Hafiz and his Poem Structure

I didn't pick a poem in particular to comment on because I liked all of Hafiz's poems. The reason why I liked them was their uniqueness in structure and wording. Poems such as Hafiz's are very good attention grabbers. Besides that, his short poems are also very powerful. Saying so much with ten to twenty organized words is really hard, but nonetheless Hafiz did it and he did it in a very good way.

The Love Story - Movie

During the last class we have watched the movie which was (somewhat) made based on the story of Erich Segal - Love story. Personally, I think that my imagination was much better than the movie itself. Maybe back then when the movie was made it was high quality, but for today's eyes it looked like a low-budget movie. The main that i did not like about the movie was that in some scenes (especially the last one) it completely changed from the book and by this it also changed some of the concept that the author was trying to transmit to the readers. Nonetheless, it also had its positive aspects as well. I liked the main actors (Oliver and Jennifer), i liked the music effects, and the places where the movie was made. Lastly, I think that (like many other movies) this movie needs to be remade into a modern Hollywood movie, so that the current generations can really enjoy it and compare it with the book.

The Love Story 2

The second and the last part of the Love Story gets more interesting. Jenny decides not to go to Paris, they get married but Oliver doesn't get the approval from his parents. He sacrifices his relationship with his parents in order to get married to Jenny. At first they struggle (financially) because they were both still in school. Jenny found a temporary part-time job so that they could live off something. Soon they both graduate, Oliver being the 3rd in his class and of course All-Ivy in the hockey league.

As the story goes on, they started trying to have a baby. After some time they see that it is not happening and as a result of that they go and visit the doctor. The doctor determines that Jennifer is very ill (Leukemia). He doesn't tell Jennifer but instead invites Oliver to his office the next day. Oliver is so impatient that he actually calls the doctor and re-schedules the meeting for earlier during that day. The doctor tells him and of course Oliver gets sad but he tries to remain calm and hide the truth from Jenny.

After a while Jenny finds out about her disease and Oliver goes to his dad (after 3 years) to ask him for some money which he needed to cover Jenny's medical expenses. His dad approves, Oliver gets the check and goes back to Jenny. Soon Jennifer's dad also finds about about her disease and joins them in their apartment.

One night, they had to take Jenny to the hospital because she wasn't feeling well and that is also the time when she dies. Oliver runs away from the hospital, meets his dad, tells him about Jenny's death and runs to his arms while crying like a boy.

I think that no matter how sad Jenny's death was, it also had a good side to it. It re-joined Oliver and his dad. So basically Jenny had to be sacrificed so that they could start talking again.

The Love Story

The "Love Story" is a short story which talks about a Harvard student Oliver and a Radcliffe student Jenny. Oliver meets Jenny in the Radcliffe University Library where she works as a librarian. Jenny starts talking about how Oliver should use the Harvard library instead of the Radcliffe University one because Harvard has more books. After that, they start a sort of a friendship. Jenny goes and watches Oliver in a game. During the game they get to talk during the 2 minute ejection which is given to Oliver by the hockey referee. Another important thing (after their friendship turns into a romantic relationship) is that Jenny won a scholarship to go to France and practice with this popular music professor. She tells Oliver about it and of course he doesn't like it. He also proposes her marriage just to let her know how serious he is about their relationship.

The Drunk Poem

The poem You are My Drunkenness written by Nazim Hikmet is very short but also very interesting. Again it connects to the fact which we mentioned in class that for feelings we do not have a lot of expressions. The author, instead of continuing with something between the lines of "you make me feel like..." he simply stops in the first stanza.


Here is the poem:



"You are my drunkenness...
I did not sober up, as if I can do that;
I don't want to anyway.
I have a headache, my knees are full of scars
I am in mud all around
I struggle to walk towards your hesitant light."

I think that the author is talking about an experience of being drunk and seeing a potential courting candidate. When I read it I get this image of a person who is drunk, all dirty and scarred, and trying to walk around, following the girl that he liked.

e.e. cummings ...is this a name?

somewhere i have never traveled by e.e cummings is one of my most favorite poems in the second package of poems. as you can notice by the title, one reason why this poem was interesting to me was because it didn't have any capitalization rules applied. other than that, the title is pretty self-explanatory. the author talks about an imaginative place in which she has never been:

"somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:"

i like the part where it says "your eyes have their silence". based on my opinion i think that the meaning of that sentence is that the eyes are silent because their are content with the view that they are getting. 

"(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)"   

this is also a part that i like because I think that it would be great for a romantic line that you could tell to your girl/boyfriend.

To Lose is to be an Artist

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop is a poem which I liked very much because it connected to my personal life a lot. As we discussed in class, we do not have a rich vocabulary when it comes to explaining feelings but for some reason the author wrote enough for me to be able to relate to what is she trying to explain. She says that losing is an art, and that we should keep losing in order to work towards the perfection of the aforementioned "art". Elizabeth Bishop also gives us examples on what we should lose in order to master the feeling:

"Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster." 

As you can infer, in the 2nd stanza above, the author also gives dimensions to losing (farther, faster). 

I have had the chance to lose a lot in my life, so in a weird way, I know what the poet is saying about losing.




