“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.”
“The “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water.”
“The Wasteland”, a poem at the deepening crux of modernism, is a whirlwind of broken, disparate pieces fitting to explore T.S. Eliot’s vision of a nihilistic world where gentle, purifying youth and spiritual inclinations/beliefs, which assuage us on the terrifying, fleeting journey of existence, float into thin air and lose their ability to free us as even the most calming, cleansing idea of an antidote, water, leads to our inevitable deaths. There is something relentlessly oppressive, habitually slovenly, and drenched chillingly in how haunting it can be to live and feel, which characterizes this poem’s greatest intricacies, as it never backs away from entering into the messy realm of our own sentience and ability to perceive that the end will eventually draw near.
This idea of the universe becomes absurdly paradoxical as the poem speaks of being able to not connect nothing with nothing. That calls to mind a feeling of desperate alienation and lack of ability to make sense of anything, as you walk around in a confused blizzard of your own making, which exists amidst the depths of your own self-created wasteland. As you also find yourself living in a horrifying purgatory in which you’re “neither / Living nor dead” and you continue to know nothing, as silence washes over you mixed with vacant light. However, there could also be and arise an omnipotent presence of a dulled optimism, amidst the trapping idea of purgatory, as between living and death springs up like an incalculable flower the capacity to just quietly exist. As that slight awareness of existence fills the hollowed parts of our soul like a herbal tea warming our insides in which we’ve felt a bitter chill for so long.
“A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool.”
These lines continually whisper with the vividness of harried existentialism with the faintness of a beauty, which exists in beckoning calamity and breathless quietude, astir with temptation and desire to believe and hope. Because to believe and to hope is to stay sane amongst the greater puzzle and riddles that besiege our existence and world. We will never understand or be able to translate the foreignness of an experience we’ve never lived or understand even the closeness of the world that lives underneath our feet and that was much the feeling that surrounded parts of this poem, but other parts stood out to me with a clarity that I couldn’t deny because those parts were part of the ornately rich tapestry, which strings us together, marking a world in which we are connected by our own universality and shared sense of the beauty and pain of the human experience....more
Madisen Kuhn in this collection considers what it is to love? To feel? To live? There is a kind of lovely stream of consciousness that affects these pMadisen Kuhn in this collection considers what it is to love? To feel? To live? There is a kind of lovely stream of consciousness that affects these poems in a thoughtful, meditative way, which leaves you transfixed. I can tell each of these poems were lovingly, soulfully crafted with an outpouring of honest, pure emotion that really resonated with me.
Eighteen Years in its delicate focus on what it is to be a sentient being also considers rites of passage and moments of growing up and all the messiness that comes along with that and I appreciate that Kuhn never underestimates the intricacies of that process.
This is also the perfect go-to book of poetry if your heart, mind, and body is going through and experiencing a lot and I love that all the while all of these important themes are coming from the young, promising voice of Madisen because that truly shines the light on the importance of youth writing and sharing with the world all the bits of insight they have, especially since our generation has a lot to reflect on in sobering, necessary ways.
I overall love the attention to the way the book is designed with little scrawled drawings that capture the messages Eighteen Years is trying to get across and its ultimate essence. Additionally, the note Madisen leaves at the beginning is a lovely way for setting the scene for how you’ll experience her poetry and the note written on the back with a girl whose head has flowers blooming from it, which suggests a kind of blooming and growth of self as well is also an important mood setter: “This book is meant to bent and worn, written in, tear-stained, and loved. This book is for you.”
Even if some of the poems are shorter or feel to some like they’ve come from the aesthetic infused pages of Tumblr that doesn’t make them any less, or at least I believe it doesn’t, as they are still warmly, beautifully packed with a lot to consider and an intensity of emotion that won’t soon be forgotten....more
This is a beautiful, moving collection! First of all, when we think about Mars, Life on Mars being the title of this particular collection of poemThis is a beautiful, moving collection! First of all, when we think about Mars, Life on Mars being the title of this particular collection of poems, it is this faraway, disconnected planet, and really our concerns with Mars should be less pressing then the concerns with the planet right beneath our feet. Our concerns should be focused on Earth more intensely (I'm not discounting the importance of space travel, merely just suggesting that there's a lot to work on more close to home).
Earth being a planet, which is complex and waiting to be discovered. It is in effect even paradoxical to be surrounded by the earth and feel this open accessibility to it when we in fact don't know much about it at all, and yet with our fascination with somewhere far off parts of us are looking past it. Since there's a part of us that doesn't know to cope with the state of the world or even begin to remedy/fix its ugly parts that drive deeper than we can always admit. We can try we just sometimes become disillusioned from our good-hearted fights.
