Overall, I thought that the mad libs engine exercise was a really fun (albeit wacky) way of looking at the poetry we’ve studied over the course of this semester. While I enjoyed the strange and often humorous renditions of poems that the generator put forth, I don’t necessarily think the mad libs engine is a useful tool for studying poetry. At its most useful, the mad libs engine is a good tool to remind us of the importance of diction. For instance, when we started replacing important words in the poem “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams, the poem’s meaning devolved drastically. I suppose this helped to assign more meaning to important words in the original poem such as “eaten,” “plums,” “breakfast,” “sweet,” etc. However, I don’t think that we really need a tool to remind us of the importance of diction within a piece of poetry. I do think that some types of deformance can be useful as tools for analysis in some cases, though. The mad libs engine, in my opinion, is a bit too excessive to yield anything of substance in regards to analysis (it definitely yielded a lot of entertaining poetry), but there are less intense forms of deformance that can be really useful for interpreting poetry, or any other creative work. In his article on Deformed Humanities, Mark Sample provides examples of different ways that deformance takes shape, such as “mashups, remixes, [and] fan fiction” He also talks about deconstructing works and looking at them in segments in order to better understand the whole. I think that all of these forms of deformance are useful for analyzing and understanding poetry because they either build upon or deconstruct the work in a way that is meaningful, rather than making a poem meaningless by replacing its crucial components with random words.
Author: brunoa7
“A Poison Tree”
William Blake’s “A Poison Tree” is an allegory for the negative implications of holding grudges towards one’s enemies. In the poem, Blake did not confess his anger to his enemy, as he did with his friend, so his “wrath did grow” (4) into a tree that was “waterd […] in fears,/[…] with [his] tears” (5-6) which he “sunned […] with smiles/And with soft deceitful wiles” (7-8). After a while, the tree “bore an apple bright” (10). When his “foe beheld it shine,” (11) he snuck into the garden and ate the apple, and the narrator found him there the next morning, “outstretched beneath the tree” (16). In writing this poem, Blake is trying to say that ignored emotions, anger and wrath especially, can become volatile if they are not put on the table and talked about. In this instance, the narrator’s pent up anger grew and grew into a poison apple which eventually killed his enemy.
Perhaps it is not a cautionary tale, though, for the narrator remarks that he was “glad [to] see” (15) his enemy lying dead beneath his tree born of wrath and resentment. This poem can certainly be read allegorically, or it can be read in the exact opposite way. Maybe Blake doesn’t care about the implications of repressing anger, and the “poison tree[s]” and fruits that such attitudes nurture. In contemplating the ambiguous message of this poem, I turned to Blake’s etchings for new insights, and was met still with ambivalence. In some of Blake’s pieces, the tree and the body are dark, suggesting an ominous nature behind them. Copy R, for example, shows the enemy’s darkened body shadowed by a brown, nearly black branch, with a dark blue and purple sky lurking over a black mountain in the distance. The foreboding nature of this particular copy suggests that the “poison tree” of pent up anger is not a good thing, for it brought death to the narrator’s enemy. Other copies, however, such as copy B, do not suggest the same. In copy B, there is a lovely pastel sunrise over a mountain, as the narrator’s enemy stretches out pale and gleaming beneath the tree’s white branch. It’s a lovely image, and it almost looks as though his enemy is asleep underneath the tree. This image, beautiful, airy, and light, brings glory to the enemy’s death, painting it as a success for the narrator. From what we’ve read of Blake’s work, though, this ambiguity does not seem to be out of place. If we had read this poem alone in an anthology, though, without any of the engravings present, perhaps my interpretation of the poem would be different. When I read the poem on its own before viewing the engraving, I thought that the poem had a moral message behind it. However, upon reflecting on other of Blake’s works and his etchings for this particular poem, my stance became more fluid. The poem’s meaning changes from person to person, as well as from engraving to engraving; there isn’t one concrete message.
“Borderland”
In her poem “Borderland,” Amy Levy is writing about a night in bed with her love, whose very presence brings her immense amounts of joy. It is not until about three-quarters of the way through the poem that the gender of Levy’s love is revealed. “It is she,” (11) Barnfield thinks in her dreamlike trance, realizing that her beloved is there with her. In her hazy state between “waking” and “sleeping” (1), Levy becomes aware of her love’s presence. “Half in a swoon,/[she] spread[s] [her] arms in slow delight” (11-12) to reach for her love and likely embrace her and hold her close as they sleep. At the end of the poem, Levy laments that “the nights are short in June,” (14) giving her less time to spend in this lovely, dreamy haze with her beloved. It is important to note that this poem, which is celebratory of Levy’s love for the woman sleeping next to her, is written as a sonnet. Its rhyme scheme, AABCBDEDEFGGF, does not necessarily mirror that of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet, but it still has fourteen lines and a prominent theme of love throughout the entire piece.
When learning about the Victorian era (or any pre-modern era for that matter) in history and English classes alike, there is definitely a suppression of queer content, to a point where it can be considered erasure. Prior to coming to college and taking more open, liberal classes, I was not aware of many queer figures in history or queer literature that’s been produced. This project was really interesting and enlightening, though. It was really fantastic to look at so many openly queer poems written in a time where societal standards were very rigid and prominently heteronormative. Hopefully, queer poets and literature with queer content will gain a permanent place in classrooms and the canon alike, so its importance can be celebrated accordingly.
