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Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Physical Bodies (Inside Bodies (Human in…

- - - - Humanimal Bhanu Kapil
        
        Humanimal explores the distinction/lack of distinction between human and animal through the historical figures of two "wolf-girls" Kamala and Amala. Particular focus is put upon descriptions of the body to explore the overlap between the categories of human and nonhuman
      - Emily Dickinson
        
        Particular poems of Dicksonson's, particularly "'Hope' is the thing with feathers", explore the natural world, emphasizing the autonomy present in the nonhuman (See: Emily Dickinson's Ethical Artifice by Scott Knickerbocker). What would seemingly separate human from animal--exercise of subjectivity--is therefore blurred and disregarded in favor of an ethical approach to nature that fosters respect for the similarity and difference of human and nonhuman.
        
        "'Hope is the thing with feathers--/ That perches in the soul--/And sings the tune without the words--and never stops at all"
        
        Moving 'Hope', seemingly human emotion, outside the human. By doing so, Dickinson emphasizes its persistence and its existence outside the human, lending it autonomy. Nevertheless, as 'the thing with feathers' it 'perches in the soul'. As an animal form, it is placed within the human body, blurring the distinction between human and animal by placing the body of an animal inside the body of a human. The bird 'sings the tune without the words', similar to human song, but lacking words. The animal is like the human, which generates respect for it, but importantly is distinct.
      - "When I developed the film in New Delhi, the x-ray of a marine skeleton was superimposed upon her left arm. Her elbow as thick as a knot. I said it was cartilage--the body incubating a curved space, the animal self, instead of hands, she had four streaks of light. An imprimatur, she saw me and flinched" (Kapil 6).
        
        Superimposition of images expresses through visual medium the overlap of human and animal. Representation of the body becomes interconnected with representation of animal bodies. "the body incubating a curved space, the animal self"--animal is bursting out of body. The boundaries of the body, the boundaries of what it means to be human, are unable to be contained within the human body.
      - Marianne Moore
        
        Moore blurs the distinction between human and animal by lending the animal human characteristics. However, the animal does not come into the human body as it does with Kapil and Dickinson, but Moore maintains a scientific distance from her subjects even as she addresses and represents the animals in human terms.
        
        "Pride sits you well, so strut, colossal bird. / No barnyard makes you look absurd; / your brazen claws are staunch against defeat" (Moore 31)
        
