In her suicide attempts she preferred crawling out of sight and hiding. She likes to be confined and caught. In The Bell Jar she discusses many ways to commit suicide and what she believes is the best way and what are the worst and why.
From the bio notes in our book I read that her poems are about acute mental and emotional suffering. She writes in a controlled flow of images. Critics comment on her later poems and say the are a "murderous art." She does a wonderful job with observation, imagination, and language. Her wit and humor also shows through in her poems and helps to lighten the dark mood of the majority of her poems.
I will also mention notes by Sylvia Plath on some of the poems we are assigned to read and on the ones I choose to present.
Regarded as one of the founders of the Beat Movement, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has led a rather colorful and interesting life. He was born in Yonkers, New York on March 24, 1919 to Charles and Clemence (Mendes-Monsanto) Ferling. His father had been a multi-lingual businessman from Lombardy, Italy, who had died rather suddenly about 5 months before Lawrence was born. His mother was a 2nd generation American who was left to raise five sons by herself. In the end she suffered a nervous breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital in Poughkeepsie, New York when Lawrence was about 2 years old. His four older brothers were sent to live in a boarding home while he went to stay with his mother's uncle, Ludovic Monsanto and his wife, Emily. They had marital problems and Emily left, taking Lawrence with her to Strasbourg in Alsace for about four years. When they returned to the United States, Emily placed him in an orphanage until she could find work and could take care of him again. She managed to find a job as a governess in the home of Presley and Anna Lawrence Bisland in Bronxville, New York, who were related to the founder of Sarah Lawrence College. She later left him there and disappeared only to end up in Central Islip State Hospital. The Bisland's informally adopted Lawrence Ferling Monsanto, as he was known then, and set about making sure he got a good education through both public and private schools.
In 1937 he graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of North Carolina in the fall. He majored in journalism and worked for the school newspaper, the Daily Tarheel. He got his B.A. in 1941 and enlisted in the United States Navy in the fall. He was commissioned as an ensign in the following January and was assigned to a submarine chaser on the Atlantic coast of the United States and England, as well as being part of the fleet on the coast of France on D Day in June 1944. He returned to the States, where he did graduate work in Victorian literature and wrote his master's thesis at Columbia University in New York City. It was also there that he became intrigued by the expatriate experiences of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway. Afterward receiving his M.A. at Columbia in 1948, he went to the Sorbonne in Paris for the remaining 3 years of his educational benefits through the G. I. Bill. He received his doctorate in 1951 and settled in San Francisco later that year, becoming a part of the local literary community.
Lawrence had published quite a few translations of Jacques Prévert, but he was also getting some of his own work published when he and Peter D. Martin opened the City Lights Pocket Book Shop in June 1953. Later, in January of 1955, Martin moved to Manhattan, and Lawrence was left with the shop. This is roughly the same time he discovered and began using his original name, which he learned when applying for his California driver's license. The City Lights Book Shop quickly became an important "avant-garde" gathering place for what would later be known as the "Beat" movement. Ferlinghetti's first project as a publisher was a series of small paperbacks known as "Pocket Poets" which he devised as an idealistic way for even the common worker to be able to read poetry, either at home or on the job. While the first book was his own, "Pictures of the Gone World," he also included other writers of the time such as Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac. A rather landmark poetry reading was on October 13, 1955, where the main attraction was Ginsberg's "Howl." The publishing of this poem and several others by Ginsberg caused a suit against Ferlinghetti in June of 1957 on the grounds of printing and selling lewd and indecent material. The ensuing court case increased the publicity of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and other Beat writers a great deal, especially since Ferlinghetti won on October 3, 1957. Other writers published by City Lights include Denise Levertov, Marie Ponsot, William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Antonin Artaud, Paul Bowles, Albert Cossery, Charles Olsen, Peter Orlovsky, Bob Kaufman, Edward Dahlberg, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, along with regular works by Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
In 1957 Ferlinghetti decided to send his own work to another publisher, James Laughlin of New Directions Books, who started off in 1958 with "A Coney Island of the Mind" which is a set of twenty-nine poems, only filling about 38 pages so they included several of his works from "Pictures of the Gone World" and "oral messages" that he had done to jazz accompaniment. Over the next several years, it sold almost 700,000 copies in the U. S. and over one million worldwide, making it the "largest-selling single book by a living American poet." In 1960 he wrote his first novel, "Her," which was very unconventional and was like a "multileveled exploration of life and letters into which the author himself intrudes." He tried several one act plays after 1962 and also found himself to be high in demand for poetry readings and appearances. In 1969, he published his fourth collection of poetry and is remembered for the reading of "Assassination Raga" which was done the day that they buried Robert F. Kennedy. "The Secret Meaning of Things" was nominated for a National Book Award in poetry in 1970 and he also published his travel journal "The Mexican Night" and "Back Roads to Far Places." Since then he has published several more poetry collections, travel journals, and books including "Open Eye, Open Heart," "Who Are We Now," "Northwest Ecolog," "Landscapes of Living and Dying," "Several Days in Nicaragua Libre," "Over All the Obscene Boundaries," and "Love in the Days of Rage."
