Boy

Be strong. Be a man. Why are you crying? Don't cry, don't let me catch you crying. It's what we're told while growing up. Cut the grass, take out the trash, wash the car. These manly chores are somewhat of an attempt the grow us into this manly man we're supposed to be. Football, basketball, baseball. These sports are supposed to teach us how to be tough, how to find trust in other men, in being strong. This is how you impress women, cologne, hair jel, nice clothes. We're supposed to look nice not too nice to where you come off as gay. That's supposedly a bad thing. Don't be a pussy, you're supposed to hook up with the women. Get her phone number. Call her. The more phone numbers you get and the more women you hook up with, the cooler and manlier you are. Here's the condom you're supposed to use. Now go learn to change the oil, change a tire on the car. Know your way under the hood of the car. Know these things, impress these women so you can have these women. All through school, middle school, high school, and even college, we're pressured into becoming this image. A strong image, image is everything, it will get you women. Don't be gay, that's for sissies, you'll be bullied all your life if you're a sissy, you don't want that. It's silly how our society guides us in this direction. Go excersice, stay in shape, be able to do at least over 25 push-ups. Build that chest, that 6-pack. Don't ever get your ass kicked. And if that does happen, don't let her or anyone else see it. And if you do get your ass kicked and you do walk away with a couple bruises and a black eye, just lie. Lie about it and make it seem that it'd be impossible to win whatever fight you were in. Be a tough guy. No women, no person likes a weak guy. You'll get nowhere in life. Work those triceps, abs, chest, biceps, calves. The guys on television have it, women want them, you want women to want you. Join a frat, it makes you look cool. Be able to consume an absurd amount of alcohol in a very short amount of time. It makes you look cool. It's all image. American boys go through this all over the country. Be tough. Do not look weak. Ever. Don't be weak, nobody likes anyone weak, but more importantly, no women likes anyone week. It's insane the pressure we go through. Our peers push us even more. You don't want to look stupid in front of them, you'll lose this so-called friends. You want as many friends as possible, it makes you look cool. It'll make you look cool in front of the women. Women love popular men. When are we going to stop and think about what these women actually like in men? Do all women even really care about how strong you are? If you're able to change the oil in a car, if you're able to bench press a stupid amount of weight, if you have many friends, if you know everything about football? Does all of this shit really matter? How far will this get me in life, will it take me to where I want to be in life? I think not.

"I'm not trying to create a first impression I can't live up to."
-Sage Francis.

Poets In The Kitchen

I am currently a creative writing major here at Florida State. I grew up writing and playing my own music, so I figured that becoming a creative writing student would be natural and expected from me. One of my main inspirations as a writer is the music I listen to. A lot of my favorite artists, not only make good music, but they have very deep, personal, and inteligent lyrics.
Many of the rappers I listen to are seen as poets because of how unique and deep their lyrics are. One of my favorite rappers is from Providence, RI and he goes by the name Sage Francis. He went to school in Rhode Island and got a degree in journalism. He's won many awards for his spoken work and slam poetry pefromances. A lot of his songs are consisted of phrases with double meanings, and very complex word play. One of my favorite examples from him are in a song called "New Word Order". He does this thing where he'll use the last word in a phrase as the first word. It's hard to explain but it's really interesting and creative. "...search for the best deals underneath the sun, block the barn yard punch the clock, knock it into next week." "...concepts of time sheets of acid rain drop and star rolling a dislocated joint custody of the moments you are holding." Underneath the sun/sun block. Time sheets/sheets of acid, acid rain, rain drop, drop and start rollin rolling a dislocated joint, joint custody. It's probably one of the most impressive things I've heard in rap music. After hearing that song I've tried doing something similar in my own writing, but rather than playing with these phrases, I tried playing with the sounds of many words. For example, "and you would think that after spending years tugging on her heart i'd earn a heart of honor on her no longer talking to my former self for myself to learn, no longer." It's still a work in progess, but the idea definitely comes from Sage Francis.
For me, my poets in the kitchen were the rappers and musicians I listen to. Most of the music I've been listening to I've been into since my freshman year of high school. Other artists are Slug from Minneapolis rap group Atmosphere, Tom Gabel from Gainesville punk band Against Me!, Aesop Rock who is a rapper from Long Island. Most of my ideas stem from these people due to their methods of expressing themselves. They tend to do this in a very poetic and honest way, which is something I appreciate and tend to do in my own writing. I feel that if I had never listened to these artists, I probably would be writing, and if I were writing, my style would be completely different. I thank these people for helping mold me into the person I am today. Another poet that I feel you should give a listen to, is Buddy Wakefield. He's a spoken word poet and his performances really add to effect of his words.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Sophie is the main character in the book Breath, Eyes, Memory. Her mother gave birth to her after being raped and beaten by an unknown man, so Sophie, and her mother, never know who this man is. Sophie spent the first 8 or 9 years being raised by her aunt in Haiti while her mother lived in New York. Because of this, Sophie doesn't meet her mother until she moves to New York to live with her mother. As Sophie grows older she begins to notice the neighbor next door that she eventually falls in love with and marries.
This man is older and is a traveling musician. This is one of the obstacles that Sophie needs to go through because of her mother's initial reaction to this. Her mother doesn't immediately approve because of his age and his occupation. Sophie's mother wanted her to grow up to be a doctor and to marry a man with a stable job that can help provide for the family. Eventually her mother comes to terms with the marriage and is ok with it. Sophie and her husband have a daughter together that travels with Sophie when she went to Haiti.
The trip to Haiti was a part of something else that Sophie had to deal with personally. As a teenager her mother would come home and test Sophie to see if she was still a virgin. Sophie hated these tests alot, she hated them enough to make herself intentionally wihtout actually losing her virginity. She felt that if she were to fail one of these tests her mother would stop them. These tests traumatized Sophie to the point where didn't feel 100% comfortable with her husband. She evntually began attending a help group with other people who were sexually traumatized. This was another step she took towards dealing with and getting over the problem.
Another obstacle Sophie needed to face was dealing with her mother's pregnancy. It didn't affect her directly, but it affected her mother greatly. Her mother suffered from nightmares which caused her to toss and turn in bed violently. When Sophie first moved in with her mother, she would have to wake her mother up whenever the nightmares happened. Her mother didn't want the child and for a while she was contemplating getting rid of it. Getting rid of the child was something her mother eventually did, but it ended up costing her her life.