        Assigning the bird the human emotion of pride becomes a way to understand how the bird moves in the world, to make the actions of the bird comprehensible through a human perspective. Moore further addresses the bird as she would a human, directing her poem to 'you', the bird. This allows for a relationship between the human and the animal, a further way that Moore engages with the natural world. The animal "claws" are paired in the last line with "defeat", a solely human concept, to indicate an overlap of the human and the animal--there are no clean categories.
  - - - Rukeyser makes problematic the invasion of outside objects into the body by discussing the dire effects of inhaled silicone on the bodies of miners. Allowing this overlap thematically, Rukeyser portrays the perilous situation that bodies in general are placed in, subject to the dangers of the world around them and to a society that values their production over their integrity.
      - "I saw the dust in the bottom of the tub. / The boy worked there about eighteen months, / came home one evening with a shortness of breath. / He said, 'Mother I cannot get my breath'(Moore 81).
      - The dust comes off the body--so it can be found in the bottom of the tub. As such, it seemingly outlines the body, settling on its limits to define it. However, it does not maintain this distance. It invades into the lungs of the miner, crossing the boundary of the human body. It settles in his lungs, and the limits of his body can only contain a set amount of matter--as he inhales silicone, which becomes incorporated into his body, something must be forced out--so he has a "shortness of breath". The body is threatened by having its elements replaced by something from outside itself.
  - - - Gertrude Stein describes everyday objects in language that defamiliarizes the objects, exploring the limits of language and representation. In doing so, her language demonstrates the arbitrariness of language, and displays a theory of language that relies upon words as presenting difference between elements of the world, allowing one object to be distinguished from another. However, the gap between an arbitrary word and what is signifies is predicated on a difference between what is being represented and the reality of the word itself, and "the difference is spreading", leaving language more and more detached from what it represents.
      - "A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading" (Stein 9)
      - The object is not disconnected from other forms in the world--it is a 'kind', linking it as a generic object to other similar objects. This relationship is summed up in calling it a 'cousin', using human terms of relation to think of the relationship between one object and another and one word and another in language. Physical objects are related to one another as words contribute to "a system to pointing", or the connections between words and between words and what they refer to. The expansion of the object beyond this system of language is posited by having it encompass juxtapositions of terms, "a spectacle and nothing strange" moving the object to contain both extremes, pushing the limits of its representation in language.
  - - - Trevino shows perilous spaces in order to de-emphasize the importance of property damage and other threats to capital in revolutionary action. Objects and space are put against the people within them to move beyond considerations of a people-in-space to the people as distinct entities from space, from capitalism and other systems that posit their worth in anything but their personhood.
      - "Santander Bank was smashed into! / there were barricades in London / there were riot girls drinking riot rosé / the party melted into the riot melted into the party / like fluid road blocks & gangs & temporary autonomous zones" (Trevino 'poem')
      - The bank 'was smashed into', human bodies entering into the realm of capital, both emphasizing the capture of humanity within capitalism but also the introduction of the value of humanity into a system that values solely the value of money and other objects. The 'riot girls' are condemned by their connection to products of capitalism, their rioting tied to 'rosé' and therefore the purity of their revolutionary action threatened by intermingling the human and objects of capital. Humans are contained in spaces and contained within capitalism with "barricades" that tie them to a particular place, to a materiality that disregards their position as humans independent of other factors such as geography and their association with objects
  - - - Whitman values the body as its own entity, and not simply as enclosing the soul. For Whitman, the body is indistinguishable from the soul, and therefore one cannot be valued over another because it is these various elements that come together to make one entire human body.
      - "The bodies of men and women engirth me, and I engirth them, / They will not let me off nor I them till I go with them and respond to them and love them. / Was it dreamed whether those who corrupted their own live bodies could conceal themselves? / And whether those who defiled the living were as bad as they who defiled the dead?"
      - The question of if "those who defiled the living were as bad as they who defiled the dead" draws into consideration whether the body itself deserves respect, or if it deserves respect only as it contains a human soul. Whitman transplants in this section actions that would be expressed toward the "soul" of another to be conducted with the body. He "respond"s to bodies and "loves" them, making the body the central object of concern in both "conversation" and emotion. He further values the body as it pertains to sexuality. His response and love have sexual implications, moving too these immaterial concepts to the realm of the bodily and celebrating the sexual as a way to value and celebrate the human body as valuable in human experience in and of itself. Further, he indicates how humanity can be connected through their bodies. Connection occurs across bodies, with them 'engirth'ing him, and his doing so in return.
  - - - Mackey involves the body in poetry by an emphasis on sound. Alliteration and anaphora emphasize the spoken quality of poetry, insisting on its sound as an integral part of its poetic work. Involving the body in poetry emphasizes the importance of the body, and its inability to be separated from human artistic endeavor. In doing so, the body is made valuable in as it relates to art.
      - "We saw light, sought shadow we / thought we saw. We saw our heads / roll away whatever we saw... we / were again at the foot of a ladder..."
      - Slippage in sound/spelling of the word 'saw', both seeing their own heads and 'sawing' their heads off, which 'roll away' in the next line 'whatever we saw'. As a report of what they 'saw' the poem is connected to the body which mediates what enters into the poetry. The body even mediates its own experience of subjectivity, when "we saw our heads roll away whatever we saw", the body having even an experience of itself. Anaphora makes it repetitive, involving the sound/body in the rhythm taken up by the poem and suggesting thematic connection between them. Sibilance also connects terms--the juxtaposition of 'saw light, sought shadow' nevertheless puts the two into conversation, involves light and shadow with one another.
- - - - "My Lord you" stands out as unusual in the English text. Moments such as these emphasize the difference between the source and its English translation, positing a fundamental difference between the cultures that have produced each. The connection fostered by translation between languages is made problematic by these moments of foreignness, where the connection is threatened by Pound's often orientalizing use of language and common tropes in portraying the subjects of the poems.
      - "At fourteen I married My Lord you. / I never laughed, being bashful. / Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. / Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back" (Pound 11).
      - Pound uses translation of text to create new poetry, reaching across cultural boundaries to portray universality of experience that serves to connect the East to the West. Pound often uses phrases that seem alien to English, emphasizing the distinction between the cultures and making problematic his utilization of foreign texts.
    - - John Ashbery
        
