March 18 (Monday): I cannot read any more Keats or Auden. I cannot relate to either of them in the least; I do not grasp their historical or literary references (especially Keats' "Endymion" and "Hyperion" stuff, which is not only confusing but supremely boring to me) and for both of them, the poems that aren't referencing some sort of historic or literary events really just sounds like fluff, or common-sense stuff that I can say little about. I must've read fifty poems by Keats and nearly double that by Auden, and aside from the occasional gem or interesting line or three here and there, no matter what I do I cannot get into either one of them. I can't grasp it. It all bores me to tears and frustrates me to no end. To have any clue of their overtones of what they're saying or why, I have to look up literary criticism on them and what they're trying to convey in their writings. Neither of them are my cup of tea at all, and if asked a comps question on them that I, for some reason, am forced to answer, my response will be "I'mma gonna wing it" bullshit-filled, surface-level answer. This supremely troubles me, because it makes me (once more) feel like I'm not ready for that exam, despite all of my preparations. I really just can't grasp that sort of writing enough to discuss it intelligently -- it's like reading a different language. I don't write like that. I don't read poems like that by choice.
March 19 (Tuesday): Ah, good old W.B. Yeats. How I missed studying you. I actually know about Yeats quite a bit already; I took a British Modernism class two years ago, and we studied Yeats extensively. However, and here's the problem -- Yeats has maybe twenty well-known poems, and wrote a *fuckload* more than that. Yeats is also a symbolist, which is the exact style of poet I hate for the most part -- screw symbolism, just write what you want to say, etc. I read probably 200 Yeats poems, most of which were somewhat indecipherable unless you knew the history and mythology he was writing about at the time. I'll have to review my notes from the aforementioned modernism class to be able to place Yeats into the proper context. After Yeats, I moved on to Robert Lowell -- a masterful poet, one of my favorites of all time, except...well, his "collected poems" is 1,200 pages (no, that's not a lie) and in my collections, I have but about forty or fifty of those poems at most -- his well-known ones. I may have to order a Lowell collection on Amazon or see if anyone in the department has one in case there are some really important poems of his that I've missed. I do, however, know a lot about his history, themes, and writing styles. I might be able to easily wing a question on him if the comps asked one. After Lowell, I moved on to the venerable, well-known, easily-readable Robert Frost. Aside from a few little things here and there, there are little notes that I could take on Frost -- most of his poetry is pretty straightforward, easily understandable, and relates to the same universal subject matter of nature and pastoral settings (animals, bugs, birds, etc) with a healthy dose of God thrown in here and there. As prolific and masterful as Frost also was, there's not a whole lot I could say about him or take notes on specifics -- there's just not, really. A lot of his stuff hovers around the same themes of nature and animals and thoughts. He seems to be saying the same things in different wordings over and over, with the occasional longer poem that contains a lot of dialogue ("Home Burial" being one of those). He won four Pulitzer Prizes and read a poem at Kennedy's inauguration, though, so there's that. I'm beginning to think more and more that my director is going to gloss over most of these poets I've been reading in favor of writing questions around the ones who are more widely-read and/or he could accurately judge the answers of (read: Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Ginsberg, Levine, O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, etc.) I have already read and studied most of those aforementioned poets, so the rest of my studies after today should be at less of a breakneck pace, and will be by more interesting authors to me personally.
March 20 (Wednesday): A day that looks deceptively light, but really isn't -- today I'm studying through Shakespeare's sonnets and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Shakespeare, as I told Daisy, wrote 154 sonnets that we know of, and because of that, it's not a light load of reading. Also because they were written so, so long ago, it's not like they're up to date on their language, so each one is a bit of a translation exercise to discern meaning. Eliot isn't light reading either -- The Waste Land itself will take me hours. While I don't think my director will focus on Shakespeare at all, he *is* teaching a class on Eliot this semester, and I *guarantee* you there will be an in-depth Eliot question on the comps exam because of that. I bought a hardcover collected Eliot on Amazon a few weeks ago, and while I've read a lot of Eliot before, that (just like the Shakespearean sonnets) was well over ten years ago. The sonnets are interesting enough, I suppose. I've always liked Shakespeare. Reading them all in sequence tells a story. It's just that there are 154 of them. As for Eliot, well, there aren't a *ton* of Eliot poems -- he wrote relatively little poetry throughout his life/career, and the latter half of his life is steeped in Christian rhetoric because he converted to Anglicanism once he moved to England. Those that come before that, including stuff like Prufrock, are REALLY good. And I particularly enjoyed his book of poetry about cats (go figure), and was blown away when I found out that it was the basis of the musical CATS much much later. THAT, my friends, is nuts.
I'll also add that today is the midway point of my studies, as well as the midway point of my break -- I have five days of break remaining, and ten authors left to read through. I am on-target with my studies, and have completed everything thus far on schedule. I must also take a "lighter" day and do my taxes as well.
March 21 (Thursday): Ah, the last of my big days -- today I covered William Carlos Williams and William Wordsworth. I would also be covering Stephen Crane, but my Crane collection has not yet arrived. So, that's a bit of a break. I am a fan of Williams already; I've read his more popular stuff over the years in various classes, but getting to sit down and read his collected works (about 150 pages or so, give or take) was very nice and relaxing. I enjoy his works a lot, and can relate to/understand them. Wordsworth, on the other hand... *sigh* Wordsworth is another of those poets I'm not really a fan of. He's one of those folks, like Keats and Auden, that I can't really get into. I can understand a lot of his stuff -- if not the majority of it, really -- but fifty pages in (on a 400+ page collection) I was really at my "fuck it" point; I looked up criticism on his most well-known poems, printed out what had to be, easily, 100 pages of it, and read *that* instead. It gave me a sense of what he was writing about and why, which is really all I need to bullshit my way through a comps question on him if asked and can't get out of it. I'm guessing there will be at least one question on the old-timers that I can't get out of.
