Emily's Top Ten

These are not in order of preference and I can't find my Norton's since the majority of my life is packed away in boxes. And I don't remember what I put in which ones, so finding any one item is hopeless.

Christopher Marlowe (plays)
"Hero and Leander" was enough to make me want to know more of his writing other than that he wasn't as good as Shakespeare which is all I knew previously.

Robert Browning
I think I like everything about him: philosophy, style, subject matter, his life.

F. Scott Fitzgerald
My second favorite drunk 20th century American. But I have only read two of his novels and would like to read the rest of him.

Ted Hughes
Somehow I find him more accessible than Sylvia. (The "Daffodils" poem was amazing.) Which doesn't fit with my whole American/British idea, but that's ok. I like contradicting myself.

Dorthy Wordsworth (journals)
Interesting view of the Romantic movement, and I only got to read a few paragraphs for class.

Christiana Rossetti
A strong woman who wasn't shrill and hyper-feminist angry. Very intriguing. (BTW, I'm on an anti-feminist kick. Does that get me out of the level of hell I got put into on the white board diagram? Or do I get stay down there with Travis for being anti-feminist?)

Yeats
Even though it was already said. How could one not?

Henry James
I've yet to read a novel, only short stories. I like his theory, now to see if I like his practice.

Robert Penn Warren
I missed the mass reading of All the King's Men, but the poem I recited for class ("After the Dinner Party") is my current favorite for the 20th century.

Robert Hayden
I know I did a paper on him, but I liked "Those Winter Sundays" from Poetry class. Interesting use of form.


---------APPENDIX 1-----------

My Cheating Appendix
or
The people I really like and have already talked about enough that I didn't want to use up my top ten on them but still intend to read more of.

John Donne (thank you, Lord Peter)
Christopher Smart (thank you to Hirsch)
Shakespeare (as in the remaining plays... actually I'd like to make it a goal to see them all)
Robert Frost
Hemingway (I'm still as devoted, and I don't think I agree with anything substantial that he ever says, and I think he's lying the whole time, and really he has an awful view of women, and I wish I could write like that. ...sigh...)
Hopkins

----------APPENDIX 2----------

Currently reading: James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time. And last night I read the whole of Ella Enchanted in one sitting. I guess I can never be entirely intellectual, but it was fun and I have nowhere to be today. And there is nothing very wrong with children's books at 21.

(Funny note: I don't have to decide whether a proper name ending in an S gets another S when it's possessive. Apparently the male members of the blue room are in conflict on this point.)

New blue room found...

Well, folks, it finally happened. After much searching and running up of cell phone minutes, we have a HOUSE!!!!! Not an apartment, not a condo, not a plastic townhouse in the midst of other plastic townhouses, but a brick, old, real, fire-place containing house. It's only a short walk away from the Coffee Bean, too. And I am not packing away any of my books... so even if we don't have any furniture we have something to fill up the space.

BTW, Brooks you should post the Bel Espirit picture on here.

Check it out, friends: Moby Dick and the Culture Wars.

Brooks's Top Ten

I really tried not to be like Ben Adams and go verbosely over my count, but I couldn't pick just ten! But I did. I forced myself. I just three the other nine candidates in as an "appendix." (There are always ways around things.)

1. William Cowper, The Task: five-thousand-line mini-epic about the transformation of a stool to a sofa.
2. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: to quote from Norton: “This, the most immediately accessible of Blake’s longer works, is a vigorous, deliberatively outrageous, and at times comic onslaught against timidly conventional and self-righteous members of society. . . .” All very attractive adjectives. :-)
3. Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus: the high-philosophical tone and unique style makes my mouth water.
4. Thomas Hardy, poetry: his complete poems runs almost a thousand pages, and his rising stature as a poet makes his verse good feeding ground.
5. James Joyce, Ulysses: I've been baptized in two exerpts and am thirsty for more.
6. D.H. Lawrence, poetry: I like his poetry, and (like Hardy) there is a lot of it to explore.
7. Robert Frost, poetry: after reading “Birches” and “Mending Wall,” I want to be a Frost expert.
8. Eugene O’Neill, plays: after watching Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I’ll pay good money to see anything O'Neill's written.
9. Richard Wilbur, New and Collected Poems: “Love Calls us to the Things of this World”—I wish more Christians would write like this! Bought this volume at the Strand, NYC.
10. A. R. Ammons, Garbage: this man has his mind in the right starting place, at least, in addressing Modernism.