I also think other parts of us have become desensitized to the cosmos much like we do to the experience of watching David Bowie sing "Life on Mars?" After watching and being around something over and over again, with the off chance of the times we experience novelty and freshening of our eyes and perspective, it's stripped of its meaning. And I think the song that this collection is based on functions as a parallel to how we see and experience life and the world around us, which can be troubling because after too long we begin to see through it. I also unfortunately had that same problem, to carry it over to space movies, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey (forgive me!)
In her works, Tracy K. Smith has a great deal of commentary about America and sense of identity and nationality, especially as living as an African-American woman in a household where discussion about race was repressed. Her family didn't know how to to talk about it, because it's another one of those fundamental things that we try to understand and make sense of for ourselves and for our children, but it comes, at times, to be too deeply threaded, hurtful, and difficult to broach. It's large and vast and problematic, just like space can sometimes be.
So, in essence, Smith could also still feel unresolved alienation within herself and her identity even though she has come closer to knowing herself as she has gotten older. We focus on Mars to distract ourselves from other things, from other problems, like race, corruption, gender, power structures and struggles, xenophobia, and bigotry that directly impact us and our daily existences.
So, this idea could relate to Smith as well because in living with the death of her father she’s trying to come to terms with a lot, and even reconfigure and reorient her life and who she’s supposed to be in a universe without him in it, but doesn’t fully know how because it isn’t clean or pretty or neat. Bowie poses Life on Mars as a question as if to ask us why do we do this? Why do we focus on Mars when there’s so much for us to focus on right here?
And Smith poses it as a statement as if now to acknowledge that yes, we do, we do this, so what does this mean? And each of the poems becomes the fabric for her cosmos and her relationship to it and they also analyze why we feel motivated to focus on Mars, or really anything to distract us from our current realities, as a form of escapism when it is inevitable that everything will still be there waiting for us when we come back. A powerful group of poems!...more
In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot invents a paralyzingly timid, consistently fearful, and chronically indecisive man named In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot invents a paralyzingly timid, consistently fearful, and chronically indecisive man named J. Alfred Prufrock who portrays facets of the human condition and also comes to be a way for Eliot to look inward and know himself. The entire poem is structured around a rambling, internal, dramatic monologue that Prufrock has with himself, which only intensifies the poem’s insular feel, and destructively, yet effectively for the sake of the intentions of the poem, feeds Prufrock’s inadequacies.
The stanzas each appropriately resemble the chaotic, all at once-ness of thoughts and introduce us to the wavering persona of Prufrock and establish the context for the ways in which we can view and familiarize ourselves with his cripplingly self-conscious psyche and internal life. Prufrock is hopelessly preoccupied with analyzing himself and obsessing over how he looks, acts, and is viewed by others, which is his ultimate crisis.
He even goes so far as to also proclaim in the eighth stanza, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe”? This stanza is an example of an irregularity in meter that brings out Prufrock’s self-doubts even further. When the meter strays from regularity, Prufrock is at the height of his insecurities and self-deprecation. The nature of Prufrock’s questioning is also contradictory, however, because it reflects a more egotistical side, albeit unwittingly, of Prufrock in that he views himself as being significant enough to affect the enormity of the universe. When, more realistically, his world and problems are comparatively smaller in some of their pettiness. This couplet can also be interpreted as the climax of Prufrock’s fearfulness in that he is perceiving even the smallest of his actions as a precursor to his fate as a human being.
Prufrock’s fundamental desire is be able to never have to decide. He wants to take an internal break from life’s questions and repressive formula. These characteristics shape the poem and its focus on Prufrock who in all of his hyperbolic skittishness represents the inherent tendencies of humankind to think intently about the future to the point of it being debilitating which, in turn, paralyzes present action.
He takes everything to an extreme, though, which is emphasized through Eliot’s use of hyperbole to highlight Prufrock’s lack of self-confidence and inability to see past himself and his shortcomings and into the larger picture of the world and the people in it: that they’re imperfect, too, and more accepting than he may think. He puts everything and everyone on a pedestal and ends up a fallen anti-hero and I think this poem powerfully points to that, but I think it was the type of poem I could come to appreciate the more I read through it. On the first read, it felt harder to parse apart and connect with, but I unfortunately (fortunately for the poem's sake?) through it all can understand the depths of Prufrock's neurosis and how it debilitates him....more
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