2. Explication

You Were Wearing
You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse. In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, "Do most boys think that most girls are bad?" I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip. "No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we read Snowbound together And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes. Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair. We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville As well as with illustrations from his book Moby-Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno. Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a drink, everyone?" I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing. You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees. In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

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The speaker of this poems seems to be a man who is remembering the time he spent with a girl in his childhood. He seems to have a very good memory of the details of the day they spent together. The occasion of the poem could be that the man is talking to the woman he meant in his childhood about the first time they played together. This encounter that he has as a child seems to be very special to him since he remembers the slightest details of the day. They could mean that she has always been very special to him. The audience of this poem is the girl that he talking about in the poem. He refers to her as you and often mentions the word we. This means that he is writing the poem to her. The purpose of the poem is to show the girl in the poem that he really cares for her. By listing all of the slightest details of the day he shows that he was really paying attention and interested in the time they spent together. Subject of the poem is the girl in which the poem is about. The tone of the poem is reminiscing on past. As he is writing the poem he is remembering all of the details of the day he spent with this special girl. It seems to be a time of happiness they he is remembering as well. The poem does not seem to have a central theme. It is more a story that the speaker is telling about an experience he had.

The subject of the poem seems to be the most important aspect. It is centrally themed around her presence and the experience that the speaker has with her. The images that the speaker sees are very vivid even though he sees them through his memory. It is all of the exact descriptive objects in the scene of his experience. Fro example the kind of shoes people wear, the tie his father wears, the shirt the girl is wearing. Even the location of the hotel the girl is staying at is mentioned. The language is rather simple and deals a lot with brand names of things which are capitalized. The language and form of the poem which is written and presented in a simple form add to the poem’s simplistic feel typical of the New York School Poets.

4. Work of Art

Pollock is often a name that comes up when talking about eh New York School Movement. Even those this movement was primary based in poetry, the poets often drew inspiration from the “action painters”. In this kind of painting there is no emphasis on individual parts. This was a new idea in the 40’s and 50’s in which Pollock was an innovator. Pollock's paintings had no relation to shape or size of canvas it was the paintings that decided the shape in size of the canvas. The ‘drip and splash’ style of painting was what Pollock was most known for is shown in this painting. For this style of painting Pollock sets his canvas on the floor and pours or drips paint from a can. In place of brushes he used sticks, knives, sand, or broken glass. This type of painting supposedly brought out the unconscious moods of the artist.

In this particular painting by Pollock he does the drip and splash technique along with some other techniques. The painting seems to have multiple layers. The back layer looks as if there is some kind of a distorted face of maybe a robot. There also seems to be some repetition of the colors of yellow, red, green, and blue. Parts of the painting seem to be painted with a brush. The painting appears simple and basic like the colors that it uses but has a deeper meaning underneath. It is very confusing when you look close at all of the layers and different techniques.

The painting has some relevance to the poems from the New York School. The repetition, and layers of meaning are the most common aspects. I am not that familiar with art but it seems like the simple hues that the painting has is comparable to the style of journal that the poems are structured in. Both can be very confusing but it is the absurdity that makes them interesting and makes you think harder about them.

1. Reflextion

While reading the New York School Poets I was very surprised how much I enjoyed it. These poets took a new approach towards poetry. It was not the traditional sonnets that I was required to read throughout high school. Looking through the different poets I found that their style ranged from long journal style, to weird spaced poems with only a few words on the page, to simple short poems. They all had one thing in common however and that was the idea to write about anything. There were poems about baseball, the details of what people were wearing, bits of overheard conversations, French poems. There seemed to be an endless amount of topics scattered throughout the poems of the different authors.

The poets used common diction in most of their poems. It seemed to be focus on simple things that had a larger meaning. By using simple style they were able to keep it short but say a lot in the process. Repetition was also frequent in some of the poems I read as well. But imagery was the main tool that stood out to me. In the poem “What You Were Wearing” the imagery of the details the speaker experienced were all imagery. It was as if you could paint a picture of what he was describing in your mind. The majority of the poems were also very vivid like that.

3. Research & Reflection

The New York School Poets first appeared in the last 1940’s to the early 1950’s. They drew inspiration from the avant-garde which represents a pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm. These poets were innovative and experimental. Their subject matter was light, violent, or observational. They often wrote in a direct and spontaneous stream of consciousness. Vivid imagery was also found in their works quite often. They favored wit, humor, and irony as literary techniques.

The creators of this movement included John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler. The New York School Poets took their basis from Abstract Expressionists. They found the mind of the poet could be the subject of the poem. This led to the idea of acceptance to be less of a priority. Strange juxtapositions, pseudo translations, and collages soon became part of their poetry styles. They also drew influence from both cubists and surrealists. Apollinarie taught the poets that a poem could come from snatches of overheard conversations, or from random lines in novels. Poems didn’t have to make sense in a conventional way. They could discover their sense as they went along.