The Poisonwood Bible

In The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver using multiple characters to narrate the story. I found this to be really interesting and it's definitely a technique I like. I feel that she did a good job writing the book the way she did.

I can see why authors use this tool. You can a different perspective on certain things, like how in any argument there are always different sides. When you're speaking to eyewitnesses to a crime there is always a different version of what happened, and once you've taken all the sides and put them together, you can see the picture as a whole. I've always enjoyed films and television shows that use this technique. One of my favorite shows called Boomtown did this exactly. They'd take an event and show it through the eyes of a politician, a cop, a news reporter, and a paramedic, all in the city of Los Angeles. Pulp Fiction is almost like this, except it emphasises more on the order in which events are shown. But you still see things through the different characters, and at the end it all ties up and makes more sense.

I like the way it's done in this story because each character has such a strong personality. Each character has their own opinion on things and interesting to hear the story through each of their distinct voices. My favorite two characters in this book are Adah and Ruth May. I feel that they have the most unique voices in the story. Adah is very poetic and sees things through a different light. I find reading her passages the most interesting because of her voice. The way she speaks is so interesting to me, especially her use of palindromes. I like reading Ruth May's passages because of how young she is, and the way she sees things. I also like how the author intentionally phrases things incorrectly because it's how a 5 year old would say something. It allows us to feel five and naive again; it's almost a reminder of how we were when we were younger. It helps that Ruth May has such a live personality; it seems like shes always doing something. Kingsolver really does a great job at being consistent in writing in the characters' voice.

In conclusion, I feel that telling the story through several voices is a great to tool to use to tell a story. It gives the characters more life, and it makes the seems so much more real. They have unique personalities which are drawn well with the book being written this way. It allows myself to get attached to the characters I like easier. They are all their own person, and that is strongly shown when they're given multiple passages to speak to you. It's a smart and very useful tool that helps us understand the characters better and to get different views on certain topics that they all share as a family in a foreign land.

Howl

Form -
Howl is a poem divided into three parts rather than stanzas, which is generally how poetry is broken up when broken up into sections. But the poem is broken up into stanzas within each section of the poem. The first part of the poem is all one sentence which is broken up in alternating stanzas of one, two, and three lines. According to a quote by Ginsberg regarding the structure of Howl, he said, “Ideally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit. My breath is long — that's the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath.” The second part of the poem isn’t as long as the first part and isn’t one like sentence like the first part. The second part of the poem is thirty lines long and, like the first part, it is broken up in alternating stanzas of one, two, and three lines. There is also some repetition with the mentioning of ‘Moloch’ in almost every line. The third, and final part of Howl, is structurally distinct from the rest of the poem. It has forty-eight lines and has one line stanzas until towards the end of the poem. This part has repetition, similar to the second part, but rather than the mention of ‘Moloch’, there is the repetition of the line, “I’m with you in Rockland.” This line repeats almost every other line.