Here are the runner-ups:

1. Elizabeth Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese: for a romantic picnic with Dana, perhaps?
2. John Henry Newman: Apologia Pro Vita Sua, I want to read this in the near future, not for its literary value, but for theological reasons. I am trying to decide whether or not I am Roman Catholic, or just catholic. :-)
3. Herman Melville, Mardi: “almost unreadable . . . Melvillians find it inexhaustibly fascinating.” I’m in.
4. Emily Dickenson, poetry.
5. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim and Nostromo: interest stimulated by Heart of Darkness.
6. William Faulkner, Absalom Absalom!
7. William Carlos Williams, poetry.
8. Ted Hughes, Collected Poems: another Strand purchase. Viva la Crow!
9. Craig Raine, poetry: founder of the Martian School.

Travis' Top Ten

The much awaited top tens lists must be produced. Here's mine. At first I was going to wing it (and tried a few hours ago) but Dad came home with my graduation gift - a new laptop - and in the meantime I flipped through the Nortons. Here it is. Note well: there is no hierarchy!

1) Edwin Spencer's The Faerie Queene (a blast from the anachronistic past)

2) William Carlos Williams (his collections entilted Paterson and Spring and All)

3) Willa Cather's New Mexico novels (Song of the Lark and Death Comes for the Archbishop, I want to do something similar, that is, write about my home state and am thus compelled to read everything about it)

4) John Berryman (Homage to Miss Bradstreet. Em, I remember you liking this too. Darcy? Brooks, shame on you)

5) Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (every high schooler recalls this one, except for us pasty ex-homeschoolers)

6) Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 (I must fulfill my destiny of being a somebody-maybe-a-good-American-author if Dr. Hake and Brooks' predictions are in harmony with matters)

7) Yeats. All things Yeats! Become intimate with Yeats.

8) William Wordworth's The Preludes

9) T.S. Eliot's The Four Quartets (My apetite was whetted in Lit. class via "Little Gidding especially)

10) Philip Larkin's poetry (I like his laconic and Hardyesque style)


Okay. At the moment I am about to start Joyce's Dubliners, a book by David Sedaris, and Plath's Ariel. I am currently reading Proust's The Swann's Way (book one of Time Lost) and Ted Hughes' The Iron Wolf, which I picked up at the Strand in NYC with Brooks my fellow "book faggot." I want to dabble in some Heidegger too. I eagerly anticipate the other book lists. Love to everybody.

Carolyn's Farewell

I just discovered this poem Carolyn left as a comment under Travis's "What the Thunder Said" post on Diapsalmata:

Between the mountain
And the river

Between the plaza
And the highway

There was a house,
And the house was full of Timmonses.

Between the city
And the village

Beyond Lake Bob
And the cornfield

There is a dorm
And the dorm housed Brooks and Travis.

Beyond the summer
And the ceremony

The mountain, river,
Plaza, highway,

City, village,
Lake, and cornfield

Will remain, but
Brooks and Travis will be gone.

And we will miss them.

Summer Work 1

One of those Norwestern blankets of pure-freshening dampness overlays the sky, making the shrubs sag with weariness. Little pellet raindrops bounce downward, bouncing like popcorn in a popper, trying to escape the catalyst of its own being. In Founder's Hall a pretty girl decorates the balcony with fake roses for tomorrow's wedding reception. The weather will probably be like this. I can imagine a happy, shy Vanesa with hair falling apart and make-up smeared and runny from the wet air. Chris's hair will be perfect and their smiles will be perfect. Otherwise, all will by runny and in need of ironing or otherwise sag in quiet drowning.