        Ashbery's ekphrastic poem 'Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror' discusses the limits of representation. Itself a representation of an already existing work of art, he wonders at the limits of capturing the human within artwork, and the possibility of creating a 'true' representation, if representation can be frees of artifice.
        
        "He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made / By a turner, and having divided it in half and / brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself / with great art to copy all that he saw in the glass / chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait / is the reflection once removed" (Ashbery 188).
        
        Levels of abstraction from the self--the self is first his 'reflection', then removed by being contained in a portrait, which is contained within a poem. These levels of removal, which Ashbery is very aware of, tell us of the limits of representation. As it is removed, artifice enters. He "caused a ball of wood to be made", ostensibly to make his portrait more accurate to the reflection as captured by a convex mirror, but this introduces inaccuracy to its representation of his own body. As a representation, it obscures view of the original subject. The further we are removed, the more it is obscured. Our description by Ashbery is several times removed. "The soul establishes itself. / But how far can it swim out through the eyes" (Ashbery 188). The soul of the subject is limited in its ability to travel, and therefore as we become further removed we have less and less access to the soul. Ashbery's theory of representation captures the futility of capturing reality within artwork.
      - Pictures from Brueghel, William Carlos Williams
        
        Williams defies the limits of painting and text as mediums by portraying a liveliness in his verse through the insistent motion of its subjects. Through this consistent movement, Williams moves beyond the paintings he is representing in text, providing a more comprehensive representation of the subject of each.
        
        "Disciplined by the artist / to go round / & round / in holiday gear / a riotously gay rabble of / peasants" (Williams 10)
        
        "Disciplined by the artist" highlights the distance created by the dual layers of representation in the poem. The subjects are being represented by a painting, which is being represented by a poem. Nevertheless, they have vitality that is communicated by their constant movement. They go 'round / & round", and although poetry and painting create images that are inherently static this repeating motion carries their actions from the poem, necessarily in the past, to the presence as they continue to twirl. Though heavily mediated, this representation therefore communicates life in its subjects.
    - - Nelson delivers an ode to blue that is entirely removed from the color itself. In doing so, she argues for the ability of language to capture a subject across mediums. An element of visual mediums, color, is brought into a textual medium. As it is suspended in the textual medium, a particular relationship can be forged with it by putting it into conversation with the speaker of the poem, allowing an intimate connection of color to speaker that defies the textual medium through making color an object of textual concern.
      - "Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. It began slowly. An appreciation, an affinity. Them, one day, it became more serious. Then (looking into an empty teacup, its bottom stained with thin brown excrement coiled into the shape of a sea horse) it became somehow personal" (Nelson 1).
      - Nelson explores the limits of the textual medium by introducing artificiality to the language of the section. It is distanced from spoken language, from language that has a presence in the world, by highlighting its own separation from natural utterances. Instead of being said, we are to "suppose I were to begin by saying". The limits are expressed also through the introduction of the topic of a color--which is not represented within the text itself but nevertheless is the topic the text circles. Text is divorced from image by putting even the poetic image within brackets, isolating it from the poetic text surrounding it as it describes how she is "looking into an empty teacup". However, the textual medium allows her to express a connection with the color by putting it into the terms of a human relationship--she is able to express a feeling of having 'fallen in love with a color'. Though unable to represent the color, the text is able to portray a relationship to the color that would otherwise be invisible.
    - - Don't Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine
        
        Rankine uses images and discussion of television within 'Don't Let me be Lonely' to explore different mediums and their ability/inability to foster connection. Additionally, different notions of authenticity and witnessing are represented by different mediums that bring something different to the table as far as capturing reality. The tension of reality/art is also emphasized by TV which can be used for both. The validity of television as a source of information is threatened by its inherent artificiality that comes from the mediation of the images.
        
