Senior Portfolio Workshop 2017

I found Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry to be a very interesting exploration into the limitations of an art medium — in this case, poetry. The idea that we view words as so essential to our humanity coupled with the idea that words cannot always accurately express our conceptions is a frustrating dichotomy. It also brings to light the idea that as human beings we feel that our humanity (our ideas and thoughts and feelings) is reliant on the extent to which others recognize that we have it. It’s very well to say “I think, therefore I am,” but Lerner seems to be saying that as true as that may be, thinking, feeling, and understanding something are not enough. We affirm our existence only when we are able to express ourselves in some way. Poetry as an art that attempts to express thoughts, feelings, ideas, circumstances, etc. — along with a certain idea of something that could not be expressed through just plain words but needs a texture and a rhythm to truly be expressive of the conception of it — is an art bound to the frustrating tension between trying to say what can’t be said and only being able to say what can be said. I think he is saying that every time you write a poem you must face the idea that there is something the words do not understand, something that does not translate, and that is a part of you, or a part of the world, that you can never feel the satisfaction of proving its existence through language.

In Ben Lerner’s essay The Hatred of Poetry, he directly addresses the mass hatred of the genre. He even admits that he “too, dislike[s] it.” He is beginning to seek how poetry shifts itself between the personal and the abstract. He also suggests that the reason that so many hate poetry is because words will always fail. When a poet chooses to write between the personal and the abstract, the poet is going to fail each time. Lerner specifically shows examples of poets who have failed. He does a thorough in-depth analysis of several poems, expressing how each poem has failed multiple times. He begins with the men who first showed hatred to poetry, Plato and Sydney. Lerner eventually shows the analysis of different poets and their personal failure for words in both great poems, as well as bad.

He begins with this idea of the hatred of poetry to begin his defense of the arts overall. This essay appears to be focusing on the hatred of poetry when he breaks down the hatred into the personal, history, and analysis. However, this turns out to be only one aspect to his argument.  Lerner is using this to show that “No art has been denounced as much as poetry,” suggesting that art is denounced as a whole, but poetry is significantly bad.

Jane Bowles

Truman Capote

The theme of the writer as the character behind the story was a well-integrated one in this essay. Hilton Als narrates a change in culture towards the theatrical, drama-seeking society that needs to know the dirt behind its entertainment as well as the selfish and sometimes harmful intentions that may reside behind a work of art.

However, overall “The Women” was an off-putting read for me because it seems to be a strange sort of feature piece on a man who the author has never actually spoken to; at least there was no sign in the writing that he had. Despite having no quotes from Capote besides what he has said in his writing, Als makes a lot of assumptions about Capote’s intentions. The idea that Capote “steals” from women in order to become the ultimate author and woman — someone with both male authority and feminine charm/ sexuality — is a very interesting theme, and that may well have been what the sum of things equated to, but I can’t help feeling that this is a dirty piece because of the fact that it says rather accusatory things about a person without giving that person a real voice outside of his works, which one cannot assume express his real life values. The idea is present that Capote switches between male and female personas based on the current popular terrain in order to stand out, and the claim is made that Capote “sought to cock block other women writers” as if that were his explicit intention. Als also refers to Capote’s gender switching as his “self-delusion,” which seems in direct contrast to his previous essay which spoke of gender as an ever-changing reality inside all individuals.

Billie Holiday was on the radio
I was standing in the kitchen
smoking my cigarette of this
pack I plan to finish tonight
last night of smoking youth.
I made a cup of this funny
kind of tea I’ve had hanging
around. A little too sweet
an odd mix. My only impulse
was to make it sweeter.
Ivy Anderson was singing
pretty late tonight
in my very bright kitchen.
I’m standing by the tub
feeling a little older
nearly thirty in my very
bright kitchen tonight.
I’m not a bad looking woman
I suppose ­­­ ­O it’s very quiet
in my kitchen tonight I’m squeezing
this plastic honey bear a noodle
of honey dripping into the odd sweet
tea. It’s pretty late
Honey bear’s cover was loose
and somehow honey dripping down
the bear’s face catching
in the crevices beneath
the bear’s eyes O very sad and sweet
I’m standing in my kitchen O honey
I’m staring at the honey bear’s face.

