Reading prompts for the class of October 25
1. Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself. (..). That is very much the image of the rhizome, prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation. Because the thought of errantry is also the thought of what is relative, the thing relayed as well as the thing related. The thought of errantry is a poetics…The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation (Edouard Glissan, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, 1997 [1990], 18)
Both Sylvia Plath's "The Elm" and Adrienne Rich's "Shattered Head" are complicated poems. They seem to aim at reaching "an-other's language", or speaking "through the other", but they also preclude the possibility of easy/direct relations. In what ways does the use of language in these poems thwart identitary representation? What effort do they place on the reader?
2. How can Steve Mentz's theoretical approach to the Ocean shed light on Sylvia Plath's "Ocean 1212w" piece and/or Marianne Moore's "A Grave"?
3. What are your reactions (and how do you account for them) to a parallel/"diffractive" reading of Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck" and Derek Walcott's "The Sea is History"?
ReplyDeleteI felt both poems had something combative in them. Trying to duel with a powerful opponent.
The “I” in “Diving into the Wreck” is both an underwater explorer as well as a warrior, taking with her a knife and putting on “body-armor”.
I also felt there is an emphasis on boundaries in both the poems, some they are trying to escape and erase, and some that are being drawn. The boundary between the air and the ocean are unclear and disappear in Reich’s poem. “First the air is blue and then, it is bluer.” As well as the boundaries between She and he, and; I and we, in the lines: “we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he.” Talking about the dead people at the bottom of the sea.
In “The Sea is History” the lines and boundaries were emphasising the shackles that have existed and the poem is trying to recall by remembering and looking at past events, at a history that was lost at sea. The words: bondage, manacles, ivory bracelets clearly describe the enslaved people that died, not able to be part of any history books, only blank pages, lamentations. Other boundaries that all of a sudden appear are nations: “and then each rock broke into its own nation.”
I felt that Walcott fits a whole epic in his poem, which makes it, in my opinion, somehow more tragic and impactful, having these myths put into the context of memory, the sea, colonialism and more. In that context an image like: “charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore” becomes especially heartbreaking. So in that sense there are more palpable feelings in Walcott's poem versus Rich’s which is more abstract. I liked the dive as a metaphor, looking at a shipwreck and a dive into the horrors of history. It almost feels like an everyday thing which everyone is bound to do. Diving into history, its words and maps.
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ReplyDelete2- Both Sylvia Plath’s “The Elm”, and Adrienne Rich’s “Shattered Head”, speak for/ through something other than human. In “The Elm”, the poetic voice is a tree, and in “Shattered Head”, the lyrical voice wonders what happened to a corpse. In Plath’s poem, however, the Elm speaks for itself and the reader does not have to question what it would say if it spoke, since it is speaking. In Rich’s poem, however, a corpse decomposes on a hill. As it does so, insects, the earth, and other natural elements start to interact with the remains of it. It seems as if revenge was taken before the decomposition, or, is being taken, as nature acts upon the body. Nature is transforming the corpse into matter. This is, of course, what happens when a person dies. “You can walk by such a place, the earth is/ made of them/ where the stretched tissue of a field or woods/ is humid”. This humidity helps matter decompose, making use, therefore of more elements than just the earth itself. The presence of liquid can remind us of Steve Mentz’s approach to how human beings are amphibious- connected to both earth and water, as both elements are being used here.
ReplyDeleteThe “us” in “Who did this to us?”, could be referring to an equal, this is another human being who found the corpse, which is now in a limbo between person and thing.
“a bloodshot mind/ finding itself unspeakable/ What is the last thought?/ Now I will let you know?/ or, Now I know?”
The ability to prompt the reader to contemplate what the other would be feeling/ thinking, or what it felt/ what their last thought was, puts them in close contact with this other.
Regarding Sylvia Plath's poem, the anthropomorphization of the elm allows it to assume the poetic voice (one sees this through the deictic “I”), speaking, therefore, for itself/ themselves. The elm’s identity is almost that of an actual person, a woman “[…] she says.”- it has been in the ground and is not afraid of it (it grew up), it has “suffered the atrocity of sunsets”, and its heart agitates for the faces of love. Moreover, it has a darkness inside of itself which could even be a metaphor for one's moral compass. Plath’s poem creates a strong liaison between what could be a woman’s feelings, through an elm tree, which is, the other. Thus, the poem makes the reader wonder about its metaphorical meaning and how different a person could be from something other than them.
