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November 25, 2007
illumination..illuminated..illuminating...illuminate...illuminates
To be illuminated...Let me tell you how much I have fell in love with this word. It makes me happy to hear it, and I don't think I've ever said it so much in my entire life until the past few weeks. I have been asking others through text messages, emails, and just random strangers "what illuminates you?" I love it. They are always taken a back, and a moment to think about it sometimes needs to take place. Its a word that carries a lot of volume, weight, depth. I have been continuously redefining this word for myself. After the past few classes, I have never spent so much time thinking about this word and what it means to me, and how it has been a part of my life for so long. Now.. to begin the documentation of how I have been illuminated over a period of 48 hours.
...lets see...Over the break wednesday morning I woke up to bad news that had happened. My sister had hit a mailbox while driving to work late and it shattered the windshield and broke the side mirror off the car(1400 dollars worth of damage). She also took out a mailbox in the process. How you ask? SHe wasn't paying attention to the road, and had too many things going on at once, trying to do too much. To get to the point quicker, my mother was off of a 12 hour shift as a nurse, and came home to this bad news. Now the whole family was upset cooking thanksgiving dinner. My sister felt very depressed, foolish, and pathetic. My mom has a way with words when she's angry to make you feel smaller than an ant. Anyways, time passed, and near the night time, my mom called us all together to talk. She grabbed us all very close and told us that she loves us very much and that we are all each other have. She's apologized for being so hard on my sister, and explained that her anger is because she loves us so much and only wants us to make it in this life. Be happy, successful, and comfortable. We hugged close like a tight family huddle and she asked us to give thanks to God for our blessings, and that we have each other. Even though our dad had passed away last year on Nov. 27th we are still making it together, us four women, stronger than ever because of him and his strenght he has given us. We shared this moment together, family embracing one another, our hearts together meeting eye to eye with each other and recognizing what matters most in this world. We all were illuminated.
-Other illuminating moments was the time i spend with my sisters. We are very close. THey are my best friends, I would die if I ever lost them. Well, since I'm away at school, I don't see them as much anymore and find myself homesick missing them often. Well when I was home, we laid around together doing absolutely nothing, nothing at all, but just sharing that time and company with them made me feel illuminated. So lucky to have a bond so strong with my siblings, and feel them as my backbone in life. A feeling I can't describe, but it is absolutely beautiful and extraordinary our connections and relationship to each other.
-I get illuminated just looking outside my kitchen window and seeing the same view after so many years. I have aged, yet i barely notice anything different about this window I stare out of. I have changed though, looking through this kitchen window while drinking my coffee in the lazy morning, my mother talking in the background and me staring. I look and notice the years have happened, I have grown up so quickly, and this beautiful scenic view I meet with in the morning has reminded me of how beautiful life is when you take time to notice what has always been there. Peace of mind is how i feel when i look at the woods that face my house.
-Spending moments with my mother discussing life...i also don't see my mom that often, nor talk on the phone with her much. She's not really a phone convo person, so i wait till i get long breaks from school to talk with her face to face over coffee, food, ..or just about anything. Her words have never meant so much to me until now.. i am older, and realize how much sense she has always probably made, even though when I was younger I had a hard time seeing that. She is such a beautiful women, so strong, elegant, and full of grace. I hope I can amount to her amazingness someday.
-my sisters artwork... she is so talented, and never shares it with us, i have to search her portfolio to see her latest stuff..man she has grown so much in every way. I stole a piece out of her portfolio this morning to hang in my room..now i have a piece of her here with me all the time, just looking at the drawing fills the room up with her presence and style.. i love it. It's different than having her picture up hanging on the wall, this is something she did, she made this herself.
-Dancing with an old crush out at the bar the other night. This was a crush from elementary school. Never have I ever thought in a million years I would run into him again, and share a moment with him as I did. It was so surreal. He goes to school in New Jersey, studying to be a surgeon, it had to have been like 11 years since I last saw him. It absolutely stunned me. We werne't ever really friends either oddly enough. We always knew of each other. He went to my elementary school, one year ahead of me. He lived in my neighborhood, and one time I remembered we played together with neighborhood friends one summer day when I was probably 9. It is crazy. Well we somehow got to talking, and caught up. We went to dance and probably danced 3-4 songs together. IT was so great!! that moment dancing with him, on the dance floor, feeling really good, and knowing that I looked good was illuminating. Here at this very moment in between the beats, I felt the rhythm in my bones, and held his hand in mine..i felt like I was right out of a movie. I was dancing in that moment, thinking of nothing else, smiles so big my cheeks hurt mixed in with laughter. It was indescribably great. And then he was gone, gone forever maybe, who knows the next time I may run into this guy. It could have been the last dance I would ever have with him. BUt let me tell you it was the best dance I could ever have with him. I bumped into other old friends from the past and it was wonderful.