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Hilton Als’ essay “The Women” is roughly about the author and filmmaker — and artist in many other senses — Truman Capote whose first book was published in 1947. Als stresses that this publication takes place “just when other ‘real’ women could not as freely enter the publishing world” (238). Als characterizes Capote as a woman because of the feminine voice and sensuality of his writing, as well as because of the topics he chose to write about. His book Other Voices, Other Rooms featured a photo of Capote on the back cover, which Als states was “something to be fucked somehow.” The qualities Als describes are Capote’s manicured hands and his intrigued expression or perhaps even the writing of other women (238). Als claims Capote never wrote as himself, and within the essay itself Als doesn’t write much about the mundane aspects of Capote’s life.  This leaves only the parroted writing style and interviews for the readers to make assumptions about Capote as a person apart from his work.

The essay is about a live subject, imagined people (characters), but the live subject seems to be a character himself by molding himself to fill the role of a woman writer as a male at a time when women writers were far and few between. Copote’s motivations are clear which is, he wants to be the most respected women writer and the best version of a women and to do this he attempts to take down other real women. He does so by infiltration, copying and underhanded compliments.

This caused me wonder personally who owns the female gender. It is clear the author is focused more so on sex(genitalia) than gender(social construct) in the beginning but towards the end it seems gender is at the forefront. Another thing I found intriguing is the duality of Capote’s image and how it seems he does not fully understand the extent of what he is projecting which brings me back to my orginal question who owns the female gender. If some aspects of physically acting out femininity came somewhat natural to Capote.  Towards the end of his career after writing In Cold Blood  he is sure he is the manliest man and states in interviews he feels this is a more honest representation of his writing.  Was then image(facial expression)  only an act but an expression that came more naturally to him than his writing? I am unsure of the answer myself but I believe it to be partly an act and partly natural. Actors don’t have clean slates and must start with some personal experience or else it does not seem organic to the audience.

The fragments of Capote’s writing as he wrote as “a woman” did not appear to me to be that of a woman. The comparison between his contemporaries and even then it did not seem emotionally genuine despite the talent he had. Capote is a character/real person that appears to be on a short emotional spectrum which I don’t believe I can say is ineffective because he isn’t entirely imagined in the mind of Als but an actual person. The most tender or perhaps vulnerable moment is at the very end when Capote and Bowles are having their photograph taken in Africa and Als wonders if he can totally make the split between himself and the female gender while in the presence of this actual female perfected. Als also questions if Capote would accept her however fleeting affection while the picture is being taken.

Fluid oppositions are a part of several recurring themes that seem to permeate Hilton Als’ White Girls. This is especially true in intentionally gray and multi-layered juxtapositions of gender. In “The Women,” these contrasts  are heavily based in what attitudes, specifically the attitudes expressed through authorial voice, are ascribed to singularly women and singularly men. As Als outwardly depicts him, Truman Capote embodies a woman physically through a certain sex appeal, but also mentally in an emotionally driven approach to writing. However, as Als narrates Capote’s explorations and supposed evolutions through these ambiguous gender ideals, he cleverly implicates an overriding masculinity in Capote’s journey to finding an authorial identity.

The Capote depicted in “The Women”–arguably, much like Als himself–seems to be on a quest for identity in his creation of art. He does this by constantly inciting rivalry and letting attitudes of comparison drive his actions. This drive toward competition in the spirit of gaining popular literary favor, which is basically equated to power in terms of the community in which he exists, is a trait generally associated with the stereotypically masculine attitude. This play on gendered attitudes seems to contrast with Capote’s desire to fit in with the biologically female authors that become his peers. Als communicates this idea best when he writes, “Capote also wanted to usurp male authority,” which fits for both a specific anecdotal situation and for Capote’s approach to rivalry and writing overall (100). This contrast of stereotypically male attitudes as they apply to rivalry-driven relationships with female writers strongly illustrates the general ambiguity and give and take within one’s gender identity or assumed gendered role that Als strives to convey.

