Fishing for Answers

corny title, no? I kind of like it.

I think what Fish is trying to say is that we only get out of a poem what we put into it. When we begin reading we already have a preset number of responses to the text based on things we've already read before and our life experiences up to that point, our own sort of 'literary tradition', to use Eliot's verbiage.

In my other English class right now (133) we're reading Adrienne Rich's "Atlas of the Difficult World" and for those of you who haven't read it, don't drop everything to go pick up this anthology; rave reviews aside, these poems are really, really boring. It's academic poetry for academics, really, riddled with obscure references to books and poems most of us haven't read and pottery types no one but the most ardent of collectors would be familiar with. It's perfect for reading and analyzing in a class room setting, but to read it for fun, outside of class, like poetry should be read, it's terrible. I can't get anything out of her poems because I don't have all the information I need to put in to understand what she's talking about. without those references, (which, once explained, are kind of crucial to understanding where she wants the poem to go,) the poem to me is nothing more than a mental scrambled egg- the brain was cracked open, the thoughts poured out, and then someone went in with a spatula and shuffled everything around until the only thing that told me it was eggs was the color and the previous experience with scrambled eggs that Fish also talked about in his essay. ( "...You know a poem when you see one because its language display the characteristics that you know to be proper to poems..." Fish 326)

It seems to me that Rich wrote "Atlas" with a specific audience in mind, an audience she references in her poem "Dedications" in which she describes all the people who are reading her poem:

I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour.

and on it goes. I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that college students don't seem to be the interpretive community she's preaching to. Are poems written to certain interpretive communities? Does that mean other interpretive communities can't read them? I mean, if we look at haiku, the Japanese, who have a respect for nature as an intrinsic part of their culture, are probably going to get a little more out of

Blowing stones along the road on Mount Asama, the autumn wind.

than anyone with a western background is.

Thoughts on this, folks?

foucault, eliot, and the Author- EDITED

So. After having the overwhelming feeling that I wanted to punch Eliot in the face for saying his piece on how the author should be completely emotionally separated from his work and how poetry is an escape from emotion (which, for the record, I think is complete crap) I have come to this summary. Foucault and company are saying that the author is not the source of an interpretation of his/her text, but rather the source of fodder for ongoing discussions (discourses was the word Foucault used). The author, then, should be completely ignored, because he is then essentially irrelevant in this new role because all he did was write the stuff, and it is now up to the readers to make something out of it.

I think I may have missed something, because that doesn't make any sense to me. I agree with Eliot when he suggests that the works with staying power are the ones that appeal to the emotions the whole world can feel, and not just the personal emotions of the author, but I can't say I find it believable that in order to create something with lasting effect you have to be emotionally distant from the work. If you're writing about Love, how can you write about it if you're not thinking about it, if you haven't felt it? How are you supposed to write about something and have it seem believable and accessible to the rest of humanity if you don't use your own experiences?

All I'm saying is that I'm not really buying it.

EDIT 1.22.08
After having changed my comment settings due to attention brought upon them by my estimable theory professor, I'm going to edit this post so that he can comment on it. (At least, I think my blog's the one he tried to comment on and couldn't, as I'm fairly certain I was the only one who as of 11:20 this morning had anything besides a "This is your first post; Edit Me!" notification on their blog.



I wrote the first part of this post after trying to wade through T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault all in one sitting. This was, in hindsight, a bad idea, and in future blog posts I will refrain from commenting until I have read the articles twice and discussed my thoughts and feelings with one of my esteemed classmates who will, for the moment, remain anonymous.

I will also attempt to word said posts in a slightly more academic manner. The first post was....erm...rather juvenile.

I still believe that Eliot's idea of emotional distance is bunk, although this idea did present me with a rather amusing image, noted in my margin: "The poet's mind is completely separate from the poet's body and that body's experiences, thereby functioning like the room full of monkeys with typewriters expected to turn out Shakespeare's complete works..."

Amusing, yes?

I do, however, agree with what he says about viewing the work in the context of the entire literary spectrum behind it. "I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written." (P. 433, very bottom) You can read Beowulf and the Epic of Astrid and see that they're written in approximately the same style, but the Epic of Astrid (which, by the way, I wrote as a semester project my sophomore year of high school, which is why you've never heard of it) needs to be read with the knowledge that the writer, namely me, wrote after she had read and experienced a lot of feminist...it might be called literature, but propaganda or ideology seems a better term. We need a context for everything we read. This, again, is where I think I start disagreeing with Eliot. You don't need to really know anything about me to read the poem, but you need to know where I fit in the literary experience.

The First Posting

Under a spreading chestnut-tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands...

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell,

When the evening sun is low...

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

For the lesson thou hast taught!

Thus at the flaming forge of life

Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

Each burning deed and thought.

That's the Village Blacksmith, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and it's where I got the idea for the title of my blog. As a woman, I can't be the title character, but as a writer, a reader, and at the moment, a student, I think I qualify to call myself a wordsmith, someone who takes "each burning deed and thought" and, perhaps more importantly, words, and crafts them into something beautiful, functional or just plain interesting.

This blog will be a repository for my journal posts for Literary Theory and Criticism and later on as an archive for my various literary endeavors and their updates. Happy writing!