Of course, he also became involved in the political activism of the Vietnam War during the late 60s and was arrested in December 1967 over a protest at the Oakland, California Army Induction Center. He wrote a rather scathing poem called "Tyrannus Nix" in 1969 about President Nixon and his policies about the war in Vietnam. As recently as the Persian Gulf Crisis in the early 90s Ferlinghetti has been asserting his antiwar views and opinions.
He was married in 1951 to Selden Kirby-Smith, and had 2 children, Julie and Lorenzo, but they divorced 20 years later. He still lives in San Francisco, not too far from his bookstore with his cat, and has become a rather well-known poet, playwright, novelist, translator, publisher, political activist, and artist.
Source: Wilson Biographies- http://hwwilsonweb.com/
Publication Statements: 1991 Biography from Current Biography; 1975 Biography from WORLD AUTHORS 1950-1970; 2000 Biography from Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Biography
Copyright: The H. W. Wilson Company. All rights reserved. The Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Biography © Helicon Publishing Limited 2000. All rights reserved.
This poem is about a hiker crossing a stream on a mid September morning. The hiker listens to the noises of nature. The world around the hiker is harmonious and musical. He is filled with his love for nature and salutes it as he would salute the american flag. The mood of the poem is one of tranquility and awe of nature.
This poem really speaks to me. The rich description transports me right into that stream. It becomes me whose cold nose drips. Me who wades in the frigid creek water of the magnificent rockies. the felling that this poem relates is a feeling of utter pleasure and happiness. The hiker is filled with the environment. the feeling is like the feeling you get when you're six years old and you know that America is the best place on earth an you recite the Pledge of Allegiance loudly and with sincerity and hold your hand to your heart and love y our country. To one who loves nature, this poem is so very powerful. To read it is to know Gary Snyder's love of nature and to experience it. It awes me to be able to read a poem and to identify with it so closely that it could have come from my own heart.
Charles Olson was born in 1910 in Worcester, Massachusetts and was educated at Wesleyan University and at Harvard, where he studied American civilization. During the Second World War, he worked for the Democratic Party and for the Office of War Information as the assistant Chief of the Foreign Language Division.
His first two books "Call Me Ishmael" (1947) a study of Melville's "Moby Dick" and "The Mayan Letters" (1953), written to poet Robert Creely form Mexico where he was studying Mayan hieroglyphics, covers mythology, anthropology, language, and cultural history.
Olson's influential manifesto,"Projective Verse" was published in phamplet form in 1950-in this particular work, the verse aims to transfer energy from the world to the reader without artificial interference, and snytax is shaped by sound, not sense.
Olson started writing poetry in the late 1940's and "The Kingfishers", the longest poem in his first collection, remains his most stiking demonstration of projective verse. In 1951, Olson succeeded the artist, Josef Albers as rector of Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and remained there until it closed in 1956. He taught again-- at the State University of New York, Buffalo (1963), but settling in Gloucester,MA devoted most of his time and energy in subsequent years to "The Maximus Poems", his most substantial work.
Olson's poems mix rhetorical directness with an enigmatic generality. Many of his best poems, like "La Preface", are oratorical. It is American to speak with a clear objective in view. One of his themes was: "What does not change/is the will to change" (used in the opening of "The Kingfishers") The directness of his approach to poetry must have seemed refreshing and the prevailing literary taste was tuned to the delicate obliqueness of Wilbur, Merrill and other young poets.
