Melissa Engberg

WCW Blog

            In reading over Williams again, I’m able to more clearly identify what seems to be his “poetic voice,” for lack of a better description… I’m guessing this has something to do with context—having now had the chance to compare WCW to other writers, I’m able to recognize what makes his poetry distinct.  Williams’ style seems very distinct from that of Stein and Loy, and while I certainly don’t think we would confuse anything in “A” with this volume (although only the exam will tell!), Williams and Zukofsky seem, to be, to be the most similar out of the four poets we’ve read this term. 

            There seems to be a directness, some sense of the grounded, to Williams’ poetry that I don’t find in Loy, Stein or Zukofsky.  In re-reading The Poor I was reminded of our examination of WCW’s paired poems… I come away now with an image of “under construction.”  I don’t know if this is accurate… there seems to be some attention to the process, which also seems characteristic of Stein’s work.  

Melissa Engberg

Mina Loy Blog

            In reviewing Loy, I looked at Photo After Pogrom and was struck by the phrase “marble pause,” and what an unlikely combination of words that is.  Maybe a dichotomy here:

-         that unusual combination of words results, for me, in something highly imagistic—I have a strong sense of how dramatic such a pause must be.  That solid connection between words and images obeys my conception of the more traditional poet’s aesthetic.

-         Still, when we discussed Loy in class, I came away with the idea that much of her focus was on the sounds of the words themselves, the sound of “marble pause,” which would seem to represent a new aesthetic that steps away from word= image of the poet’s design and into word= image/sound/meaning created by reader

So?  My first reaction to that conflict is to say that Loy embraces, rather than rejects, but then what to make of her Feminist Manifesto?  For me, it very clearly rejects a lot of patriarchal definitions of the feminine… particularly the elevation of the virginal. 

            I could divorce the poem from the manifesto but that gives me pause— we might feel more free, in our avant-garde perspective, to separate poem from poet, but to separate poem from philosophy(i.e. personal philosophy)?  They seem important to each other, especially if the focus is on radical perspectives… some ability to violate chronology stemming from reflect on poem: reflect on manifesto… the manifesto’s philosophy creates the poem and the poem’s philosophy creates the manifesto.  Who knows?  Not me, clearly.