 

This is How I am Going to Die

The poem which I really liked from the first group of poems is Cesar Vallejo's Black Stone on Top of a White Stone. In this poem the author imagines his death, and gives us some details about the place, the time, and the situation in which he will die:

 "I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn."

Later on, in the second stanza, the author gives us hints that he actually wishes to die:
 
"As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders
To the evil."


In the last part of the poem he also tells the readers about the way in which he will die:





"They hit him hard with a stick and hard also
With the end of a rope."

Ultimately, I think that the author himself was in a depressive mood and depression in many times can lead to thoughts about death or suicide.

The Stranger - Final Part

The last part of The Stranger is the one in which I expected for something big to happen - some kind of an unexpected climax. But unfortunately the story's intensity went down with Mersault being found guilty on the charges that were pressed against him. During the last days of his life, before his execution using a guillotine, he spends his time thinking about life. At some point he comes to a conclusion that everyone is going to die someday and that he is just dying earlier than the rest. In my opinion, this is what happens when you let fate make the choices that you are supposed to make. If Mersault was punished for something, (except for the murder) it was for wasting his life.

The Strange Stranger - Part 3

Meursault eventually ends up in jail for the murder that he had committed. In the beginning he doesn't care and again continues to act indifferent but as the time passes he realizes that things have changed for him. First he is called for interrogation where he is asked whether he wanted a lawyer and oddly enough he refuses to have one. Nonetheless he gets one and I bet that he was his lawyer's "nightmare client". Meursault refuses to cooperate with him and continues with his non-sense attitude. He shows up before the "Magistrate" for his first court session. After the session, he had spent nearly a year in prison waiting for his trial to come. During that time he got a lot of media attention and he became popular (as could be also seen by the number of people who later attended the court sessions). For the first time in the story he had this urge to cry because everyone was looking at him in such a mean way. So basically for the first time since the beginning of the story he actually felt something which was natural, humane, and that actually made sense. Nevertheless, after the testimony of many of his peers he is found guilty for the murder. In the end of chapter 4 in part 2, Meursault starts paying attention to the details again by telling us how the police was gentle to him, how the judge told him that he deserves to have his head cut in a public square in the name of France etc. It seems that after the verdict he shrinks again into his small world of pointless details because that is the only "place" where he feels safe.

The Strange Stranger - Part 2

Meursault's life starts to get more interesting (for the readers) in the following chapters. He is still the same old indifferent person, but somehow things start happening to him and as usually he doesn't hesitate to embrace them. The main theme of the following three chapters is Meursault getting in trouble. His buddy Raymond beats up his girlfriend and afterwards asks Meursault to tell the police that she had betrayed him and that her betrayal was the reason of the conflict. Our main character does that. Later on he actually shoots a person...once and then...four more times, just too punish him for ruining Meursault's day.


During the story he also acts weird towards Marie when she talks to him about their marriage. He tells her that he doesn't really care if they get married but that they could get married if she wanted to. He considers Marie as just a random woman who happened to be with him and that he would also get married with any other woman also. But Marie truly loves him. Meursault "feels" some marriage when him, Marie and Raymond go to Masson's and his wife's beach house but the feeling was only temporary. We also find out that he was forced to quit college and since then he didn't have any ambitions whatsoever because he believed that they didn't matter. Personally I think that quitting college made Meursault the way he is portrayed in the story. It depends on the person when it comes to handling difficult life situations. Meursault was one of them that probably dealt with it in the hard way.

The Strange Stranger

The first three chapters of "The Stranger" describe the life of a person who is random in a nonrandom way. His lifestyle consists of nothing. He doesn't plan for anything and does everything that shows up. He is a person who doesn't commit to anything and is apathetic towards everything that happens around him. His mother dies, he spends a night with a stranger woman, eats supper with also a stranger and hears a crazy story from him and yet again, he remains apathetic and random. He reminds me of Jack (The Narrator) in the movie "Fight Club". Doing nothing and everything without a reason. It almost looks like he is lost while seeking a meaning to life. I guess this is how it looks like, to follow a purposeless life, without feelings and emotions, almost like a robot who knows nothing more than to follow binary commands.

The Trans-Siberian Fantasy

During our first two classes we have read a long poem written by Blaise Cendrars. As you can tell by the title, my first impressions about this poem define it as a very good fantasy. Knowing Cendrars' character and his imaginary life full of lies and fabrications, my impressions get even stronger. He takes this trip which is supposedly from France to Russia (or vice-versa) by a train. Somehow, during that trip, the whole world and all worldwide cultures got involved even though he wasn’t passing through all of them (i.e. Mongolia). Even though this poem supposedly “travels” across countries, cultures, events, and people, I was able to draw a line between the poem and myself. The traveling poet makes the world look so small and reachable while imaginatively passing through various countries including Germany, China, Sweden, United States, Spain etc. I also get this sort of a “traveling effect”. When I’m in an airport, looking at the big screens which show various cities of different places, I get the feeling that none of those cities are far away and that all of them can be reached easily. Furthermore, the contrasts and the great mixture of different things also grabbed my attention. The poet tends to compare and contrast objects which have no relation between them whatsoever but nonetheless, he managed to make the poem attractive and mind-catching.