Bagpipe Music by Louis MacNeice
When I read this poem on my own, I went through it at a very fast pace, almost singing it in my head as I went along. There are many iambs within the poem which, when paired with the AABB couplet rhyme scheme, contribute to a very rhythmic cadence, and I understood the title. This poem creates a repetitive and consistent rhythm which one would expect from a musical instrument, hence the title Bagpipe Music. This musical, bagpipe-esque sound was even more prominent in MacNeice’s reading of the poem. While listening to the recording of MacNeice himself reading Bagpipe Music, it sounded very similar to how it had when I read it on my own. Actually, I believe that it was better when MacNeice read it, because many of the couplets that I thought ended in slant rhymes actually paired well together in MacNeice’s accent. “[H]eather” (11) and “Vienna” (12) do not rhyme in my accent (I thought that the use of them together was a bit of a stretch), but because MacNeice pronounces the “-er” morpheme as “uh”, it coupled perfectly with “Vienna”.
Though the majority of the poem is read at a very quick and upbeat tempo, there were certain words that MacNece chose to emphasize in his reading of the poem which I did not in my own reading. Upon first listening to the poem, I was interested in his emphasis on the phrase “no go”. This phrase is repeated several times throughout almost all of the stanzas, and MacNeice allows himself to slow his cadence on the long “o” sounds provided by both “no” and “go”. There is definitely a slowness that accompanies the letter “o”, especially when it is being used as a long vowel. In this context – a long vowel sound surrounded by lots of short vowels – the phrase “no go” is very drawn out and prominent. Both MacNeice’s repetition and stress of the words “no go” throughout the entirety of the poem really serve to highlight his purpose in writing the piece. Bagpipe Music is a commentary on the rampant commercialization and urbanization of Scotland, and how it is a plague on Scottish society and culture. The “no go” lines resist this new urban culture, asserting that the Scots will not go to the “picture palace” or “the stadium” (27); they will not have a “country cot with a pot of pink geraniums” (28); they won’t embrace the ideas of “the Yogi-man” or “Blavatsky” (9). The consumerist culture overtaking Scotland is shamelessly pushing out important aspects of Scottish society, pretty much eliminating their folk culture. To complement the “no go” statements, MacNeice ends many of the stanzas with lines that begin with “All we want”, followed by a statement which counters the impositions of this new culture in Scotland. The sound of this poem performs the idea that these “All we want” lines impose by emulating a bagpipe’s music. The bagpipe is a traditional Scottish instrument, present in their folk music. By making this poem sound like a bagpipe, MacNeice is asserting that Scottish folk traditions will live on in spite of rampant commercialization and urbanization.
Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind from Spring Awakening
“Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” is a song from the musical Spring Awakening by Duncan Sheik, based on the German play of the same title. Sheik’s Spring Awakening follows the story of a group of teenagers/young adults in late nineteenth century Germany as they question the rigid morals of the society they live in. Spring Awakening is a beautiful and brilliant piece of theater, and it has been among my favorite shows for years now.
“Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” comes late in the play when Moritz grows tired of dealing with his depression and failure. Over the course of the play, we learn that Moritz is not doing as well in school as he’d like to, and consequently, he’s disappointing his family. Moritz desperately wants to leave all of these pressures behind and flee to America, but he can’t get the money to do so, despite his pleas to his best friend Melchior’s mother, Fanny. During the song “And Then There Were None,” we are presented with a letter that Moritz wrote to Fanny, explaining his situation and threatening to commit suicide if she could not provide him the money he desired to escape to America. Fanny offered her condolences to Moritz and provided him with alternate solutions to his frustrations, but this was not enough to console Moritz.
Moritz ultimately decides to take his own life, and “Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” is the song Moritz sings before doing so. It opens with the lyrics “Awful sweet to be a little butterfly/Just swinging over things and nothing deep inside/Nothing going, going wild in you, you know/You’re slowing by the riverside, a-floating high and blue.” Though these opening lyrics are beautiful, they are heavily symbolic of Moritz’s apathy for life and the emptiness he is constantly plagued with. Later, in the chorus, Mortiz sings “I don’t do sadness/Not even a little bit/Just don’t need it in my life//…//I don’t do sadness/So been there/Don’t do sadness/Just don’t care.” The chorus is much more blatant than the verses, indicating that Moritz is fed up with the consistent feelings of sadness in his life. He no longer wants to be depressed, and he feels that the only way to escape his depression at this point is to take his own life.
While the song alone gives the audience great insight into the toiling inside of Mortiz’s head, it is not as meaningful and as easy to understand when it is separated from the performance. In the performance, you can see Moritz’s anger and frustration as he sings, and you are also exposed to dialogue not included in the song, so in addition to the link I provided to the OBC recording of the song, I’ve also included a recording of this scene, in which you see the brief fit of outrage and frustration Moritz experiences right before the song, and his ultimate decision to end his life following the song. Though listening to the song definitely makes me emotional, nothing compares to the chilling feeling I experience when I watch this performance. I remember when I saw the Deaf West Broadway revivial of Spring Awakening last December, I was in tears and I had goosebumps the entire time. The performance of this song is deep and beautifully chilling in its original form, but when performed with deaf actors and the incorporation of American Sign Language, there is even more beauty in the performance that really resonated with me. I can’t seem to put into words why I found it to be so much more meaningful this way, so I thought I would include a video to provide some explanation. Sadly I couldn’t find a recording of the Deaf West performance of this song from one of the revival shows, but I was able to find a video of the actor who did Moritz’s vocals singing “Don’t Do Sadness/Blue Wind” with someone signing along in ASL.