Assignment: Essay III

Rough Draft due: Tuesday, April 15th
Final Draft due: Thursday, April 17th
Length: 5-7pp

Format: double-spacing, 12-pt font, in Times New Roman or a similar font. No Courier. No Ariel. Please.
Heading: Name and date, single-spaced at the top. Optional title.

Please respond to one of the following options. Each poem is accompanied by a main question to which you must respond and a series of supplementary questions that should guide (but not overly determine) your response.

Your paper should not assume the form of a series of discrete repsonses to the guiding questions. Rather it should introduce and defend an interpretation of the poem.

While questions of meter and/or rhythm are not included, these may apply to your reading.

  1. Les Murray, "Mollusc"
  2. Jorie Graham, "San Sepolcro" or "At Luca Signorelli's . . ."
  3. Ben Belitt, "The Orange Tree"
  4. Mina Loy, "Brancusi's Golden Bird"

Bibliographical and Citation Guidelines:

General Concerns


1. Les Murray, "Mollusc," from Translations from the Natural World (1992)

By its nobship sailing upside down,
by its inner sexes, by the crystalline
pimplings of its skirts, by the sucked-on
lifelong kiss of its toppling motion,
by the viscose optics now extruded
now wizend instantaneously, by the
rides grating up a food-path, by
the pop shell in its nick of dry,
by excretion, the earthworm coils, the glibbing
by the gilt slipway, and by pointing
perhaps as far back into time as
ahead, a shore being folded interior,
by boiling on salt, by coming uncut over
a razor's edge, by hiding the Oligocene
underleaf may this and every snail sense
itself ornament the weave of presence.



2. Jorie Graham, "San Sepolcro" [x] or "At Luca Signorelli's Resurrection of the Body"

Chose one. For either poem, look at the appropriate links. Then focus on the following question: In each poem the speaker is looking at/contemplating a painting. The painting provokes a lyric meditation on big themes--truth, beauty, human finitude--which the speaker entwines with a description of setting or an anecdote from the painter's life . Using the painting in conjunction with the poem, explore the connection between painting and poetic meditation Graham develops. How does she use the painting in her poem (ekphrasis)?

  • Each of the Graham poems describes a scene depicted in a painting and also a scene outside the painting (the setting of the painting, the activity of the painter). What is the relation between the description of the scene in the painting and the description of the other scene?

  • So again: What is Luca Signorelli doing in his studio and how does the poem's description of what he is doing relate to the preceding description of his painting?

  • How does the speaker's description of San Sepolcro relate to her description of Piero della Francesca's painting?

  • What is the role of color (the blue) in "San Sepolcro"?

  • In the second poem: What does it mean to graduate "slowly / from the symbolic // to the beautiful"? What is the use of distance? What does the poem mean by "the true"? Does the meaning of "the true" (an abstraction in Frank O'Hara's sense), or let's say what is true, what counts as true, or what it means for something, some piece or feeling of knowledge, to be true--does it differ from body to body or from context to context (e.g., from the religious to the artistic to the scientific), according to the poem? How does it differ or how does the poem try to get us to imagine how it might differ or how it might fail to differ? (I think this part of the question applies to both poems, actually).

    If you are missing the "San Sepolcro" handout, refer to this version until you can get a copy from me.


    Please note that the informative material linked above is very basic, given for preliminary use only, and should not be cited in your paper. If you wish to cite texts on either of the painters, do the appropriate research.



    3. Ben Belitt, "The Orange Tree"
    source: Nowhere But Light (1970)

    To be
    intact and unseen,
    like the orange's scent
    in the orange tree:

    a pod of aroma
    on the orange's ogive of green
    or a phosphorus voice
    in the storm of the forge and the hammer:

    to climb up a ladder of leaven
    and salt, and work in the lump
    of the mass, upward and down
    in the volatile oils of a wilderness heaven:

    to sleep, like the karat,
    in the void of the jeweler's glass,
    yet strike with the weight of the diamond—
    perhaps that is to live in the spirit!

    So the orange tree
    waits on its stump as the wood of its armature
    multiplies: first, the branch, then the twig in the thicket
    of leafage, then the sunburst of white in the leaves, the odor's epiphany.

    All burns with a mineral
    heat, all hones an invisible edge of the noonday, while the orange's scent
    speaks from the tree in the tree to declare what the holocaust meant:
    to be minimal,

    minimal: to diminish excess; to pare it
    as a child pares an orange, moving the knife through the peel
    in a spiral's unbroken descent, till only the orange's sweat,
    a bead of acidulous essence, divides the rind from the steel:

    perhaps that is to live in the spirit.


    Questions


    4. Mina Loy, "Brancusi's Golden Bird"

    The toy
    become the aesthetic archetype

    As if
    some patient peasant God
    had rubbed and rubbed
    the Alpha and Omega
    of Form
    into a lump of metal

    A naked orientation
    unwinged    unplumed
      —the ultimate rhythm
    has lopped the extremities
    of crest and claw
    from
    the nucleus of flight

    The absolute act
    of art
    conformed
    to continent sculpture
    —bare as the brow of Osiris—
    this breast of revelation

    an incandescent curve
    licked by chromatic flames
    in labyrinths of refelctions

    This gong
    of polished hyperaesthesia

    shrills with brass
    as the aggressive light
    strikes
    its significance

    The immaculate
    conception
    of the inaudible bird
    occurs
    in gorgeous reticence . . .


    Questions



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