Week of November 18, 2013

Although having a rough start, I feel like after getting into the text, the initial toughness of Stein has mostly faded and it’s becoming easier to read and to analyze. I’m actually able to look through what is going on in the text and figure some things out instead of being confused trying to understand the wording and language usage. While focusing on my section for our discussion, it was interesting to see how the ideas were developing and what was going on in the message she is trying to convey. The brief departure from human nature and human mind into a related discussion of the comparison of identity and superstition was really neat.

It’s interesting to see how Stein gets her message across through irony and the exposure of truths in the dissection of superstition and identity. In bringing her example of having money all year after the cuckoo bird into light and stating that it is a fact because it happened and that she could see it and know it so it must be the truth, she exposes the faults of identity in being a construction of what we see or know about people and claim them as fact with the label of identity.

Week of November 4, 2013

The authors we looked at this week are both incredible people. Their presentations were fantastic, and I feel like I really learned a lot by seeing them present their work. Reading and hearing Douglas Kearney’s work has even inspired me to attempt performance poetry as a project to learn through and develop skills with.

The BathHouse event on Tuesday was a great experience. Listening to Tisa Bryant read her pieces was almost musical. The way her language comes off the page and truly creates an image is astounding and impressive. During her readings, I actually closed my eyes during her readings to allow the language the give me its story through nothing but her words. Similarly, listening to Douglas perform his poetry was an absolute treat. His emotion and expression in his tones and volumes is a wonder to experience, and even though I knew what to expect, seeing him do it live had a quality that I didn’t expect and still managed to surprise me with how powerful he is onstage.

During the Q&A, I learned a lot of really helpful things. Tisa’s advice to be able to speak aloud what you’ve written to test it in a practical and real sense is something I’ve done in the past with poetry, but for some reason never thought to do with prose. Something related to this that I believe they both said is that if something isn’t working, be willing to just let it go instead of allowing it to hold you back. Both Douglas and Tisa gave the advice of creating all at once and revising once everything is out so as to not interrupt the creative process. Douglas also gave the exercise of completely interrupting the creative process and putting self-imposed limitations on your work and seeing what great things come out of it that you can’t put down for the exercise. Really, there were a ton of great things that I learned, from seeing them, and I’ll be using many of them during my own writing practices in the future.