The New York School poets knew that they did not have to copy the past but could adjust the tradition of it to their own unique style. Their poems often has an anti political element to them. They wanted to accomplish something with language that had never been done before. It was the idea that art could be about the car parked outside one’s house or one’s feelings about the government.

In the poems that I read my original thoughts of the poets were much like the history I read on them. I noticed the different languages that the poems were in such as in “Ma Provence”. Also a lot of poems were very vivid in the way they presented themselves, for example “What You Wearing”. The first thing I noticed was that the poems were not conventional. Some of them with the weird spacing did not even make sense. After reading the history of the poets I found that this was their intention. Even though I am far from an expert on poetry I truly did enjoy reading this poems. It seemed more real than other poems I read through out school. Literature should make you think and wonder about what you just read. I found myself doing this as I read through the poems. It was a lot like watching a really good movie that when you leave the theater you feel like you want to re think your place in the world.

List of Poems

New York School Poems

James Schuyler
Salute
A reunion
A White City
Roof Garden

Clark Coolidge
Movies

Kenward Elmslie
The Dustbowl
Duo-Tang

Ted Berrigan
Personal Poem # 8

Tom Clark
You III
Baseball
Poem

Kenneth Koch
Ma Provence-french
You Were Wearing
Taking A Walk With You

Frank O’Hara
To The Harbormaster
For Janice & Kenneth to Voyage
Poem Read At Joan Mitchell’s

John Ashbery
A Blessing In Disguise
Le Livre Est Sur La Table

5. Create a Work of Art

MA PROVENCE
En ma Provence le ble est toujours vert
Et les filles sont jollies
Elles ne meurent pas elles vous aiment a la folie-en
Ma provence
Bills break the breakfast teacups and the sun
Shines darkly over the bill-ware
She writes it out in envervatig prose
“In my provence, my rose.”
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In my Provence the blue is always green
And the girls are happy
They do not die they like you they have the madness in them
My Provence
Les factures se cassent les tasses à thé de petit déjeuner et le soleil
Brille obscurément sur la facture-marchandise
Elle l'écrit hors dans la prose d'envervatig
“Dans ma Provence, ma rose.”

One of the New York School Poet’s tourniquets were pseudo translations. They would take a poem in a different language and translate it from what they thought it meant. For my original piece of the project I mimicked a pseudo translation. The original poem “Ma Provence” was written in half English and half French. In my translation I translated the English to French and the French to English. Some of the words seemed to be lost in translation but I did the best I was able to. Much like the New York School Poets would have done.

Heart of Darkness Post

The theme of restraint is the most prominent in the novel Heart of Darkness. Restraint was what saved Marlow while it was the cause of Kurtz failure.

Restraint is something that Marlow assumed everyone practiced. As he reached Africa he found this not to be true. It seemed as if everything was meaningless. The only people who seemed to understand restraint were the manager and the cannibals. Marlow states, “The cannibals some of those ignorant millions, are almost totally characterized by restraint.” Even though they out numbered the whites, they did not attack them. Marlow later characterizes them stating, “…would have as soon expected restraint from a hyena prowling amongst the corpses of a battlefield.” Marlow is impressed by such restraint that the cannibals show compared to even Kurtz. Even though they outnumbered the whites, they did not try to harm them. Or at least the ones that were near the white’s camps. The cannibals that follow Kurtz also practiced restraint towards the whites. When Marlow was trying to rescue Kurtz the natives did not harm him when Kurtz told them not to. In the novel Marlow’s restraint seems to be work while the manager’s work is to keep up with his appearance. It is these restraints that allow them to not fall into the darkness of the Congo. He soon discovers that the only way for people to not lose themselves in the darkness is to find their own restraint. In the case of Kurtz, he practiced no restraint and got lost in the darkness of the Congo. For example he gave in to the temptations of power and suffered the consequences. Even though Kurtz used to be a man with morals much like Marlow, those are lost when he reverts back to his primitive nature in the heart of the Congo. Even at Kurtz’ lowest point he crawled back into the jungle because he had no restraint over the need to be with the natives. Although at Kurtz’ death scene he exhibits some restraint when he says, “The horror! The horror!”. Marlow takes this statement as Kurtz’ judgment on himself as well as a hint of a soul inside of Kurtz. Kurtz is not alone in his lack of restraint in most of the novel. The helmsman display a lack of restraint when they open the shutter of the cabin, as well as the pilgrims who eagerly shoot the harmless natives.

The theme of restraint in Heart of Darkness is seen throughout the novel. Whether it is the presence or lack of it is between each of the characters. There seems to be a direct relation between restraint and losing oneself within the darkness of the Congo. This is made explicit in the juxtaposition of Kurtz and Marlow.