Alexie's Darkness

After reading "Ten Thousand Feathers" I am thrown off by Alexie's dark side that he puts into this poem. Previously in his poetry Alexie talks about his view of nature as godly and his idea that no one should be put on a pedestal as his main idea's. In "Ten Thousand Feathers" however Alexie begins to talk about how everyone dies and the circle of life, but he does so in a very negative connotation. This was the first time that I noticed Alexie's dark side of his poetry, but now I am beginning to see it in a different light and am beginning to think that Alexie is pessimistic through his poetry. I am curious to find out what he will be like when he comes to KO now.

Connections

As we read Alexie's poetry, I find some similarities between his poetry and that of Frost. THe structure of their story poems are remarkably similar and many of their thematic concepts are connected weirdly enough. I often find myself connecting the two even if they may seem unconnected at first.

Connecting A Road Not Taken to Modern Day Problems

This just kind of came up in my search bar and it is surprisingly interesting and pretty deep.  It is pretty interesting how they connect A Road Not Taken to unwanted pregnancy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZtmNefMLzM

Orange is the New Black, Road not taken

This clip is from the show Orange is the New Black

Frosty Form

As I write this I am wearing glasses, so expect studious and astute comments with a dollop of slurred phrases for I cannot see. I digress, we know from our previous knowledge of Robert Frost that he realates form to content; but how, we ask. He enjoys putting rhyme scheme on portions of his poems to give them order where there is no order and/or panache. Order being an attempt at man made control within the natural world; ie, Storm Fear, and Mending Wall!! Anyways, in our first example of Sherman Alexie he gives a rhyme scheme to a stanza wherein man is attempting to control nature by killing birds and actually making a business of it as if there is no emotion involved. Alexie goes on to say that the birds didnt need to be killed, they just needed to be moved.

Frost Rhyme Scheme

While we were reading Frost's poems, I found it interesting that he used a lot of rhyme, but often in an unusual pattern. For example, in Storm Fear, there are a lot of lines that rhyme, but there is no real regular pattern to the rhyme. Also, we looked at a couple of sonnets, but none of them had the traditional ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme. Instead, "Into My Own" had the pattern AABB CCDD EEFF GG, and we talked about the correlation between content and form.

Frost's Development

Frost's Development 

     Frosts ability to switch from a very traditional kind of poem such as those in his earlier books of poetry to a more story like and untraditional poetry in North of Boston shows exactly how versatile frost is not only in content but in form as well. An example of a poem that has a classical structure and poetic flow is gross first poem published in his first collection A Boy's Will. The poem, Into my Own, is a Shakespearean Sonnet with many examples of couplets and quatrains. The content of this poem shows the stray development of a character heading toward the woods which we said was a symbol of the uncertainty of the afterlife as the character approaches the woods. This poem is short and has the ability to portray numerous meanings and symbols through out the poem. 

     However in his second collection frosts way of writing significantly shifts to a less traditional poetic looking pieces to a more short story. He opens the collection with the poem Mending Wall, which is not divided into individually sonnets but instead flows more like a short story. This poem is filled with numerous symbols and connections throughout like that of a story with a central theme of a wall.

     Both of these poems show Frosts diversity in his writing abilities as he is able to do both traditional poems as well as some that are somewhat unorthodox and appear to be more of a story.

Frost

So I did some addition research about frost and I found this quote that I think describes Frosts poetry, “In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world…He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain." http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192#sthash.7Ul2uV4r.dpuf. Frost wrote from his own experiences, and brings his emotions into his poetry.  

Personal ties into Frost's Poetry

I find it very interesting how Frost's poems connect to his personal life.  Like many of his poems, Frost had a very depressing adult life. In 1885 (he was only 11), his father died of tuberculosis. They only had $8 to survive off of. Then, his mom died of cancer in 1900. THEN, in 1920, he had to put his sister into a wacky house, where she was for nine years before she died. He and his mother experienced from chronic depression.  No make matters worse,  his daughter Irma was sent to a mental hospital in 1947. Many of his poems have to do with being alone and dealing with sorrow, like in "Home Burial".  So I found this interesting.

-Call me English J.

Frost Relationships

Form: Robert Frost tends to use a certain rhyme scheme throughout his various poems, but each poem are all differently arranged. Frost likes to be highly structured, and out of the poems we've he only wrote one poem without using a rhyme scheme (Storm Fear). This poem does have rhyming at the end of lines, but they are very irregular. He also likes to use a regular meter and dosen't like to stray from this. Thsi varitey in rhyme usually depends on the theme of the poem. Frost always relates his poems structures to the main themes of his poems.