2- This haunting(ly beautiful) poem could be analyzed with Mentz’s concept of deterritorialization, which he draws from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980). According to Deleuze and Guattari, deterritorialization could be considered a process through which established structures of meaning and identity are disrupted. For them, identity is not necessarily a fixed entity but can instead be shaped by various forces, contexts, and experiences. It implies a dynamic interplay between individuals and their environments, which must have inspired Mentz to adapt this philosophy into blue humanities. He suggests we adapt our language to the oceanic environment and proposes seven words through which he suggests rethinking how we engage with texts, especially in relation to environmental issues. He hopes that, with their help, we could “break up the Anthropocene,” which often centers human experiences and dominance over nature instead. In this way, he might be encouraging us to recognize the complexities and interconnections of human and non-human entities, particularly in the context of aquatic environments. This approach is relevant for analyzing Moore's work, which may be read as challenging conventional perspectives. For instance, while water(bodies) is usually attributed to rejuvenative concepts like birth, Moore handles the ocean as a deterritorialized place where death is embedded or intertwined with the ocean (or seascapes in the poem, considering the ekphrastic techniques), and it cannot be separated from the environment. It can be concluded that natural landscapes shape human experiences (including death) and identities (rather than presenting a singular, personal view of mourning; the poet emphasizes the collective experience of mortality). Such interconnectedness also manifests itself in and through the language (free verse, no traditional meter, irregular line lengths, dashes, enjambment, etc.). This generates fluidity in our reading experience as well.
ReplyDeleteIn his work, Mentz also explores the duality of alienation (alien) and belonging (core) by mentioning two different origin myths of the ocean. Moore’s vivid imagery of the grave may reflect this desperate tension that comes with confronting death. This sense of alienation is further emphasized by the grave as a physical space that separates the living from the dead. Conversely, the poem also evokes a sense of belonging, in a way, to the natural world. By intertwining the imagery of the grave with descriptions of the surrounding environment, Moore may be suggesting that death is not an endpoint but rather part of a larger, continuous cycle of life. This connection to nature offers a sense of belonging in return. There lies existential reflection at such interplays. Moore’s exploration of these themes encourages readers to contemplate their own relationship with mortality and the natural world. It is almost as if we are pushed to undergo a meta-cognitive deterritorialization. :)
1- Through Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Elm’ and Adrienne Rich’s ‘Shattered Head’, it appears both poets deploy language as a means of subverting any attempts at asserting a stable identity. The poetics of Relation as presented by Glissant, emphasizes that identity is more relational than self-sustaining, for there is always ‘other’ without which, the self cannot exist, which is relevant for the analysis of the two poems in the way that they do not allow an easy projection of the self. Rather, these are concerned with the problem of tension as a principle of form and structure between the self and the other, with the other in particular being outside the self. This approaches what is argued in Glissant's work where it states that ‘identity is no longer only found in the root but also in Relation’. In both poems, identity is observed, however, it is not constant; it is a dynamic idea which keeps changing as per the conditions which do not provide simple definitions of a person.
ReplyDeleteIn Plath’s poem, ‘The Elm’, the speaker’s voice is fused with the tree’s voice to the extent that I feel as though I am always losing track of who is speaking. It is stated that, ‘I know the bottom, she says.’ The speaker says, ‘I know it with my great taproot,’ indicating that the speaker correlates with the elm tree rather than distinguishing between the two. This corresponds to Glissants claim when he said, ‘if by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find one self’. Instead of suggesting that the speaker’s personality evolves around one incident of pain, the speaker’s personality can be said to grow sideways given that an elm tree is present and seems to know more about the situation. For me, that is how the poem articulates the notion of self – the self ‘grows’ because of other things and forces conjoined to the self rather than the self being rigidly held. The line, ‘I am terrified by this dark thing / That lies in me, also proves how identity, like ‘errantry’, is a deep expedition and draws one to the terrifying and unfamiliar inner rooms in oneself. Neither does the poem seek to provide a clear or linear narrative of a person’s journey toward self- actualization. Rather it emphasizes the many aspects which come and go and make a person. Also, it reminds me of the description of the rhizome, in Deleuze and Guattari, where the identity goes outwards in branches as there is no single root. If I take this analysis too far-fetched, I would say that the language used by Plath brings about a notion that encourages me to believe or accept that the self is in relation to something greater than the individual self.
