Lauren’s CoPo Blog

During Fred Chappell’s Thursday Poems reading, he remarked to the audience, “I’m a slow learner.” While this prompted a response of laughter and applause, I realized that Chappell was in fact telling the truth. His poetry hasn’t learned from the newest, free verse poetry that his contemporaries are composing today. While he remains unique, he writes his poems sticking to tradition and adhering to the meter and rhythm that poets have used for centuries.

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Since we recently read Plath in class, I decided to pick up The Bell Jar from the bookstore last night. The next day, I’m nearly finished. I reccomend this to everyone in the class who wants more of an understanding of Sylvia Plath.

After Plath died, a lot of readers saw her book as “speaking from beyond the grave,” in the cliche used by the book’s publisher. I know we can’t use her novel to determine why she committed suicide or other questions about her life, but even so, the book has definately helped me understand her poetry.

For example, “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” is illuminated when you find how, in The Bell Jar, the narrator (and potentially Plath)  dated a medical student who showed her an operating room of dead bodies, complete with dead babies in jars. She also talks extensivetly in the novel about her father, who died when she was nine. She impliesthat a lot of the suriving family’s money troubles came from her late father’s distrust of life insurance salesmen. This may have contributed towards Plath’s animousity towards her father in her poems. And overall, from reading the book I have found it easier to understand the unique way in which Plath viewed the world.

In class, we discussed this poem in the context that the narrator was beginning to see the world as a much bigger place. However, after class, I wondered if the world may have become smaller, too. On page 160, the narrator hears Aunt Consuelo’s cry, and is suprised that it is actually her own yell. I wonder if we can read this another way: the narrator hears her Aunt’s yell, and realizes that it sounds like her own. This would explain why, on page 161, the narrator refers to the “family voice I felt in my throat.”

In this reading, when we observe the narrator remind herself, “you are an I, you are an Elizabeth,” we may see this as her attempt to separate herself from her aunt. When she hears the aunt’s cry, so like her own, the world becomes a small place where there exist families, but not individuals. When the narrator tries to snap out of it, she asks, “What similarities… held us all together or made us all just one?” Here, she is overwhelmed by the similarities between the voices, betweens the “hands” and other parts that the people both in the waiting room and in the National Geographic possess. In this reading that I am attempting, similarities that the narrator encounters between herself and other people make the world grow smaller to her.

-Lauren O.

I was at the locksmith’s in Brent Hall the other day to get my work key made. The locksmith asked me to wait by his desk, and from where I was standing, I could see his open email account. Now, I didn’t mean to snoop, but this was what his entire email box said:

Retarded Grandparents

Re: Retarded Grandparents

Re:Re: Retarded Grandparents

Re:Re:Re: Retarded Grandparents

Re:Re:Re:Re: Retarded Grandparents

I think it went on a little more, but you get the point. I couldn’t help but see this correspondence as a poem. The way the Re: echoes the “Re” in Retarded is a nice touch of repetition of sound. And the way the poem grows in the size of its stanzas reminds me of “Visit to St. Elizabeths” by Elizabeth Bishop.  Even though this found poem consists of two and a half words total, the increase of Re:s in each stanza heightens it.

-Lauren O.