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see the pics in the drop box to relate to my illuminations..
Posted by maxell at 07:35 PM | Comments (2)
November 12, 2007
Elizabeth Bishops-The Fish
1).Shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost
through age.
2).Shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age.
3).Shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
4).shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
This line is particularly interesting to me and I chose to map this line because of how it initially jumped out at me after the first time I read this poem. The different ways you can map this selection can greatly alter how the poem takes shape and feels. I am partial to the way that Elizabeth Bishop has the poem structured, for the other ways don't apply as much volume, or do enough justice for what is being stated. Number four though, in particular is arranged in a very unique way. Its structure works for some of the poem, but not the entire piece. Sectioning off parts of the poem spatially can apply emphasis on certain details and really give a spotlight to certain aspects of the fish. The pauses and breaks also elicit a different way of hearing and feeling the poem and the details that follow this fish encounter. For me, I would say to keep the rhythm and images flowing, the Bishop format seems to do the poem justice in allowing one to follow the details and stay focused on each word to build upon this fish. I lose track of images when words are placed too far apart, as well as lines that are too long. For certain instances it works, but for a poem that packs in so much heat and detail, I think the quick 3-4 word long phrases make the images of the fish stick longer.
The sestina-
After reading Sestina by Bishop, I had to read it over a few times and still don't quite understand this poem. I notice the form the poem takes on is like a short story. The stanzas are always six lines long and the thought isn't always finished at the end of it. It seems like such a simple form yet to make a sestina really work, I feel like they always resemble story like ways, or like a step by step experience. An instance perhaps, here it is about the grandmother and child's interaction by the stove with the almanac, and the rain with tears. Symbols present themselves and are cyclical in a sense. I like the structure since it is quite simple, and you go about reading it as if you were to open up a novel. The spacial arrangements are what the eye usually expects so you can really focus in on what is occuring in the play by play scenario. What I think hinders the sestina is that it is so structured. There is no room for space arrangements or indentations,etc. This can hinder the poem for the fact that it may limit what can be written. For example some poems written need to have spatial arrangements to convey what is being said, whereas other poems may suit the sestina like style. How is idea served with this mapping? That question is a tough one so I'll answer it as best as I can, I feel as though the idea is very centered, and lies within the stanzas. The images aren't presented and focused on detail, but what seems to matter most is the feelings presented between the child, the grandmother, and tears. It's almost as if it is seen very one sided,told by the viewpoint of the Grandmother, does that makes sense? I may be confusing myself. My ideas about the continued purpose of such a mapping is to convey feelings or a memory. Not so much elaborated details of beauty, but an image of emotions that strike one. Subtle images of expressions and feelings intertwined with the objects presented in the scene that play off the emotions that brew.
The relationship between map form and idea form in the two different poems are different approaches but still arrive at delivering meaning of some sort. In the fish, there is constant delivery of descriptive images and detail about this fish, we are waiting the final climax of the poem in the end when the rainbow is finally reached, whereas in the sestina poem, the reader isn't hit with all these descriptive details, but rather very handpicked details that matter the most in the scene that show the emotion behind the story. Each descriptive part maps something that needs to be told or added to create the final climax of the tears the grandmother knows. These are tears she only knows, and in the fish, these are the exact images that the writer keeps close detail of. The way we can arrange the poems or remap them are in fact a huge deal in how we go about interpreting the poem. Sestina takes on a form of six lines in each stanza, this is carefully crafted to fit the details into the poem and achieve its purpose. If you were to arrange the sestina spatially, I don't think it would recreate the same idea or meaning to the reader.
WOW... after reading the cheat help, I am blown away at how difficult this poem is to write. The fact that Bishop made her sestina so good, I didn't even notice the placement of the same six words repeated throughout her stanzas. This is truly an art. I would like to try something like this, the closest I've come to writing a poem with a form that entailed specific rules to follow was the Villanelle. I enjoyed it, and I think I also posted it here somewhere. I love that line about poets refusing to write poems with form, I agree that you need to find every opportunity to do something with whatever the requirements may be. If you only look at the limitations you are surely missing out...
Posted by maxell at 05:15 PM | Comments (2)
November 05, 2007
justin bua...
how he has mapped his life growing up in Brooklyn, and just his outlook on life with poetry, hip hop, and urban life. Check it out Justin bua.
Posted by maxell at 06:07 PM | Comments (1)