T.S. Eliot – s [r] blog

Guest Post, Alissa McElreath: We Read

October 17, 2015October 2, 2015Alissa McElreath

I teach English for a living. I primarily teach the composition sequence to freshmen students at my university, but I also teach creative writing, and now and again, literature classes. Sometimes, getting my students excited about reading and writing feels like trying to coax my kids to eat the green stuff on their plates. I know why reading matters in my life – helping my students see why it is relevant in their lives is often another thing entirely.

This semester, on the first day of classes, I asked my Studies in Literature students why it was important to read literature. It was one of those general, ice-breaker-type questions that I tend to throw out into the mix on the first day. It helps me gauge where my students are coming from – and to get a sense, early on, of the dynamics between them. There was an awkward silence for a few minutes, until the answers began to flow. I wrote their responses on the board.

We read:
To learn
To be entertained
To discover
To escape
To transcend loss
To confront big truths (life, and death, and everything in-between)
Because we have to

“Do we?” I asked. “Do we have to read?”

Of course, the answer to that question was ‘yes’ – because, the students told me, if they didn’t read they wouldn’t get the grades they wanted. But I encouraged them to think about reading as a necessity for living; that books provide us with the roadmaps we need to navigate through life. Books are like manuals created just for us – we can even personalize them to our needs and liking. Through them we can learn to be more empathetic and compassionate; we can learn our histories, and those of others; we can learn how to treat the living, and the dying, too. We can learn about hate, and love, and forgiveness. We can learn about motherhood and fatherhood, and sisterhood and brotherhood, and try those roles on from the safety of our couches. Without reading, everything is one-dimensional. Without books, our worlds are narrow and impossibly limited. Sure we can live that way, I pointed out, but would we want to? I mean, really, and truly?

reading boy I am lucky in that I get to see firsthand the impact that literature has on a life. While my students do not find all that they are assigned to read entertaining, I know they learn from some of it. Only last week, a student came shyly up to me after class to tell me how much she got from Helena Viramontes’s story The Moths. This story, narrated by a 14-year old girl, is about family, and loss, and love (how often it is difficult to separate the three). While my student did not see herself perfectly mirrored in the narrator’s story, she had an epiphany-type moment after reading it, and she was able to look back on her own 14-year old self with a new clarity. She could now confront some Big Truths about her own family – ones that she had buried deep inside of her. I’ll never forget the student athlete who gobbled up Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (I never knew people could write about stuff like that, he told me), or, when I taught a night class one semester, the veteran whose voice (and hands) shook with emotion when it was his turn to share a favorite passage from Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

I see the impact of books reflected all the time in my own kids. For example, driving to Harris Teeter with my 11-year old daughter last weekend, I found myself, improbably, discussing T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. It began when she unexpectedly quoted the first two lines while we sat in traffic at a light.

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky…Do you know that poem?” she asked from the backseat.

“I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled,” I replied. “One of my favorite poems! How do you know it?”

She reminded me that Hazel Grace recites the poem in her Favorite Book of All Time: The Fault in Our Stars. She read the book earlier in the summer and, at the time of writing this, has re-read it five times, and watched the movie twice. (This excludes all the viewing and re-viewing of the movie trailer that happened before I decided she was allowed to watch the entire film.) The book changed her life as a young reader – threw the door to a whole new reading experience (and world) wide open. Green’s book led her to Eliot’s poem, which in turn led us into what can only be described as an absolutely delightful yet mind-blowing discussion of Eliot’s poem while we were headed to complete a very mundane errand. Talking with her about The Love Song absolutely made my day. If she hadn’t read TFIOS when, unprompted by teachers or homework obligations, would she have otherwise turned to the Internet to look up the poem by herself? I couldn’t stop thinking about this. The fact that Green took Eliot’s poem and, coming as it does from Hazel Grace, made it new and accessible and interesting and cool and relevant to countless young (and yes, old) readers all over the world – young readers who would perhaps not even have given the poem a second glance outside of the world of the novel – that right there is what books can do; that’s the kind of power they have, and it’s pretty staggering when you think about it.

