When I am in my painting, I’m not aware of what I’m doing.” When aware of what I am in my painting, I’m not aware When I am my painting, I’m not aware of what I am When what, what when, what of, when in, I’m not painting my I When painting, I am in what I’m doing, not doing what I am When doing what I am, I’m not in my painting When I am of my painting, I’m not aware of when, of what Of what I’m doing, I am not aware, I’m painting Of what, when, my, I, painting, in painting When of, of what, in when, in what, painting Not aware, not in, not of, not doing, I’m in my I In my am, not am in my, not of when I am, of what Painting “what” when I am, of when I am, doing, painting. When painting, I’m not doing. I am in my doing. I am painting. (This poem is based on a real Pollock quote: "When I am in my painting, I'm not aware of what I'm doing. It is only after a sort of "get acquainted" period that I see what I have been about. I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through. It is only when I lose contact with the painting that the result is a mess. Otherwise there is pure harmony, an easy give and take, and the painting comes out well.")

The Ecological Model of Health Behaviors: Eating Vegetables

As part of my study of heath this semester, I have started watching the Coursera lecture series Introduction to Global Health Policy, taught by a professor from the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins.

In the first lecture, the professor introduced the concept of the “ecological model” of health behaviors.  To demonstrate the model, he used the example of the use of insecticide-impregnated bed netting intended to prevent malaria and other mosquito-carried diseases in Africa.

The model involves 5 layers of influence on the eventual outcome of heath related decisions. I decided to try to apply the model to different health behavior: eating vegetables.

1. Individual: I like the taste of vegetables. Apparently, I’ve liked vegetables since I first started eating solid foods. My parents tell stories about how when I was a baby, I would cry and scream while pointing at bowls of steamed broccoli, delayed from serving while the family lit the Shabbat candles with friends.

Some people choose to eat vegetables because they are healthy, but I wouldn’t say that thinking applies to me. Although I don’t choose to eat vegetables because of their “healthiness” per se, I do often decide not to eat junk food because it isn’t healthy.

2. Family: I have always eaten the food my family cooks and grows in our front-yard garden. We eat most of our meals at home as a family. Since my parents have always bought and prepared a lot of vegetables, and then modeled eating them happily, I’ve always eaten lots of vegetables. While both parents stress the importance of a healthy diet of unprocessed whole foods, they serve vegetables mostly because they love to eat them.

3. Community: We live within walking distance to two wonderful Farmers Markets. I live around many vegetarians and other people interested in the politics of food, local food, unprocessed food, organics, etc

4. Institutions: I don’t go to school which I have heard feeds students poorly-prepared vegetables. And we live within walking distance to both a natural foods co-op and a chain natural foods grocery store.

5. Policy & Law: Most things I can think about don’t affect me directly, like the fact that organic farms have regulations, making organic foods more expensive. I have been exposed to national campaigns focusing on healthy eating such as Michelle Obama's Let’s Move as well as national guidelines like the food plate (and formerly, the pyramid).

One of the things I was curious about was where pop-culture would fit into the ecological model. For relatively isolated communities in Africa, this factor might not be relevant. But for us here in the US, I think it is very important. So I have added a sixth category:

6. Society: While it is not something that affects me greatly, because I don’t go to school or have a tv, I know that it is a great influence on many kids my age. That eating vegetables is uncool. While it could fit into community (what people in our community tell us) or that it might fit into institutions since so much of it is corporation and ad based, it could very nicely fit into policy as a social policy. Because of this overlapping nature, maybe it should be its own level of society and pop-culture (at least in America.)

Free Verse: Flat and Hard upon the Page

(Comparing Two Versions of a William Carlos Williams poem)

The second version of William Carlos Williams’s poem “Young Woman at a Window” is an excellent example of imagism, employing many of the movement’s techniques and goals. The first version of the same poem fails to meet the requirements of the Imagist Manifesto and explores other poetic techniques instead.

Although both versions of the poem employ free verse, the cadence in the second version disrupts conventional speech more than it does in the first. For example, Williams uses line breaks to emphasize his breaking up of prepositional phrases. In both versions, he breaks after the preposition “on”: “tears on” and “her cheek on.” In the second, he brings this new speech further even more by beginning with a similar break: “she sits with.” At the end, the poet allows “in her lap” and “to the glass” to be presented together, nevertheless continuing his emphasis on the importance of prepositional phrases.

