The Context Of The Poem
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born in New York in 1919. After spending
much of his childhood in France, he studied universities both in the
U.S.A and in Paris before moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s
where he found the city lights bookshop and Publishing Company.
City lights was at the heart of the beat movement in the 1950s and
1960s where Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg and other poets created a style of
free verse that was both radical and populous. The beat poets were the
U.S.As angry young men questioning some of the dominant values of
American Culture. They also placed exuberant emphasis on poetry in
performance, often with Jazz accompaniment.
"The kind of poetry which has been making most noise here,"
Ferlinghetti remarked, "Is what should be called Street Poetry ……It
amounts to getting poetry back into the street where it one was, out
of the classroom out of the speech department, and in fat off the
printed page. The printed word has made poetry so silent."
Laurence Ferlinghetti has continued to live and write in San Francisco
and in 1998 he was acclaimed to be the city's first poet Laureate. He
is also a painter. 'Two Scavengers In A Truck, Two Beautiful People In
Mercedes' was published in 1979 in a volume called 'Landscapes Of
Living And Dying'.
The poems' title alerts us to the simple contrast that is its subject
'beautiful people' is perhaps written with a mild sense irony as this
phrase was originally coined by the Hippy Movement in 1967 to refer
the 'flower children' who shared the counter culture ideals of peace
and love. The couple in the poem are not beautiful in this sense but
wealthy and elegant.
The poet is deceptively simple. In places it is written as if in
bright primary colours, so we read of 'yellow garbage truck' and the
'red plastic blazers', we get exact details of time and place, and we
see the precise position of the four people all waiting at the
Lines and Shadows, by Joseph Wambaugh, tells the story of a group of regular San Diego street cops assigned to a task force designated to stop the victimization of illegal aliens by bandits in a hellish no-man's land near the Mexico-United States border. The officers soon realize the issue may be too big for regular street cops such as themselves, and many must deal with the psychological, emotional, and social conflicts caused and manifested by the events that occur during their mission.
With every different scene, Soto makes it flow very well by introducing each place with detail and what is surrounding the characters at that moment. I think it was thought out well and every “W” question can be answered easily. The poetic devices that I found were simile, metaphor, and personification. The similes within the poem were “tiered like bleachers,” and “fog hanging like old coats.” The metaphors that I found were “That was so bright against / The gray of December / That, from some distance, / Someone might have thought / I was making a fire in my hands.” and “Light in her eyes, a smile...” The personification I found was “a few cars hissing past,” and “the lady’s eyes met mine.” His tone in this poem was nonchalant but at the same time passionate. I used two opposite words to describe his tone because he is nonchalant in telling it; it is about something that was so simple. Though the tone is also passionate because it’s a bigger memory that someone could have and cherish. Soto’s attitude was more of carefree and nostalgic. This poem shows Gary Soto’s different colors and that is represented from when he was acknowledged for his first collection of poems in 1976 for the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. I think that is a great accomplishment considering his family and education situation. Him and his family were struggling to find work as he was growing up, so instead of focusing on his
Sexuality is very diverse, in some instances normality is based on the cultural context of the individual 's society. In "The other side of desire" by Daniel Bergner, the author goes in depth into the lives of four individual 's whose lust and longing have led them far down the realms of desire. The current paper addresses the four individual 's Jacob, the Baroness, Roy, and Ron each exhibits a paraphilia that may or may not meet the full criteria in the DSM-5. Furthermore, each person’s specific paraphilia is conceptualized and explained in depth. Countertransferential issues anticipated before working with these individuals is analyzed and clarified. Also, the apprehension of sexual arousal and sexual behaviors is conceptualized into normality
The World We're In by Will Hutton If you're American, you probably haven't heard of this book. "The
Most of us do not think twice about the foods we pick up from the supermarket. Many Americans have a preconceived belief that the food being sold to us is safe, and withholds the highest standard of quality. Certainly, compared to many places in the world, this is true. But is the United States sincerely trying to carry out these standards, or have we begun to see a reverse in the health and safety of our food- and more explicitly in our meat? Jonathan Foer, author of “Eating Animals” argues for reform within the food industry- not only for the humane treatment of animals but moreover for our own health. Although Foer exposes the ills within the food industries in order to persuade readers to change their diets for the better, his “vegetarianism or die” assessment may be too extreme for most Americans. The true ills do not start with the meat, but with industrialized production of it through methods practiced by factory farming.
What Douglas Martin had to say when he came to our class is probably the most valuable advice I've heard so far this semester. Martin's reasoning is right in tune with my own thinking about writing, and probably why I'm a Creative Writing major versus an English or Lit. major.