Content –
When Howl was first read in 1955 it shocked a lot of people. It shocked people due to its uniqueness because there wasn’t anything else like it at the time. It was considered to mark the beginning of post-modernism. To me it seems that the first part of the poem Ginsberg’s commentary on the society around him. “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves though the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”. He goes on to talk about “angel-headed hipsters…who were expelled from the academics for crazy and publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull”, and “who passed through universities with radiant eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war.” Some of the events in the poem are autobiographical and some are about his friends and their experiences. It seems that Ginsberg is the speaker himself making observations of the world surrounding him. He’s part of the world that he talks about; these are stories about him and his friends. His word choice throughout the poem is interesting. He uses a lot of cacophonous and visually strong words, there’s a very harsh sound throughout the poem. For example, “…a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills off Empire State out of the moon yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars”. Overall I enjoyed this poem because of its content and how different it is from anything I’ve read or written. Howl is a perfect example of the type of poetry I’ve always tried to write, and it’s a great source of inspiration for the future.

Tender Buttons

Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein is a collection of many short poems divided into three sections. These sections include Objects, Food, and Rooms. The section that I read most of was the first section, Objects. All of these short poems range from as little as one line, to as many as about 15 lines. Many of the poems are abstract and are nowhere near the traditional form of what a poem 'should be'. Many of the object poems are named after objects. Examples include, “A Box”, “A Red Stamp”, and “A Piece of Coffee”.

At first glance I felt that these poems made no sense at all. But if you take a deeper look, you can see that Stein is simply experimenting with several things in these poems. She plays a lot with imagery, repetition, and alliteration. In the poem “A Red Hat”, which happens to be my favorite of the Object poems, she begins it with, "A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it." Here we see the repetition of the 'very dark grey' image as well as the 'monstrous' description of whatever she may be talking about. It may be a red hat, because it was no red in it, but it may also be a red hat. There's no telling with her. The rest of the poem continues with, "If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out."

I was looking to see if there was much in common with these objects, and the only similarity that I see in these objects is that they're all really random objects. Many of them have descriptions such as color, and some are described in a weird way like, “A Piece of Coffee” and “A Brown”. Though her style is extremely different and isn't liked by many people, it is a refreshing style of writing. I was a little thrown off at first, but I found it to be interesting because it made me think a little harder to figure out what she was trying to say. I think that Stein has chosen many of these random objects because, to me at least, some of these objects are everyday things that I don’t really pay much attention to. She takes objects such as tables, chairs, shoes, and even sounds, and takes a deeper look at it. It seems as if she’s looking at it was another eye we don’t always use and uses that eye to look beyond the surface of it. It is definitely and interesting way to approach these objects and poetry. It’s a shame that this type of poetry isn’t as popular, because of it being so abstract, but I guess it’s alright because it seems a little bit more exclusive where it currently is.

The Illusion of Safety (3/11/09)

We relive the moments when we fucked up the most to get a laugh and it also helps to cope.

We make mistakes and we know it and we never learn from them. What the hell is our problem?

Living 20 as if it were 16. Living those ways because we’re missing.

You wrote the script and I provided the score and this is the stage where we performed this great comedy.

Oh god, if i could go back again i wouldn’t be standing in this very spot i am standing in now.

Would that be good or bad?

We will never know.

Failure is seen as progression. But when the same mistake occurs repeatedly we don’t progress in any direction. Stop standing in the same spot, we’re losing you. But i guess I haven’t even gone too far because the memory of you is still new.

We are standing a distance the size of my regret for choosing the decision I decided to choose. I can’t sing the blues. But i can sing the melody embedded in the spots on your back.

The position that i’m sitting in shows that your eyes are the repeat symbol and so it goes…

But fuck it…

Who knows?

This society is kindly, but blindly, guiding us in a loop. Caught up in a bow I broke so I had to sew.

You know, the scratch on my arm, ska, and the scent of weed no longer remind me of you. I’ve given myself plenty of memories. An amount that almost matches the billion brilliant bright lights up in the sky that we’ve seen since the day we were born.

This train of thought departed without me because it started from a thought of the past, my Aesop Rock CDr, and Defiance, Ohio tape.

It went through so many neighborhoods in the city of life that i forgot why i even wanted to hop on to begin with.

It is the illusion of safety.

We are only in love with the thought of love, right?

Well, I’m happy i missed that train.

We are now standing a great distance. A distance as great as my satisfaction for making the decision I decided to make. And no matter where we go or how long it takes for you to do so just know that you are still alive. (Dot, dot, dot) We are still alive.

St. Augustine, FL - Harvest Of Hope Fest (March 6-8)