Content:  Frost seems to use a lot of nature in his poetry and see sees nature as a metaphor for growing up, passing of time, or new stages of life. Nature is usually portayed using a pathetic fallacy, which is personification specifically for nature. Based on the poems that we've read Frost writes in the first person, creating a feel of actually being apart of the poem. "To the Thawing Wind" is a great example of a very differnet poem, becuase Frost uses apostrophe, which is a poetric device that we've haven't seen a lot in some of his other poems. 

From/Content Comparison: Since Frost likes to use nature throughout his poems, this idea is usally portrayed in his structural writing. If he wrote a poem based aroud the theme of stormy weather ("To the Thawing Wind" "Storm Fear") He would use a very scattered rhyming scheme to portray that sense of stormy weather. If an animal was being used as the main theme he would use various different meters to show different elements of that animal. In "The Oven Bird" he uses different meters to represent the unregural bird calls. This use of form and content relationship really brings the reader into the story. 

Frost's Poetry Themes

Although all of Frost's poems have common themes, the poems he sections together are connected in a greater way.  For example, using the poems we've read:

NORTH OF BOSTON

In this section, Frost focuses on relationships and different "walls" that are created.  He uses different walls such as physical walls, found in Mending Wall, and emotional walls, found in Home Burial.

MOUNTAIN INTERVAL

I can connect "The Road not Taken" and "Oven Bird" in that they are both about making decisions.  The Road not Taken ends with the narrator choosing the road less traveled by.  The Oven Bird, on the other hand, needs to make his own decisions instead of waiting for something to happen.

A WITNESS TREE

Written for his secret love, this section has an upbeat, lovestruck feel as we saw in the Silken Tent.

Controversy over Joyce Carol Oates' new story about Frost (published in Harper's Magazine)

In the November issue of Harper's Magazine, author Joyce Carol Oates (a former Symposium author) published a fictional story about Robert Frost that's received some media coverage. Here's a pretty detailed article from The New Republic in which Alice Robb tries to get to the bottom of it through talking with contemporary Frost scholars and biographers.

Joyce Carol Oates Has Written Something Outrageous About Robert Frost

I haven't been able to access the whole story--full access requires a Harper's subscription--but if I can get access to the entire story by Oates, I'll post it.

What are your thoughts on the article? On Oates' intentions?

Kathleen Morrison

When we read Robert Frost's The Silken Tent, we discussed his affair with a married woman named Kathleen Morrison. The poem was written for her. I decided to do some more research on this situation. Kathleen and Frost met in 1918 at Bryn- Mawr where she was editor and chief of the student paper and invited him to lecture there in 1920 when she was a senior. After college Kathleen married a man by the name of Theodore Morrison, an English and Creative Writing professor at Harvard from 1931- 1963. They met again when a colleague of Theodore brought him in the Harvard circle. Frost and the Morrison's became close friends claiming they were like family. When Frost lost his wife, he and Kathleen became very close and as it turns out Frost was very strongly attracted to her.  Around 1938, Frost employed Kathleen as his secretary and advisor. This was also about the time they became lovers. Frost wrote both The Witness Tree and The Silken Tent for Kathleen.

Frost

After reading the poems that Frost has written I wonder if that poems he writes connect with his life? I question this because some of the poems are really depressive and seem to resemble death, so I was wondering if his life and his poems connect to each other.

Frost Style and Contenent

Frost

Through the reading of Frosts poetry, the style and the content of his poems have become more easily identifiable. One major stylistic thing that Frost likes to do with his meter is have it be consistent, but have some exceptions in some lines. Another thing that Frost likes to do with meter and rhyme is have his content affect the pattern. For example if frost is writing about a storm as in "Storm Fear" he has a consistent rhyme and meter at the beginning of the poem when it is peaceful, but a messed up rhyme and meter during while he is describing the storm. Frosts rhyme usually has a rough, not very strict pattern to it. Usually Frost writes in stanza's, and he occasionally has poems with lots of dialog that are written as if they are a story in a book. Frost also likes to make use of poetry devices such as enjambment, personification, and pathetic fallacy. The content of Frost's poems usually center around the relationship between man and nature, the passing of time, and the impact of making choices.