        "I leave the television on all the time. It faces the empty bed. I don't go into the bedroom during the day once I've dressed. Sometimes when I am wearing a skirt and feel like putting on pants or vice versa, I go in there and people are conversing. Occasionally I sit on the edge of the bed and listen. I listen for a few minutes only. One day there is a man interviewing a boy caught in the penal system, a juvenile offender" (Rankine 15).
        
        As the boy is "caught in the penal system", so too is he caught within the speaker's television. Both have to do with authenticity/proof. As the boy is being interviewed as part of the legal system, the TV is also claiming authenticity by portraying this questioning as real. There is a separation of the self from the television. Though the speaker enters and "people are conversing", she cannot join into conversation, rather she can only "listen" to the conversation that is being had. TV is not directly implicated in reality, but is a mediated access to parts of the world you are separated from. The peopled television juxtaposes the depeopled space of her bedroom--though she cannot contact the people in the TV, her room is also devoid of human connection.
    - - "Sontag / or Sonic the Hedgehog" juxtaposes high culture/academia with a playful use of popular culture. Different mediums are brought to influence the speaker, such as textual and academic (Sontag) and video games (Sonic). Additionally, the text adds polyvocality to the poem--we have speech directed at the audience as well as speech directed at another subject within the poem. Use of text message as a medium plays with the audience, allowing us a voyeuristic view into the life of the speaker, while also implying the subjectivity of the speaker--if the speaker is able to be sending text messages, engaging with other people, it implies an interiority and a self beyond the poem.
      - "I text Girard do / you wanna come / over? Watch me stuff / swim trunks into / a weekender bag / and maybe a movie? / Regret is a gift that keeps on giving I / think it was Sontag / or Sonic the Hedgehog / who said just dash dodge / weave faster than you / can think n there's no / time to shame spiral" (Pico 1).
      - Pico juxtaposes somber engagement with the past with irreverent snippets of text-message conversation, moving swiftly between seriousness and frivolity. The thematic focus on the past is tied to use of present technology. The poem is drawn to the present also by its constant flow of action and constant enjambment that keeps the poem moving ever forward.
  - - - Bribery, Steven Zultanski
        
        Zultanski confronts his audience with shocking and violent images to push acknowledgment of the political utility of being confronted with the harsh reality of American political and personal life. Zultanski communicates his politics through generation of disgust and despair with America as an entity and with Americans, perverting American mythos in order to communicate its fundamental participation in death and destruction of lives.
        
        "The president is just an exception man, like other men but more so. He does more the same terrible things that other men so and have done, plus his own unique terrible things: he also wanted to brush the boy's arm, and so he did and fell in love" (Zultanski 50-51)
        
        Invention of perverse situations is meant to reveal an underlying truth. Though the particular circumstances described are untrue, the underlying disgust generated is appropriate. Though Obama may not be responsible for this particular crime, Zultanski nevertheless generates a disgust for his guilt with regards to a myriad of other crimes. Responsibility is both culture wide "he does more the same terrible things" but also individual "plus his own unique things". Zultanski wants us to accept our own guilt as a society, but also to personalize it so that it may gain utility through our own consideration of and movement beyond the guilt we have as American citizens.
      - Confession
        
        Ariel, Sylvia Plath
        
        Plath utilizes the images of societal trauma in order to communicate her own personal trauma. She undergoes a problematic engagement with history, where her confession encompasses historical trauma, making personal what is a collective societal trauma, such as the Holocaust in her poem 'Daddy'. Her confessional poetry seeks to bridge the gap between personal and collective, by connecting her readers to the speaker who gains subjectivity through the implied traumatic history that lurks behind the speaker's statements in each poem.
        
        "I could hardly speak. / I though every German was you, / And the language obscene / An engine, an engine, / Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen/ I began to talk like a Jew / I think I may well be a Jew" (Plath 50).
        