Randy vacuums the lobby, just like he did yesterday, just like he will everyday for the next three months--steadily, not impatiently. That is inner solice and patience on his face. I misinterpretted it at first for complacency. Now I see the reflection of a saint's face in his eyes. He has taken something to heart. Work, work, work. And that is what summer is good for: the sky burdened with growth, saturated with gatheredness, finally is made ready for pouring. Tonight, libation and marriage is at one with the weather here in our earthly residence. Not only does the cup run over, it tastes good as well. It is enough to make one stop questioning certain natural laws and realize how wine was invented and why it tastes sweet and makes the head spin.

My Poetry Practicum Finished

I divided my nine credits of Directed Research and Writing into eight critical and one creative. The one creative credit is a series of ten poems written in what I call a "quadracube" or a 4-cube. Each poem consists of four stanzas of four lines each (quatrains), each line containing four feet (tetrameter). It takes a long time to revise and tinker and tinker and tinker with poetry. Mary Oliver says her poems go through fifty drafts. These came close. I finished the last one today and have shipped it off to Dr. Tobin for review and grading.

the mushrooms

The Mushrooms

Under the tree with black branches
and a white lily drooping earthward,
like the last drop of dew in the desert,
sits a punk clump of pious mushrooms.

This year they wait in prayer in the shade
like a prophet spreading out his legs
from the trunk to the continents. Next
year, they will reappear in the drawer

of some widowed mother's cupboard,
and she will let them over-ferment
and mince them a day before they rot
and stir in broth like a witchdoctor.

Children and grandchildren who eat them
shall grow pale with delirious visions
and thirst for water to speed the season
to hide the shadow of the shriveled bloom.



The Skunk

He lives beside a garden of moss
under the spongy redwood logs
and circles around a ritual path
in shadowy thickness of scented herbs.

The patch above his shaggy brow
has balded like a friar’s tonsure.
Observing a monkish vow of silence,
he shuffles under the swaying ferns.

Then, his tail lifts. It sounds a fiery
silent prayer that sails above meadows,
a slow and steady acidic bomb,
a mystic force—fronds bow their heads.

His tactless divination floats down
into the valley to burn the nostrils
and throats of men who pause and think:
The skunk is omen-making again.



The Patch

When a suit has rubbed and thinned
by daily ferine abrasion and stretch
down to the threaded lining and beyond
into vacancy and nothingness,

her needle fastens on the fringe
with a freshly-tanned leather scrap,
and seals the hole stitch by stitch
hemming the penultimate of death.

So a patch can save a coat.
A little bargain: the mark of age
that buys another year. It leaves,
not Yeats’ tattered rag of a man,

but a skid-guard on the elbow,
a gargantuan scab tacked on a ledge,
rough and ready for foreign friction:
Bridge-bracing. Adoption. Mend.



The Pipe

Sometimes I hold Grandpa’s pipe
in the crook of my thumb and, rocking
in his chair, recall the old myth—how
Prometheus stole fire from heaven

by sneaking embers into a cupped shell
and scuttling back down to terra firma,
keeping the ash hot by drawing the flame
through a reed cut from the hedge.

Using his god-given breath of life,
he squinted like a caveman in sunlight
and spit out sparks and smoke and fauna
into fields of brush, and thus spread

the stolen secret. Silly folklore.
But how can I scrutinize the yarn
of all the wrinkled, smiling patriarchs
puffing away on their planked porches?



The Seaweed

Like the curly beard-locks shaved
and wiped from Poseidon’s dripping chin
with sea-foam settled at a bowl’s rim,
the floating weeds cluster and congeal,

forging a scraggly nest for mites
and rank surface scum of the deep.
Wiry fullness, salty jungle
baking in the sunlight and wave-breath,

a refuge, a sponge that holds on through
Olympus’ livid tempests, sifting
and soaking in fixity and flux,
as stalwart as a weathered captain.

