Thursday, May 17, 2012

My Final not a Paper: The Hat and the Beard

Hey Professor Hanley, Check this out man. http://www.glogster.com/that1otherguy/the-beard-and-the-hat/g-6lhlchhbshvkpcud2buqoa0

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

I don’t have a song that particularly fires me up but Nowhere Man by the Beatles has always been one I’ve my favorite songs. I’ve listened to it since I was a kid and I’ve never really tired of it. My worst job experience had nothing to do with the actual job. In 2008 I was working for a family friend in construction, and helping him build and add on to his house out in the hills. That was the summer when there were a number of fires in northern California. I had to dig under his house to make a tunnel to hold cement that would make for a better foundation. It was stifling hot dirt was everywhere and smoke blanketed the county like a heavy fog. Under the house it was difficult to breathe as the combination of dirt and smoke and heat were filling my lungs. The work was better once I had finished under the house, but that was a truly awful experience. So after reading the two poems from What Work Is, as I’m not terribly familiar with Levine, I get the sense that the poet is processing outside experience through an individual; that experience becomes encapsulated in the poet persona of the poem, and doesn’t attempt to discharge into a greater collective conscience. For instance in “My Grave” the poet persona describes how after his death none of his physicality remains, “Not one nightmare/ is here, nor are my eyes which saw,” his physical state is mixed with those of his emotions, memories, and thoughts of loved ones, but they go with him and nothing really seems to remain for anyone else. The death has no greater sway on the fabric of reality or collective memory but instead is stored in box in some common area. Whitman on the other hand focuses the collective through the individual, I know we’ve been over this many times in class, but it keeps arising as a major difference between Whitman and his successors. As time passes the notion of the individual in American society changes ever so slightly. In his poetry Whitman, and in any number of his works, seems to be saying the individual is a key aspect of America in so far as he perpetuates the culture and his station as well as those around him or her. Levine takes in a approach that seems more individualistic. Instead of the individual’s experience in America, Levine illustrates the American experience on the individual.