... she's using this blog as a safe place for her work at school too. FS works as an English liaison and blogs for her school newspaper, so bits and pieces of her writing are housed both here and elsewhere in school-affiliated websites.
Hello dear readers (who are most likely first-years),
The subject of this post is as you can see at the top, when I was a first year...
… I was an incoming student, who'd thought she would double major in English and History. My first semester here at Mount Holyoke, I'd taken a first year seminar in English entitled "How to Read a Poem" with Professor Alderman and a 200-level course in History entitled "Topic: We Didn't Start the Fire," a survey of post-World War II American History.
Poetry had been a short, but delightful blip in the entirety of my high school education. Or, rather, I should say blip blip since two instances in which poetry made its memorable appearance. In my sophomore English class, our summer reader comprised of Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This led us, of course, to read "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold," the first few lines of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming."
Quite honestly, I had to look that up. I remembered the first few lines, but I'd forgotten the author and title of the poem. And yet even my memory of those first few lines, read and re-read all those years ago is a wonder, because one day with this poem was enough to leave me, this present me, five years later able to recite again those first few lines.
Then, my senior year of high school, my teacher was particularly fond of poetry. His poetry unit lasted only a month, but in that time he plied us with Shelley, Donne, and Keats. Then, he had us all sign up for a poem to present and explicate as if we were teachers ourselves, giving an essay prompt (and then writing the essay itself), and reciting the poem. No repeats, he told all his five classes so that all told roughly 200 poems were presented to him by the end of the unit.
For me, senior year was a desperate dash of deadline after deadline: college applications, AP exams, and actual classwork of projects and homework. But I found myself lingering in front of the mirror, playing at the character of such and such poem: Lucille Clifton's young girl in the poem "this morning (for the girls of eastern high school)" and her artiste in the poem "the poet;" Keats' narrator contemplating the inevitability of death against the limitless of imagination of "When I have fears that I may cease to be;" Auden's voice of art in contrast to the everyday in "Musee des Beaux Arts;" even an attempt at the entirety of querulous, antsy narrator of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Let me just say right now that I was no 4.0 GPA, no over 90% correct SAT student. I tried, but inevitably my own wandering interests came between myself and scholastic perfection.
Yet, without all of this wanderlust in the world of English, how could I have come to that point in high school where I could bow to myself and say, "this morning / I met myself / coming in," reach a hand to my reflection and then bring that same hand to myself, curling the fingers at my sternum, feeling my heart beat beneath?
In a letter I wrote to my aunt and uncle in Houston at the time, I mentioned the experience in this way, "The Lucille Clifton poems are a required study for a poetry presentation, but I'm growing rather fanciful over the presentation so [I] memorized it and have been practicing performing it. I feel alternately wild and pleased with myself saying the words. I want to jump, to twirl, to wink, cry/smile."
I performed the poems I memorized in front of the high school English teachers, some of whom I'd had and others of whom happened to be passing by. It was my thank you to them for introducing me again and again to something new, this world of poetry. For poetry, while it can be read alone, is best in a group when it is read aloud, when the words come alive enriched by the voice of such and such person.
So, when I saw the course "How to Read a Poem" was still open during registration, I leapt at the chance to revisit this heady, new world of poetry. Here in Professor Alderman's class, I discovered what it is to read a poem. To read is to examine piecemeal the words, then the lines, then using both words and lines to contemplate the entirety of the poem.
My first two-pager on Milton's sonnet "I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs" was a disaster. All of my faults and oddities came to light: a tendency to invert the grammatical structure of subject verb, an inability to comprehend subject-verb complements, rampant nominalization, and subject mimicry. I had set out to analyze Milton and instead began to write like him.
The next essay was even more disturbing in unearthing my authorial dirt. The transferring of my verbal articulation to written analysis? Pfft. Inevitably, I came face to face with myself and my writing and thought, "The hell is this?!"
And yet, dear readers, this was all in all a good thing. It is a hard battle to fight, your own bewilderment in regards to yourself, but to have won is to have wrested creative freedom from the murkiness of your own mind.
At the end of the semester, I turned in an essay explicating Emily Dickinson's conceit of animal subjects to cast light on the thoughts and questions she had that could not be explained by organized religion. In my case, I had been able to bridge, if only a little, the divide between my ability to narrate and my ability to analyze. This last essay "To Be Zero at the Bone" marked the discovery of my own voice in academia of not only analysis, but narrative analysis.
A good essay leads the reader in and through itself in much the same way a good story does. It professes a setting, a character of interest, and a story i.e. the circumstances of the argument, the subject of the argument, and the argument itself. What makes a 30-page or a 100-page or even longer piece of literary criticism so interesting for me is due to this sense of narrative analysis unfolding before my eyes. I can delight as much in a piece of literary criticism as much as the subject novel or poem of the literary criticism itself.
I knew then by the end of this first year seminar as I know now that English must be my major. I loved my history class "Topic: We Didn't Start the Fire." I've kept all the texts from that class to this day and pass the texts on to my friends, because the material was so interesting, so well chosen and taught. Yet, history does not unfold itself before my eyes, limitless and mysterious, the way that English does.
This essay is in part not only my journey as a first year, but also my journey to becoming an English major. You know, you know your major once you've taken a class in it. At one point, you will know this must be the one, because though you are sleepless, exhausted, and at the end of your rope, you continue on without resentment, without the thought of the end that "it's only one semester," but with the thought of what could happen next?
And this next could be your entire academic career at Mount Holyoke College.
For your viewing (and laughing) purposes is my first and last pieces of writing in the first year seminar "How to Read a Poem." It is inevitable, I find, that no matter how much I edit before turning in a piece, there will be typos. There will be odd grammatical mistakes, sometimes, due to over-editing a piece. So readers, laugh with me for I too am laughing at myself.