Adrienne Rich’s ‘Shattered Head’ is a meditation on disembodiment and the disintegration of self. What strikes me most when I read it is the imagery, the description of a woman’s head “severed / from the trunk, half its face gone.” It pushes me to think about the extent of the violence presented in the dismemberment here, and so I try to understand the poem beyond mere physical disintegration, as cutting deep into the wholeness of a person. The woman’s head is cut off not only in a physical sense but also in the sense that she has no stable core to hold her together. In this way, identity is also like a ‘rhizome’, which is not all confined to a single indivisible point of attachment, but exists at several points of connection. The image of a severed head goes beyond the simplistic understanding of what identity entails, that it can be captured in one fundamental and irreversible fitting story about the person. I also find the line “The brain chats, the soul shrinks” particularly striking. It suggests a certain emptiness, a certain mechanistic behavior - as if the thinking part is still working, still talking, but only the ghost of that self- the self- is left reeling. Looking at “Shattered Head” in the light of Glissant's poetics of Relation, I see it as inviting the coexistence of a variety of identities. The poem implies that each identity is not only fluid, but also in the process of incorporating variables beyond the individual's control. The shattering of the self is inevitable, and Rich expresses this in her poem while in motion, wandering.
Delete3 - Both poems share a perspective that points to the sea as a symbolic form of history, a place that has lived for thousands of years and recorded human History and tells it with its own language. In Adrienne Rich’s poem, the poetic voice is propelled into action by a “book of myths”. This powerful book – we get this idea due to the strong meaning behind myths, and how these seep into people’s culture, - could allude to any community’s history, it could be the history of women, of people of color, of a whole nation, and so many others. I argue this because we only get a hint of this speaker’s identity through the pronouns announced in the eighth stanza “I am she: I am he”, which still leads us nowhere exactly, so the reader never really understands who this book is about. The book of myths may symbolize any group of people’s history, but, more specifically, things of the past, stories, these don’t exactly define such groups. In Walcott’s poem we see something similar, here “The sea is history”, the sea is the collector of the “tribal memory”. It is important to note the question posed in the very first verse: “Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?”. A person is seemingly asking for concrete proof, historical markers such as monuments and written history, implying that a tribal memory may only exist if it is marked, otherwise those memories are nonexistent. So, in both poems we can see the idea of the history of a group of people that was left deep under the sea, and the present history that is shared by these groups of people is mythical, as the truth lay deep under.
ReplyDeleteIn Walcott’s poem we assume it to be describing the history of a post-colonial island, and this is due to the heavy imagery of violence as well as the mention of the “caravel” in the third stanza. The poetic voice speaks of “packed cries”, which we can guess to be the cries of the slave ships, which is related in the poem to the episode of the Exodus, it functions as an episode of a past marked by troubles and hardship. There is also a heavy contrast that comes before the Exodus, which is the Genesis, which Walcott describes in a hopeful tone, “the lantern of a caravel” was “like a light at the end of a tunnel”, but then came violence. The biblical episodes seemed to be used as parallels to the Israelites’ journey. But they might also allude to the fact that these events may be historical to some, but not to others, seen as the Bible is an accepted religious text (“that was just Lamentations, / it was not History;”).
Another parallel the reader can find is that a voice in Walcott’s poem suggests another voice to “strop on these goggles,” for they will “guide you there”. But, in contrast, in Rich’s poem, the task at hand is a lonesome one. There is no “assiduous team”, the poetic voice goes alone.
There is also the parallel insect and animal imagery. In Rich’s case, the subject descends “like an insect down the ladder”. And in Walcott’s case, the use of insects could perhaps describe the groups of people or tribes that were affected by colonial history, and since then have not been able to live in harmony with each other. Each insect described has different ideas for the future of these tribes: “then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote, / fireflies with bright ideas / and bats like jetting ambassadors”. But Walcott’s has a hopeful image, with which he ends the poem: now it is time for an independent nation to assert itself, to have its own voice “(…) there was the sound / like a rumour without any echo / of History, really beginning.”
In Rich’s poem there is, in fact, a history, but it is mythical. The subject wishes to find “the wreck, and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth”. There could still be, just like Walcott’s poem, a history yet unwritten. In Rich’s case, the poem ends with the sad reminder that we are “carrying a knife, a camera / a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear”. It is a lament for the stories that have been lost, and that the one subject alone cannot retrieve them.