        Universalizes trauma through claiming of a traumatic event not hers, "I think I may well be a Jew", claiming an identity and an associated trauma. Blurs distinction between individuals through this claim to identity, fostering connection but also de-emphasizing the importance of particular trauma by applying it widely. Engages across lines of identity through taking this trauma onto herself. Confessional mode also engages with audience, asking them to image the poem's speaker as an agent in the world, through constant use of lyric 'I' that emphasizes the importance of the poetic subject and implies interiority to the 'I' by giving it a history beyond the poem.
    - - Commons, Myung Mi Kim
        
        Kim's text posits language as a commons while also exploring the limits of language, with reference to translation and language difference. Moments where non-English text is inserted separate the assumed English-speaking reader from the poem's speaker. Transliteration of non-Roman alphabets beg the question of intelligibility--how much does sharing depend on legibility? How is understanding fostered beyond language?
        
        "COMMONS elides multiple sites: reading and text making, discourses and disciplines, documents and documenting. Fluctuating. Proceding by fragment, by increment. Through proposition, parataxis, contingency--approximating nerve, line, song Velocity, the exultant and transitory glimpse of encounter" (Kim 107).
        
        "Reading and text making", "discourses", "documents" all communicate information between people. In "fragment"s, "increment"s we are able to connect. These elements of the archive contain and are in conversation with human bodies-- "approximating nerve". They are able to communicate a "glimpse of encounter" while also participating in this encounter.
    - - Specificity
        
        Purge, Trisha Low
        
        Low uses the medium of legal wills to allow the audience to participate as a voyeur to the relationships of the speaker and she imparts her last wishes to her friends and family. By surrounding the speaker with this familial and personal relationships, this confessional poem creates an illusion of interiority of the constructed 'I' subject. Use of 'you' connects to the audience while the particular address to family members distances them, leaving them both drawn into the poem and set aside, able only to glimpse parts of the speaker's experience and identity.
        
        "I think it's quite a nice feeling to know that in a couple hours I'll be gone. I mean, yeah, I know I have to make you go through all my stuff which is kind of a complete waste of time, and I know it'll make you sad but it's still...nice. I'm really sorry. I do love you guys, you know" (Low 13)
        
        The poem is peopled by reference to various relationships, but the poems are completely from the point of view of the speaker. We gain knowledge of other people in the speaker's life only through their relationship to the speaker, and their relevance to the events of the poem. There is an implication of the speaker's existence beyond the poem, "a couple hours" pointing to their existence beyond the present/past moment captured in the poem. Directly addressing the family as "you" makes the reader embody the role of the friends and family of the speaker, using the confessional mode to foster connection between the reader and the speaker by causing them to inhabit these roles within the poem. Yet references to specific names and roles distances the reader, who may not match the roles they are asked to inhabit. It shows that these connections fostered are tenuous, and the difficulty of using text to foster human connection.
      - Implicated in
        
        American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin, Terrence Hayes
        
        Hayes uses the pronoun 'you' to address the American people and to implicate the reader in the American society both the speaker and the audience are trapped in. Doing so places a responsibility on the reader and introduces this element to reading--what can poetry do? What can reading do? Especially relevant in the political situation of Post-2016 election US, Hayes uses poetry to draw America together to both experience unity and come to terms with the responsibility we have for one another and the harm we have done each other.
        
        "I make you both gym & crow here. As the crow / you undergo a beautiful catharsis trapped one night / in the shadows of the gym. As the gym, the feel of crow- / shit dropping to your floors is not unlike the stars / falling from the pep rally posters on your walls. / I make you a box of darkness with a bird in its heart. / Voltas of acoustics, instinct & metaphor. It is not enough / to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed" (Hayes 11).
        
        "both gym & crow" implicates the reader as part of the Jim Crow era. However, 'both gym & crow' implies two positions--both the oppressor and the oppressed. As an oppressor you make "undergo a beautiful catharsis" but it is not without hurting your fellow people--"shit dropping to your floors". Occupying both positions, 'you' as an American figure are both sufferer and causing the suffering. The American is a figure of both connection and disconnection. "It is not enough / to love you. It is not enough to want you destroyed", the American reader is both loved and hated, in the precarious position between being loved and being destroyed. A 'you' occupying multiple positions invites us to connect while addressing our disconnections.