April Fools!

Elizabeth Bishop:

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All of her poems in this anthology apply to nature, such as fish or native peoples of Africa or an armadillo. They all also encompass of part of her life, thus reflecting on the meaning of nature in human life. However, Bishop’s use of nature is not the same as Thoreau’s or Emerson – all of her poems are fairly cut and dry. The aspects of nature are all observed from a distance standpoint, such as her analytical observations of the large fish she had caught. Her poems have an equal amount of both interesting description and bare facts of life, so that readers can more easily relate to the topics she discusses.

S Saul Bellow:

fir In the first chapter of Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March, the reader is introduced to the main characters and plot through a mixture of enlightening facts, curious characterizations, and foreshadowing. This piece is obviously modernism because while Bellow’s descriptions of people and places are quite colorful and thorough, they are also realistic and easily relatable. The many allusions to different parts of Chicago both give the reader a clear picture of where the story is taking place.

I thought that the piece was interesting, but that is jumped around a little too much for my taste. I would rather have Bellow inform me a little more of the situation with Augie’s father. Even though this is only the first chapter, I really didn’t understand the purpose of Grandma Lausch out of being a better mother figure to Augie than his own mother.

Robert Lowell:

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Lowell’s poems follow a specific trend: they all mirror or take the place of a part of history already established. He uses Moby Dick, Jonathan Edwards and his speech Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, a life that can be assumed is like the life of Elizabeth Bishop, and the experiences of Robert Gould Shaw. Although he borrows the bare bones facts from these novels or life experiences, he creates his own unique word within the lines of the poems. He gives the readers of his poems his own interpretations of situations and emotions. Lowell mostly writes poems which reflect Northern parts of the country, probably because this is where he lived. There is little to no romanticism in the poems, even though there is an element of fantasy within them.

Jack Kerouac:

- Although he is arguably one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, I cannot bear to read Jack Kerouac. As a writer I admittedly try out his style at times, but as a reader it is nearly impossible to slog through the muck of run-on sentences and obscure references and beatnik vocabulary. Big Sur is even worse than On the Road, the earlier novel that I have completed exactly half of, unable to go on. Half a page long paragraphs, most of them without a single period but rather with numerous dashes to combine the thoughts and make them halfway coherent do effectively tell a story, but rather the reader really wants to know or really cares is the question. To me, Kerouac’s works are his own sort of genius – perhaps you have to be a fellow beatnik (stoner) to truly appreciate them.