So, why do we read? We read:
To learn
To be entertained
To discover
To escape
To transcend loss
To confront big truths (life, and death, and everything in-between)
Because we have to – we really, really, just have to.

Guest Blog Post, Charles Rafferty: On Writing

September 26, 2013November 15, 2013Charles Rafferty

My writing tends toward condensation. When I write poems, I never trickle onto the second page. When I write stories, they almost never exceed a thousand words — and they’re often just a single paragraph. This interest in the tiny and the compact has a practical foundation. I lead a busy life — and I doubt I have the concentration and stamina to pull off writing something like War and Peace. Generally speaking, this interest in the miniature and the distilled extends to my reading life as well. Couldn’t Chapter 8 of Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading be understood if he gave us just this sentence: “Incompetence will show in the use of too many words.” And when we want to refresh our memory of, say, T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” doesn’t a review of our own underscorings get us just as far as a rereading the whole thing?

I certainly don’t want to argue against the beauty and the necessity of long works. But there’s much that can be appreciated without them. It’s in this spirit that I offer up the following maxims and observations — it’s an effort to avoid my having to write 30 essays explaining my positions, and an effort to keep you from having to read those essays:

Don’t regard any maxim too highly. Its opposite is equally true. If you haven’t heard it yet, that’s because no one has stated it cleverly enough. Consider this an assignment.
Every good poem has form. To say otherwise is like saying some water doesn’t have temperature.
On setbacks: You can’t sing with a broken jaw, but you can learn to play the piano.
The impulse that begins a poem is almost never strong enough to finish it. You must be willing to let go of what ceases to be useful—like laying down your walking stick when the crags turn into plains.
Some poems fail because of just one word — as troubling as a hornet on the railing of a crib.
One vase lets you see the scum and filmy water that power the bouquet of goldenrod. Another one doesn’t. Which is better? Beauty or the beauty that tells us where it comes from?
When compiling a book, it is best to start with a large pile of poems—the survivors will need something to rise above.
To have successful poems over the long haul, you must be the kind of person who dusts the furniture when there is no hope of visitors.
Poets collect themselves into schools for the same reasons as fish: safety in numbers, a flash in the shallows.
On lacking inspiration: The pearl diver comes up with nothing almost every time. And still he goes down hugging a boulder, his prybar at the ready.
On publication: A first book is like gristle coughed onto your plate. Getting it out lets you keep breathing, but nobody wants to pick it up.
On rejection: It is the favor for which we never think to ask. It is the chance to make things better.
To complain that poetry is too accessible is to complain that the streets are too efficiently plowed after a sudden and devastating February snow. A good poem tells us the way.
A purist is someone incapable of progress.
We must continue to write even when the poems are shitty. Stabbing at dirt will polish a knife.
Every pearl began as irritation.
She recited the prayer by rote, making him think her soul had a bar code.
The predictable occurrence of stressed and unstressed syllables becomes more pleasing when the pattern is violated, here and there. We prefer a bouquet with a few broken petals for the same reason. We don’t guess for a moment it might be fake.
The thing that is most accessible is not always the best material for a poem. There’s a reason the pyramids were not constructed of sand.
On listening to poetry that I know is not: The wind can howl in the midnight pines but morning will find them standing.
Details should be chosen as carefully as if you were covering up a murder. A poem is a lie you must make the world believe.
There is a difference between the predictable and the probable, between the vague and the mysterious, between deviation and variation. The poet must learn when each is acceptable. Reading widely helps.
Exclamation points are too often a cry of wolf. I prefer people to scream when they are actually on fire.
Some poems end like surgery—the problem solved, the pain a memory, the stitching so tight that nothing leaks. Other poems end like a diagnosis.
We respond to clichés the way we respond to form letters and junk mail — something the writer didn’t bother to craft, a kind of boilerplate for the soul.
Having too strict a meter can be like having the bass up so high on your stereo that you can’t make out the harpsichord. Too loose a meter can be like static.
There are no five-leggers. Nature prefers symmetry.
Of course, poetry should strive to substantiate truth in particulars, but it is possible to be too particular. Think of the person who gives crowded directions. He risks our safe arrival by making us read through the intersections.
About sestinas: In all but the best, the uninitiated finds them vaguely repetitive, the expert finds them predictable.
Too many poets still use “heart” to mean the seat of love and desire and passion. This is archaic. A heart should show up in a poem only as something that beats beside a surgeon’s blade. When we hear the word misused, it’s like watching a man put on a hat so long out of style it’s laughable. We turn away.