In the second version of the poem, Williams relies exclusively on a static visual image to convey his meaning. In the first poem, the boy acts and moves, rubbing his nose. But in the second, the image is utterly still and unmoving. Here the boy’s nose is pressed against the window, not dynamic and not in flux. The intense use of the prepositions of placement (such as "on" and "to" and "in") further emphasizes the staticness of the description by pointing out that everything is already placed in physical space. Similarly, the first poem assigns the active very “robs” to the subject of the boy, while in the second version the verb assigned to him is both passive and subsumed in an adjectival clause.

The static image the second version of the poem presents uses language and imagery that is never indefinite. While the interpretation of the poem as a whole might be open, the way the words describe the image itself is quite specific and closed. The image can easily be imagined as a painting hanging in a museum. The first version, on the other hand, states that the boy “who robs her knows nothing of his theft,” a claim that does not refer to a specific fact or image but instead to an abstraction. This phrase is highly open, and therefore the poem contradicts the goals of the Manifesto. Interestingly, at least in my view, the closed, definite image of the second version creates a poem with a more open meaning.

Finally, while both poems are condensed and concentrated, the second version is tighter than the first. Williams cuts his word count from twenty-nine words to twenty-three. He cuts the number of stanzas from six to five. In addition, in the second version but not in the first, no word is more than one syllable.

Dadaist Poetry

From an online dadaist poetry generator:


Dada Barack
One Barack: On blue dogmas
on elected states and end to,
and most was end. Promises, politics
of the Obama’s We states.
Recriminations, dogmas
of the a, the far a was
have been of our politics.


Dada Barack 2
Barack on, and address strangled states.
In inaugural to promises,
worn out long most the elected,
We too.
One previous address, the an that have
appealing things, its dogmas.
Barack was collection states,
Was his have.


(Text from The Economist: "One of the most appealing things about Barack Obama’s previous campaign was its promise of bipartisanship. On the night he was elected, he insisted: “We have never been a collection of red states and blue states.” In his inaugural address, he declared “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics”.)

*

The idea for this poem came from Tristan Tzara's "How to Make a Dadaist Poem":

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

 

The Transubstantiation of Nature

(I'm so glad I've been studying the Bible and religion this year!)

Emily Dickinson’s poem “I taste a liquor never brewed” articulates the poet’s experience of inebriation, not from alcohol but from the natural world. With her abundant use of dashes, she recreates the experience of drunken stumbling as well as the slurred speech of a drunkard. Nevertheless, I would argue that her metaphorical drunkenness here is not as much a comment on the joy of enjoying nature as it is an expression of the poet’s connection with the spiritual.

The foxgloves that we might normally see as flowers in a field are recreated by Emily Dickenson almost like the name of pub for bees. When the bee gets too drunk, the proprietors (or “landlords”) of the Foxgloves inn kick him out. The butterfly, on the other hand, realizes his drunkenness himself (as do so many people who have realized they had become too inebriated) and swears off drink forever. The poet, however, has no plans to sober up. Instead, she bellies up to a bar serving the metaphorical liquid of the molten blue sky. Instead of the “fine Rhine wine” alluded to in the first stanza, and instead of the nectar of the insects described in the second, the poet becomes drunk on air and dew--that is, on nature. She will imbibe summer’s exuberance until the snow falls from angels’ hats.

With her use of the reference to the Rhine, the poet suggests that her inebriant is a replacement not just for alcohol but specifically for wine. Writing in an era when Christianity was central to the experience of community, Emily Dickinson would have been keenly aware of the religious resonance of images of wine as the transubstantiated blood of Christ. She chooses to end the poem “leaning against the--Sun--” suggesting perhaps that she was leaning against the core of her religious faith, or Jesus. The Sun, set off by the poet with dashes perhaps to indicate its deep significance, becomes the Son.

Although she appears to be alluding to Christianity in this poem, Dickinson utterly rejects the more formulaic religious practices of her time. While the saints inside their churches look out the windows at her (perhaps in surprise or shock), the poet experiences religion directly and personally outdoors in nature, unencumbered by the formal beliefs, rituals, and hierarchy of the church. Here she seems to support the almost Whitmanian trust in nature, freedom, and direct experience.

Rather than the eucharist's communion wine turning into the blood of Christ, nature here transubstantiates into the spiritual. The poet drinks deeply, filled with a uniquely modern kind of religious experience. The lack of a final period perhaps suggest the openness and inclusivity of her kind of faith as well as, perhaps, the eternal nature of Christ.