And as a lifeboat of shipwrecked sailors
paddles aimless on the marginless
sea, a ragged weed-clump floats by,
a marker of highways, an astrolabe.



The Handkerchief

The callow suitor emerges feebly
among the circus-ring of chat
and appearance, but the handkerchief
reassures the timorous player.

The providence of having it there,
pocket-dweller, ready to be whipped
forth to staunch the flow of earth—
dignifier, old debonaire.

The countess slips her silky kerchief
under the table to the suitor,
who clasps it in between his feelers,
and as he fondles the winking token,

he blushes, swallows, sighs and shoots
a skyward glance, a prayer of thanks
and ecstasy. For snot-stoppers
can lift our souls to celestial trance.



The Puddle

Puddle, you are blacker than the black
asphalt girding you and laid out
like a ruthless adulterous bed-sheet
for steering wheelers packing off goods

and bads in heels and boots. (Let’s just
define natural beauty out of
existence.) But for all that: life
flitting, bathing, coming, going,

birds in the font. How did Progress
with its merciless homogeny
miss or crack you into residence?
Was there some blunder that spared you,

making rainwater drain to your womb?
Or are you a primal spring bursting
in the under-bowels of fetal earth,
and trickling up as a forfeiting breast?



The Navel

A sunken circle, shy scar on a plain
of virgin flesh, it stands in, a tough-
twisted center for tribal warriors.
It is the rubber knot of a balloon

that children blow to fill its bowels
with air. One can nearly imagine
a thorny finger untying it
and letting the life filibrate out.

The navel is the knob and window
that keeps the demons peaking in
and all of earth's wares peaking out.
It holds together all things—it is

the nail in the mast—the spike driven
into the bottom of the sea, insuring
that all the fish will go on swimming
in their set migration patterns.



The Ink

Potent extract, poison-flow,
the stain of Indian night flooding
blanched, open space. The ruckus caused
when one stray stroke or blotchy patch

gets brushed onto a field of signs:
curse and crumple, reset and reprint—
by hand or machine, the ink must fall
precise or mankind throws a fit,

goes berserk, stands on its head.
That is why the calligrapher’s nub
tapers to the finest, finest point;
the gate of life and death cannot afford

misfire. This power, this delicate
constraint of sin is scored by a scribe
jabbing his tongue into his lip,
wide-eyed and squeezing out each line.



The Chisel

To take the hammer and chisel up
with warm hands, and with warm eyes
to scan the stone where salvation
must be etched. To cut through, both

like a termite gnawing on wood and
an old painter brushing lush water-
colors. To feel out grains and patterns
within the rock's dense mass, yet hold

to a spirit of airiness and angel’s breath.
To etch heaven and hell on earth
with chisel and hammer. To carve the poem
letter by letter, chip by crumb,

while the pebbles gather at your feet.
To work the tools like a dying poet,
eeking and straining for a gaze
so cold and fiery it kisses and burns you.

Emile Complete Noe Finale!

Finally Emily is done with her Noe papers! She channeled her frantic scrammbling into a directed, controlled funnel of ravenous energy. Her progress puts poly-sci majors to shame:

With my seventh Noe paper having been finished, I give you a taste of my afternoon. (deadline was 11pm)

Word count Noe Paper 3/3/05:

3:34 0 words
3:48 148 words.
4:09 294 words
6:05 432 words
6:37 657 words
6:50 756 words
7:20 791 words
7:41 897 words
8:20 1,170 words
8:35 1,203 words
9:00 1,348 words
9:13 1,491 words
9:24 1,605 words
9:37 1,683 words
9:49 1,869 words
10:53 1,902 words

Congradulations Emily. It is finished.