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May. 2nd, 2005 10:43 am
(no subject)
Hungry. Tired. Six more hours to go before I go home, find something to eat, and finish my Moby Dick paper.
May. 2nd, 2005
May. 2nd, 2005 10:49 pm
Full Disclosure re: My Lit Skills
Ok, so I like to go on about how good I am with words, with literature. And it's mostly true, though I do have my incoherent moments (decades, sometimes).
But poetry is not my forte. I can do it, but it's MUCH harder work for me to dissect a poem than it is for me to dissect a prose passage.
Of course, the refusal of some poets to bow to things like punctuation, standard sentence structure, and the like doesn't help. Don't get me wrong, I'm as glad that Emily Dickinson threw out traditional grammar as my professor is, but it does make it harder to know what she's talking about, sometimes. And don't even get me started on Mr. ee "I'm too good for proper punctuation" cummings, who should have been spanked, and spanked hard. Flaunting convention is a nice tool, but when it becomes pretty much what you're known for, I think you've taken it a bit too far.
Seriously, now: non-Lit geeks, when you hear "ee cummings," do you think about the beauty of his poetry and the ways in which he changed how people think about poems, or do you think about the fact he didn't use punctuation or capital letters? Yes, I thought you'd say that.
Right, then. I'm getting back to deciphering poems. I've got a paddle with Walt Whitman's name on it.
But poetry is not my forte. I can do it, but it's MUCH harder work for me to dissect a poem than it is for me to dissect a prose passage.
Of course, the refusal of some poets to bow to things like punctuation, standard sentence structure, and the like doesn't help. Don't get me wrong, I'm as glad that Emily Dickinson threw out traditional grammar as my professor is, but it does make it harder to know what she's talking about, sometimes. And don't even get me started on Mr. ee "I'm too good for proper punctuation" cummings, who should have been spanked, and spanked hard. Flaunting convention is a nice tool, but when it becomes pretty much what you're known for, I think you've taken it a bit too far.
Seriously, now: non-Lit geeks, when you hear "ee cummings," do you think about the beauty of his poetry and the ways in which he changed how people think about poems, or do you think about the fact he didn't use punctuation or capital letters? Yes, I thought you'd say that.
Right, then. I'm getting back to deciphering poems. I've got a paddle with Walt Whitman's name on it.