Harrison Bergeron is a fictional story written by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, explains what a society would look like if it was at its worst-case scenario. Every citizen weighs the same, looks the same, and even performs the same as everybody else. In the story, two characters, George and Hazel, are sitting the living room watching tv, when suddenly a breaking news come on the screen. A rebel within the society threatens to take over the city and rid of the pain. The rebel gets shot and killed, leaving the society as it was before. With everybody weighing the same, looking the same, and being the same height, this dystopian world would a terrible place to live in.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy embeds issues throughout the novel such as the will to survive, the power of love, and the ability to trust in vital situations. In the novel, McCarthy illustrates a person has no physical or mental boundaries when protecting the one they love. The power of love and the extent to which one will do for love is prominent in creating the relationship between the father and the son. When entering certain conditions, the son had to be able to trust the father to do what was morally right. The strenuous situations McCarthy creates within the novel deepens my belief that the will to survive, love, and trust can and will overcome the struggles of life. The father is motivated by his need to protect his son from the dangers
My first and immediate explanation for the poem was an address from one lover to a loved one, where distance became a factor in their relationship. The lover has it far worse than the desired partner and the solitude builds nothing but longing for this person at a time when his love is the greatest. He says " What have I to say to you when we shall meet?... I am alone" with my head knocked against the sky”. He further asks, “How can I tell if I shall ever love you again as I do now?” There is uncertainty because he is wondering over the next encounter with his loved one. He says, “I lie here thinking of you” and is compelling when he wants the loved one to see him in the 5th stanza and what love is doing to his state of mind. He is hopeless and expresses it by asking questions he is unsure of, conveying his troubled state. Williams enforces imagery along with sound effects to demonstrate the despair of the man in a realm that is almost dreamlike with purple skies,spoiled colors, and birds. Stating he is alone and that his head collides with the sky may underline the man’s confusion. He also uses imagery in the “stain of love as it eats into the leaves”, and saffron horned branches, vivid and easy-to-imagine images that captivate the reader. The line stating “a smooth purple sky” and this stain which is “spoiling the colours of the whole world” easily formulate a very distinct picture. Through consonance words like “eats” and “smears with saffron” become fiercer in the eyes of this lover as they cancel out a “smooth sky”.
The nineteenth century was a time of economic, technologic, and population growth. These changes created problems in everyone’s daily lives. Two examples of things that affected the lives of many were disease and sanitation. Disease and sanitation led to high mortality rates in Nineteenth- Century England. This relates to North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell as it takes place during nineteenth century England and multiple characters died presumably due to disease.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1949 text The Second Sex, examines the problems faced by women in Western society. She argues that women are subjugated, oppressed, and made to be inferior to males – simply by virtue of the fact that they are women. She notes that men define their own world, and women are merely meant to live in it. She sees women as unable to change the world like men can, unable to live their lives freely as men can, and, tragically, mostly unaware of their own oppression. In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir describes the subjugation of woman, defines a method for her liberation, and recommends strategies for this liberation that still have not been implemented today.
In The Rover by Aphra Behn the reader is shown how all a woman could do during the 1600’s in Europe was sell herself through marriage or prostitution through the characters Hellena and Angellica. Both women have different views on love, sex, and marriage. Hellena is a woman who does not want to be controlled by men. It has been determined by her father and brother that she will join a nunnery, which she rejects. Hellena doesn’t want her desires to be controlled and feels she has the right to love if she chooses and who she can love. Hellena can be seen as a modern day free spirit, and Behn uses this as a way to resist the double standard applied to woman and the idealization of what a “proper” woman is. Hellena falls for a man, Willmore, while attending Carnival and it is her wit in the dialogue with Willmore that the reader sees that Hellena is not foolish in knowing how men view and treat their women. Hellena knows that Willmore will not be faithful and uses her virginity as a way for him to marry her because that is her only way of not going into nunnery as she says, “What shall I get? A cradle full of noise and mischief, with a pack of repentance at my back” (pg 590). Hellena takes control of her situation that marriage is a necessity for women and she will not act as a “prostitute” where she will sleep with a man without a marital commitment. Angellica is a foil character to Hellena. While Hellena wants marriage, Angellica vows "nothing but gold shall charm my heart” (pg 564) meaning she has chosen a life of prostitution. It is not until she too falls in love with Willmore that she tries to believe that her lower status won’t matter and his love for her can be above that. However, because she lives a life of prostitution an...
Auto Wreck is an ominous, grim, and disturbing poem written by Karl Shapiro about death, fate, coincidence and the envisioning of reality. In this harsh poem Shapiro describes an awful car accident where many people ends up dead. He flawlessly employes a unique imagery and language that gives the reader a clear and true sensation of the terrible mishap. The author makes us feel as if we had seen and even experienced the car collision ourselves. Although it may see that the main focus in this poem is death, which is one of the most important, the poet also throws in the way he and everyone else saw everything after the accident, how their emotions changed, and how they envisioned reality afterward. Shapiro not only acknowledges and makes vivid the deaths that just occurred and how different people reacted to it, but he also discusses how much of an accident it really was, how someone had to be guilty and if anyone was really innocent at all.
Literature as defined by Merriam-Webster Dictionary is “the body of written works produced in a particular language, country, or age”. Literature comes in different variations, languages, and from different countries. Canadian literature is literature made exclusively by an author of Canadian descent that understands what life is as a Canadian. The Canadian play I chose to read was Toronto Mississippi by Joan Macleod. The play has different themes that can be used as to teaching tools in Canadian English classes. The theme of being handicapped is the theme that the play revolves around. The talented playwright Joan Macleod has yet again made another successful play and should be used as teaching tool to teach students in Canadian English classes.
Wright is renown for her use language, and many of her poems contain paradoxes in which the reader is confronted with a phrase completely unrealisable, but effective in portraying the nature of the poem. “The Company Of Lovers” itself opens with the use of a paradox “…We meet and part now…” instils an image of simultaneous unity and depart, evoking in a sense of temporary cohesion that may soon be lost. This may represent a changing nature of ‘lovers’ and perhaps such a quick meeting and farewell represents the promiscuous nature of some who class themselves as ‘lovers.’