Charles Rafferty’s new short story collection, Saturday Night at Magellan’s, is available here: http://fomitepress.com/FOMITE/Magellans.html.

The London Magazine

May 6, 2013April 28, 2013Superstition Review

The London Magazine is the UK’s oldest cultural and literary journal featuring the best original poetry, short stories, cultural reviews and literary essays since 1732.
For 280 years, The London Magazine has been an indispensable feature on the British cultural landscape. Responsible for publishing some of the most significant literature in British history from Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats to T. S. Eliot, today it remains at the forefront with the best contemporary writing.

Our most recent contributors and features include Edward Lucie-Smith, Avant-Garde – what Avant-Garde?, Peter Abbs Eating from the Tree of Paradise: The Apprenticeship of Carl Jung, Eamonn Gearon On Arabs and Ignorance, Michael Horovitz, Postcard from Ireland as well as poetry from the Costa Prize Winner Christopher Reid and Orange Prize Winner,Helen Dunmore.

Don’t miss out on this essential addition to your reading featuring new and established writers. Simply visit: www.thelondonmagazine.org to subscribe today. Published bi-monthly, we are currently offering an introductory 6 month, 3 issue offer for just £25 (includes postage to US). Alternatively you can purchase an ebook version of our current and past issues from amazon direct.

Meet the Review Crew: Christine Truong

May 14, 2012February 19, 2018Superstition Review

Each week we feature one of our many talented interns here at Superstition Review.

Christine Truong is an Art Editor for Superstition Review. She studies English Literature and Art History at Arizona State University and upon graduation she plans to attend a graduate program to learn, research, and write about literature.

Christine was born in Vietnam, but has spent the majority of her life living in the inner-city of Los Angeles. She considers herself fascinated and jaded by city-life. However, after traveling to towns throughout Europe, Asia, and the U.S., she has come to conclude that Los Angeles, with its imperfections, is no ordinary place. Christine continues to draw inspiration from the pathos of city-life and like others of her generation, she thinks about what it means to be a young adult in modern life.

Unlike other students of her discipline, Christine did not always enjoy books. Her love for books began when a Middle School teacher recommended that she read The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan after learning of her Vietnamese heritage. Christine likes to say that her true love for literature began when she read Demian by Herman Hesse and Anthem by Ayn Rand in the tenth grade—both, in their own ways, stories of individual conquest.

Today, her love of literature has translated over to the world of literary theory and poetry. In both her spare time and academic life, Christine enjoys reading critical theory, where every piece seems to be more complicated and elaborate than the previous. She is interested in poetic forms, rhetoric, and post-colonial and deconstructionist theories. She enjoys the critical and prose works of T.S. Eliot and other Modernists, as well as the English Romantics and Russian writers. If she were forced to choose a work to read for the rest of her life, she would, without a question, choose T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock.” If she had to choose a work of art to view for the rest of her life, it would be Eugène Delacroix’s Paganini.

Christine’s interest in Superstition Review came at time when she realized she needed to spend more time connecting with others who also love art and literature. She also writes an opinion column on culture and politics for ASU’s State Press. In her spare time, she updates her literature blog, a hundred visions and revision and tries to find time to update her cooking blog, Culinary Curiosities.

Christine enjoys reading astrological charts. She is also an after-school instructor for the Tempe School District and teaches play programs for parents and their toddlers at Gymboree Play and Music.