This story is very intriguing because it turns the Vampire myth on its head and makes it a source of pain and development for the character’s love story. The reader feels sympathetic to him because he does not desire to be a monster and was shaped by the Western/Eastern Vampire myths. His fear of acting as a Vampire should almost mirrors the fear the older woman had in the cemetery of what Vampires are known to do. He states, “The lemons relieve our thirst without ending it, like a drink we can hold in our mouths but never swallow. Eventually the original hunger returns. I have tried to be very good, very correct and conscientious about not confusing this original hunger with the thing I feel for Magreb” (8). What I found really effective is the description of his fear of the sun and his being convinced he would burn. His behavior is not merely dramatic because he later realizes the foolishness of it and how it inhibits him from moving forward. He feels safe in the myth and is comforted by what he sees as an instinctual need for blood. The sentence structure as he makes his way out of the cellar raises the anxiety for the reader. “Afraid, afraid” seems to echo mores through his mind than on the page (11). He sates “Thirty years. Eleven thousand dawns. That’s how long it took for me to believe the sun wouldn’t kill me” (13).

Much of their relationship hinges on the physiological aspect of hunger. Though blood does nothing, their ritual of searching and eating ties them to one another and this pattern propels the story forward. “Often I wonder to what extent a mortal’s love grows from the bedrock of his or her foreknowledge of death, love coiling like a green stem out of that blankness in a way I’ll never quite understand. And lately I’ve been having a terrible thought: Our love affair will end before the world does” (13-14). Their “marriage” is not confirmed as official, but it is founded on the same principles of taking care of one another, but he seems to see mortal relationships as weak because they are encouraged by the” foreknowledge of death” (13-14), whereas their relationship is far more transitory. It hinges on finding the ideal drink, but in many ways, I believe, it is more about the potential of boredom likely in any long-term relationship.

Karen Russell’s “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” makes several points about the nature of humanity and the mortal expectations of romantic relationships. Russell accomplishes this by implementing the preconceived predatory nature of vampires, as well as through the connections vampires have to the idea of eternity, and how each of these elements impacts Clyde’s relationship with Magreb. A particularly strong point in Russell’s craft is how seamlessly she takes these literary characterizations of the supernatural and uses them to mask truly human qualities.

The notion of a literal eternity together poses a daunting situation for both main characters, similar to the one a typical legal marriage would entail. Though both will literally live forever, Clyde admits to thinking their relationship will end before the world does, perhaps insinuating that he knows Magreb is growing distant; later on those suspicions are confirmed. He realizes she does not sacrifice as much for him as he does for her and so uses that as an excuse to allow his predation instincts to overtake him. This metaphor is very carefully constructed by Russell, as she truly does manipulate preconceived tropes of the supernatural, eternity and predation, to symbolize, respectively, the human concept of the inevitably ending “forever” and the underlying dissatisfactions that lead people astray. Coupling these qualities with their truly humane counterparts also adds a certain element of irony to Clyde’s constant reminders that he and Magreb are monsters, or non-human. The fact that Clyde is relegated to a human form as he realizes his dissatisfactions supports these notions as well.

In contrasting Magreb’s boredom with Clyde’s self-denial in her favor and constant pining for her affections, Russell establishes a commentary on marriage that extends beyond just the basic issues of dissatisfaction and the resulting infidelity. Instead, Russell unpacks the motives of dissatisfaction and makes the seemingly abnormal characters quite relatable.