Olson concentrated on three main points in poetry. First, he stresses the kinetics of the poem. He stresses that a poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it and it must be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.
Secondly, when the poet ventures into Field Composition, he puts himself in the open and he can go by no track other than the one the poem underdeclares, for itself. In addition, the principle is the law which presides conspicuoulsy over such compostition, and when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. He stated, FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT.
Thirdly, Olson said that the process of the thing is how the priciple can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. Olson wanted the poet to get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can. And if you also set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER.
Michael Stephen Harper was born in Brooklyn, New York on March 18, 1938. He attended City College of Los Angeles where he got his A.A. in 1959, while he got his B.A. ('61) and M.A. ('63) in English at what is now California State University at Los Angeles. He also earned an M.A. from the University of Iowa in creative writing from a Writers' Workshop he attended there. Harper has taught English literature and writing at several colleges on the west coast including, Contra Costa College in San Pablo from 1964-65, Lewis and Clark College and Reed College in Portland, Oregon from 1968-69, and California State College in Hayward in 1970. He has also been the visiting professor at Carleton College, Cincinnati, Harvard, and Yale Universities. Harper has been a professor of English at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island since 1973 (although he started teaching there in 1971), and has been the first holder of the Israel J. Kapstein Professorship of English since 1983. Harper has been married since December of 1965 to the former Shirley Ann Buffington, and they have one surviving child, a daughter.
Harper says that his poems are "linked with the sensibilities of African Americans" and that they are "rhythmic rather than metric; the pulse is jazz; the tradition generally oral; my major influences musical; my debts, mostly to the musicians who taught me to see about experience, pain, and love, and who made it artful and archetypal." He claims such musical influences as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, and Bud Powell.
Lucille Clifton has appeared in many public places including the Today Show and Nightline. She has won awards as a poet, fiction writer, and screenplay writer. These include creative writing fellowships, a National Endowment for Arts, two nominations for a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and an Emmy. Clifton has also written over 20 children's books.
The sounds of her poems are African American spirituals and secular folksongs with a rich history of rhythm and blues. She has the rhythms and sounds of African American fundamentalist revivals and magical incantations. Her phrasing and timing are of classic African American humorists. She has a physical sense of the language and a belief of the power of song, tongues, and the impotency of slogans.
"I am a black woman poet, and I sound like one."Poem:
"She don't have to act strong if she don't want to."
Gary Soto was born on April 12, 1952, in Fresno, California to Mexican American parents. His grandparents immigrated from Mexico during the Great Depression and found jobs as farm laborers. Soto grew up poor in the San Joaquin Valley and learned a hard work ethic through chores, such as mowing lawns, picking grapes, painting house numbers on street curbs and washing cars.
When Gary was five his father died as the result of a factory accident. His mother was left to raise her three children Gary, his older brother, Rick, and his younger sister Debra with the help of the children's grandparents.
Soto describes his family as an "illiterate" family. They did not have books and were not encouraged to read. In fact, Gary did not start writing poetry until he was in college.
He graduated from high school in 1970, and went to Fresno City College, where he began to study geography. He received an AA degree from there in 1972. Then, Soto earned an English degree at California State University at Fresno in 1974. He continued his education to earn a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of California at Irvine. While working on his graduate work, Soto married Carolyn Oda, the daughter of Japanese American farmers.
After receiving his master's degree, Soto became writer in residence at San Diego State University and a lecturer in Chicago studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1977, he became an associate professor in both the Chicano studies and English departments at UC, Berkeley, where he has been a senior lecturer since 1992. Soto has assumed the role of a full time writer since 1993.
Soto has published many books of poetry and also children's books. He has also won many awards including the National Book Award in 1995, he twice won the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for Creative Writing, and he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979.
This poem in its seeming simplicity is, at a closer look, a more complex thought. The speaker is thinking about life and money, what it takes to live. You must have money to live, yet money isn't really essential to life. The speaker is also contemplating how money goes from one place, one person to another by indirect means. You have to pay money to live. The people you pay money to use that money to live, and the people they pay their money to use that money to live and that is how things work.