March 22 (Friday): So now we're into almost exclusively contemporaries for the bulk of the rest of my studies, though this doesn't mean it'll go much more quickly. Today I covered Philip Levine and Anne Carson, two books by each. Luckily, they were not *large* books, though Levine's wasn't small, that's for damn sure. I have an extensive reading history with both poets; I've taken classes where they've been covered in detail. Levine was rough; he has a very large body of work, and most of it's boring. His "New Selected Poems" was incredibly tedious to get through for the most part; his older stuff I can't really get into, as it is really dense and at times, just, well...boring, as I said. I did highly enjoy his book "News of the World," though, which is more straightforward and interesting. Carson, on the other hand.... *sigh* again, I like Anne Carson's stuff, for the most part. Her "The Beauty of the Husband" is a wonderfully brilliant book, if incredibly sad and heartbreaking. However, her "Men in the Off Hours" is one of the most incomprehensible things I've ever read. I sent this message to Parker about it earlier tonight:
So much of her writing here is like bullshit literary masturbation -- spinning its wheels, hipsterish, trying so hard to be brilliant that it makes no sense and just isn't. Little of it makes any kind of stylistic or thematic sense, either. Screw this, I'm getting nothing from it.
And I stopped reading through said book so that I didn't throw it across the room. Yep, welcome to my life, folks.
March 23 (Saturday): Finally a day where I get to read poets I *like* wholeheartedly: Michael McGriff and Ben Lerner, two books by each. Their books are relatively thin, too -- not 300 pages each, like the grueling pace I've been putting myself through for the better part of this past week. Both of the McGriff books were basically chapbooks -- 70 or 80 pages each, at most. The Lerner books were about 100-150 each. I love both of these guys' works; I took probably twenty pages worth of notes, and was done reading through all four books in about six hours.
March 24 (Sunday): The last *real* day of my reading, today I covered some heavyweights with big books -- Dean Young and Bob Hicok, one book each -- as well as reviewed the theories and manifestoes (yes, that's intentionally spelled that way) of Andre Breton. With Breton, I studied him in the surrealism class last semester, and can be assured that there will be a question on the exam about him, or at least tying in to his theories. I have a full set of notes on him. I also have all of his manifestoes and access to his poetry and other writings. For Young and Hicok, they're the last two authors on my list, the bottom of my list, the "additional authors" section. I'm nor sure I *need* to study them, but I'm going to. I like both of them fair enough, I suppose, or at least I like most of what I've read by them up until this point -- and then I started reading their new books. Dean Young writes really strangely. Sometimes (read: rarely) he'll have a straightforward poem, one which mostly makes sense all the way through. Sometimes he'll have a poem where the first half is fairly straightforward and then it GOES CAREENING OFF THE RAILS into the surreal and incomprehensible. And, then sometimes he'll have a poem that is almost completely incomprehensible and frustrating to read, because I cannot discern any sort of true meaning from it whatsoever. The majority of his work consists of the latter two types of poems, and this is the kind of poetry that I HATE. That's why I didn't include Merwin on my comps list; I'd read enough of his incomprehensible shit in my surrealism class last semester. It's similar to that newer Anne Carson book I was reading earlier this week (Men in the Off Hours) where it's incomprehensible and strange seemingly for the sake of being incomprehensible and strange. Literary masturbation. Etc. The Dean Young book was almost 300 pages. I stopped about 50 pages in -- it was clear that I wasn't going to get anything else from it, at least not when I'm trying to read it for content and for themes for my comps. I instead went out and found some criticism and interviews with him in which he explains why he writes the way he does (explanation: because he wants to, really). Bob Hicok is similar in style, I think, but unlike Young, his poetry does seem to be written with a "story to be told" or something like that in mind, and while he does make use of somewhat odd language, there's usually reasoning behind it (he'll flip the letters in some words on occasion for effect). I sort of like Hicok's style, but he's another of those poets that I can't really get into too deeply. I think it's a matter of personal taste. I'll have to re-read or re-flip through both books again as I review my notes between now and the comps. As for Andre Breton and his "Manifestoes of Surrealism"? I didn't get to that today; I've read the big manifesto before and will leaf through it again (as well as my notes) over the coming week. I know there's going to be a Breton-ish question on the comps.
This basically completes my "formal" study for comps; I still have yet to receive my Stephen Crane collection in the mail, and I'll read through that when I get it, but from here on out it's basically me, my notes, and my thoughts on everything. The reviewing of my notes (and re-reading of some authors/criticism on some authors with much larger bodies of work) will take place from now until the night of April 4, at which point I will be finished and will simply have to take the exam on the morning of the 5th. The Crane collection is troubling -- it was shipped last weekend, but it's being shipped USPS (and slowly, at that; I'm guessing "media mail" speed) which means that I can't track it and that it could arrive tomorrow, or could arrive three days after comps are over. Who knows, really. I've made the decision that if it hasn't arrived by Thursday, I will find a Crane collection in the library, online, or somewhere in the department and will read everything over this coming weekend.
For now, though, I have a little bit of breathing space. Only a little, but some.
No comments:
Post a Comment