Russel starts out this story in a very dull and monotone way. Her first sentence is a suggestion of excitement, but she quickly negates it with “but of course there is no way for anyone to verify that now.” She then goes on to write a long list of the characteristics that all of the worker women share. This tone sets up an intriguing contrast with the outlandish happenings of the actual story and allows the reader to suspend disbelief. There is no feeling of silliness that goes along with reading about a group of women who have turned into silk worms because we are made to understand early on that there is absolutely nothing exciting and joyful about it.

Through the story of Kitsune’s eagerness to impress the man who got her in the terrible situation she is now in against her better judgement, Russell opens the story up to more interpretation than a simple story about women being victimized by a terrible man and having to make the most out of a situation which they are stuck in. The focus on daydreaming and comradery initially seems to push the story in that direction, and right up until Kitsune’s sudden turn to tenacity the story feels safe even despite the fact that these are “silkworm-women” and it feels as if it could easily end with Dai’s death as the final proof that these women must simply learn to live with what they have. Once the reader hears those fateful words, “if the caterpillars are allowed to evolve, they turn into moths. They grow wings and teeth,” the reader is shocked and excited, not having seen any way out and having been lulled into just as much of a dull and somewhat indifferent acceptance as the kaiko-joko (she does this by using monotonous language, describing the glimpses of pride that Kitsune occasionally feels for being the only group of people able to spin so much silk, the idea that important people are wearing it, and the sense of individuality that they get from having distinct colors).

The question of how far willpower can take a person is posed, tested, and ultimately triumphs. The wings, however, never actually grow during the story, and the ending focuses more on revenge than the gaining of freedom. To me, the choice of ending the story with the Agent’s death was disappointing and brought an abrupt halt to the triumphant feeling that Russell had evoked through the rapid change of tone from the monotonous plodding of a group of defeated women to the rush of a revolution. The ending gave me a sense that the writer was keeping a secret from her readers, that maybe they never did get their wings, or maybe they got them but were never able to escape the room, starving to death, or once out they were just as miserable being trapped in their moth bodies as they had been trapped in the room. If the writer was trying to give us a clue as to what happens next and not simply leaving us in the dark, I can only guess that by leaving us with the image of Kitsune’s moth-face reflected in the eyes of her dying victim, Russel is suggesting that the women are losing their humanity and by incasing themselves in thread created by their own bitterness and regret, they will ultimately emerge as complete monsters. This is, again, a very abrupt change in what had seemed to be the direction of the story and is both frustrating and intriguing.

Karen Russell’s writing shows a similar connection between the two stories, “Vampires in the Lemon Grove” and “Reeling for the Empire”. In both of these short stories, Russell’s writing is not complex or outlandish. The writing itself is simply constructed. However, the messages portrayed in these short stories are complex. Looking specifically at “Vampires in the Lemon Grove”, this story is creative in its storyline: a vampire couple living in a lemon grove trying to keep away from blood thirst. Within the story there isn’t a whole lot that actually happens, similar to “Reeling for the Empire”. Even though the stories are simple in their writing, and storylines are not full of exciting development, Russell uses the simplicity to say a lot to a “bigger picture”.

In “Vampires in the Lemon Groves”, Russell is toying with the idea of overcoming the past in the character of Clyde. Although Clyde is not an immensely developed character, the reader can understand what Russell is getting at about overcoming ones past. Clyde has had to overcome challenges of myths told to him about vampires after meeting Magreb, and soon having to conquer change by overcoming his past ways of living. Russell also gets at the point of humanity. Russell utilizes the vampire couples attempt of using lemons, and other foods/objects, instead of sucking the blood of humans as an act of good humanity. However, there comes the point in the short story where the lemons are no longer sufficient for their blood thirst. The symbol of blood to a vampire is a symbol of a humans need for life. In other words, Karen Russell utilizes this thirst of blood, after so long of being conscious of others needs, to be equivalent of human agency. How much can one sacrifice before it becomes too much for them?