Post 4: Understanding Second Avenue

     Frank O'Hara's Second Avenue qualifies as a difficult poem. Looking at the literal meaning behind the words he used in part 2 of Second Avenue can give multiple translations.

     The written text reads:
What spanking opossums of sneaks are caressing the routes!
     I interpreted:
Those darn (or some type of negative phrase) opossums are taking their time crossing the road!
     Text:
and of the pulse-racked tremors attached to my viciousness
I can only enumerate the somber instances of wetness.
     Interpretation:
heart beating faster because of anger
makes him recall the times he wanted to cry
     Text:
Is it a triumph? and are the lightnings of movedness
and abysmal elevation cantankerous filaments
of a larger faint-heartedness like loving summer?
     Interpretation:
Is he successful? Are inspirations (or ideas that move him) and heart palpitations (or great anxiety) like the love of summertime?
     Text:
You,
accepting always the poisonous sting of the spine,
      Interpretation
You like pain
      Text:
its golden efflorescence of nature which is distrustful,
      Interpretation:
the pain is from the sun (or is natural light) and it is not honest
      Text:
how is one borne to this caprice of a lashing betrayal
whose jewel-like occasion has the clarity of blossoming trees?
      Interpretation:
why did it come to be that people are at the mercy of the fickle kindness
of the glowing sun which sometimes gives life (or maybe has a purpose).

Post Three Photo notes and Photo poem

Post Two: Fragments

These are quotes collected for an exercise of noticing what I notice in another class.

• "I stopped yelling at old people, I wasn't getting a damn thing done."
• "and curiosity was stayed by fear"
• "A demagogic nostalgia for the greater authenticity of the experience of the imagined less well-off 'other', as if only severe forms of oppression can create 'relevant' poetry."
• "when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his."
• "James Maury commended the practice as a means 'to reflect, and remark on and digest what you read."
• "He proved that white space and irregularity could be part of a poem's structural composition."
• "The fragments of a poem are deliberately kept in random order to be reassembled in a single instant of consciousness."
• "The fractured poem may be relatively linear and continuous, or it may be radically disjunctive, but when transition is removed, relations become implicit, not explicit. Content may be whole, or partial, or it might even be subversively suppressed, left to be provided by the reader."

Post 1

Post 1

Introduction: I’m a junior and this is my second Creative Writing class. I usually write fiction, I am not really certain what genre. I admire stories with elements of science fiction, fantasy, or some type of magic. I also like regular stories as well. My experience in the Creative Writing Program so far has been positive. I didn’t really like poetry, but I learned how to understand it last semester in an intro class. Learning about the significance of form in poetry made it easier to understand it, for instance line breaks and concrete poems.

Genre: Before reading “Literary vs Genre Fiction” I’d never heard of Literary Fiction. If I had I was not aware, because the word did not really hold a definition for me. After reading the PDF, the impression that Literary Fiction brings to mind is fiction that is more useful for academic reading. I would call Literary Fiction academic reading because of the way it was described as depressing and oppressive in the PDF. Books that I’ve read that are unstructured or depressing I’ve usually had to read for a class. For example I would call “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, “Free Enterprise” by Michelle Cliff and “Bailey’s Café” by Gloria Naylor Literary Fiction. All of these books had heavy themes and were depressing at points, and I most likely never would have read them for ‘fun’. Books that are read to learn academically seem to fit into the Literary Fiction genre.

On the opposite side, Genre Fiction brought connotations of light reading. When I read the ideas about Genre Fiction in the PDF I thought it could be defined as fiction that follows certain guidelines and could easily be classified on a shelf. The PDF says that Genre Fiction usually has a predictable or reliable structure I think that’s a part of the guidelines it follows. Genres themselves are kind of obscure because they are not that solid from person to person. Sometimes they help the reader find something but other times they make things more confusing, particularly when I am writing something I don’t know what the genre is, is anything with Zombies sci-fi? My experience so far in reading and writing outside of genre or with hybrid genre has been subconscious I guess. I like to think I’d give a book a chance regardless of genre because it could be very interesting but I know there have been books I’ve read because of genre and I didn’t like them at all.