The subject of this post is as you can see at the top, when I was a first year...
… I was an incoming student, who'd thought she would double major in English and History. My first semester here at Mount Holyoke, I'd taken a first year seminar in English entitled "How to Read a Poem" with Professor Alderman and a 200-level course in History entitled "Topic: We Didn't Start the Fire," a survey of post-World War II American History.
Poetry had been a short, but delightful blip in the entirety of my high school education. Or, rather, I should say blip blip since two instances in which poetry made its memorable appearance. In my sophomore English class, our summer reader comprised of Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya and Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. This led us, of course, to read "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, things fall apart, the center cannot hold," the first few lines of Yeats' poem "The Second Coming."
Quite honestly, I had to look that up. I remembered the first few lines, but I'd forgotten the author and title of the poem. And yet even my memory of those first few lines, read and re-read all those years ago is a wonder, because one day with this poem was enough to leave me, this present me, five years later able to recite again those first few lines.
Then, my senior year of high school, my teacher was particularly fond of poetry. His poetry unit lasted only a month, but in that time he plied us with Shelley, Donne, and Keats. Then, he had us all sign up for a poem to present and explicate as if we were teachers ourselves, giving an essay prompt (and then writing the essay itself), and reciting the poem. No repeats, he told all his five classes so that all told roughly 200 poems were presented to him by the end of the unit.
For me, senior year was a desperate dash of deadline after deadline: college applications, AP exams, and actual classwork of projects and homework. But I found myself lingering in front of the mirror, playing at the character of such and such poem: Lucille Clifton's young girl in the poem "this morning (for the girls of eastern high school)" and her artiste in the poem "the poet;" Keats' narrator contemplating the inevitability of death against the limitless of imagination of "When I have fears that I may cease to be;" Auden's voice of art in contrast to the everyday in "Musee des Beaux Arts;" even an attempt at the entirety of querulous, antsy narrator of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Let me just say right now that I was no 4.0 GPA, no over 90% correct SAT student. I tried, but inevitably my own wandering interests came between myself and scholastic perfection.
Yet, without all of this wanderlust in the world of English, how could I have come to that point in high school where I could bow to myself and say, "this morning / I met myself / coming in," reach a hand to my reflection and then bring that same hand to myself, curling the fingers at my sternum, feeling my heart beat beneath?
In a letter I wrote to my aunt and uncle in Houston at the time, I mentioned the experience in this way, "The Lucille Clifton poems are a required study for a poetry presentation, but I'm growing rather fanciful over the presentation so [I] memorized it and have been practicing performing it. I feel alternately wild and pleased with myself saying the words. I want to jump, to twirl, to wink, cry/smile."
I performed the poems I memorized in front of the high school English teachers, some of whom I'd had and others of whom happened to be passing by. It was my thank you to them for introducing me again and again to something new, this world of poetry. For poetry, while it can be read alone, is best in a group when it is read aloud, when the words come alive enriched by the voice of such and such person.
So, when I saw the course "How to Read a Poem" was still open during registration, I leapt at the chance to revisit this heady, new world of poetry. Here in Professor Alderman's class, I discovered what it is to read a poem. To read is to examine piecemeal the words, then the lines, then using both words and lines to contemplate the entirety of the poem.
My first two-pager on Milton's sonnet "I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs" was a disaster. All of my faults and oddities came to light: a tendency to invert the grammatical structure of subject verb, an inability to comprehend subject-verb complements, rampant nominalization, and subject mimicry. I had set out to analyze Milton and instead began to write like him.
The next essay was even more disturbing in unearthing my authorial dirt. The transferring of my verbal articulation to written analysis? Pfft. Inevitably, I came face to face with myself and my writing and thought, "The hell is this?!"
And yet, dear readers, this was all in all a good thing. It is a hard battle to fight, your own bewilderment in regards to yourself, but to have won is to have wrested creative freedom from the murkiness of your own mind.
At the end of the semester, I turned in an essay explicating Emily Dickinson's conceit of animal subjects to cast light on the thoughts and questions she had that could not be explained by organized religion. In my case, I had been able to bridge, if only a little, the divide between my ability to narrate and my ability to analyze. This last essay "To Be Zero at the Bone" marked the discovery of my own voice in academia of not only analysis, but narrative analysis.
A good essay leads the reader in and through itself in much the same way a good story does. It professes a setting, a character of interest, and a story i.e. the circumstances of the argument, the subject of the argument, and the argument itself. What makes a 30-page or a 100-page or even longer piece of literary criticism so interesting for me is due to this sense of narrative analysis unfolding before my eyes. I can delight as much in a piece of literary criticism as much as the subject novel or poem of the literary criticism itself.
I knew then by the end of this first year seminar as I know now that English must be my major. I loved my history class "Topic: We Didn't Start the Fire." I've kept all the texts from that class to this day and pass the texts on to my friends, because the material was so interesting, so well chosen and taught. Yet, history does not unfold itself before my eyes, limitless and mysterious, the way that English does.
This essay is in part not only my journey as a first year, but also my journey to becoming an English major. You know, you know your major once you've taken a class in it. At one point, you will know this must be the one, because though you are sleepless, exhausted, and at the end of your rope, you continue on without resentment, without the thought of the end that "it's only one semester," but with the thought of what could happen next?
And this next could be your entire academic career at Mount Holyoke College.
For your viewing (and laughing) purposes is my first and last pieces of writing in the first year seminar "How to Read a Poem." It is inevitable, I find, that no matter how much I edit before turning in a piece, there will be typos. There will be odd grammatical mistakes, sometimes, due to over-editing a piece. So readers, laugh with me for I too am laughing at myself.
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