"Aunt Sue's Stories" by Langston Hughes

This poem, though simple in structure, struck me through its strong use of repetition, which serves to emphasize the key elements of the narrative. First is Aunt Sue, most likely the aunt of the child to whom she tells stories. She tells stories of black slaves, in different scenarios and conditions, stories that come not from "out of any book at all," but instead from her own life experiences, presumably as a slave herself, stories of the life she was forced but a fate from which the child has been saved. The simple but effective descriptions allow the reader to experience the summer night but within their own context, bringing to mind their own experiences of similar hot nights spent outside, listening to anecdotes presented as anonymous stories.

 

This poem is made powerful through its specifically chosen yet general descriptions, giving away nothing but evoking everything. Each read leads to the creation of another internal detail and a greater desire to understand and hear Aunt Sue's stories for one's self.

The Student's Wife- Ray Carver

The piece I connected with this week was “The Student’s Wife” by Ray Carver. I really liked this piece because it created a sense of nostalgia. Carver did this by using description to create a history and want for that history by Nan. I got a good sense of who Nan was when she listed what she liked and how that was contrasted with the fact that she can’t afford most of the things she likes. This contrast, added together with the story of Nan and Mike fishing, showed Nan’s want for a better time. It made Nan, and myself along with her, feel nostalgic for what was and what could have been. I think another reason why I felt a sense of nostalgia was because I imagined my grandparents as Nan and Mike. There’s a line in the first paragraph, “…stopped only to reach to the nightstand for a cigarette,” that completely transported me back to my grandparents. They were both smokers and I know how much my grandfather cared for my grandmother. I don’t know if he read to her, but I feel like he did other little acts like that to show how much he loved her. It’s also a funny coincidence, but my grandmother’s name was Fran and the wife’s name is Nan. Nan is definitely more dramatic than my grandmother was, but I think they both have a sense of the melancholic that helped me place my grandmother in Nan’s shoes. Being able to visualize these characters as people I actually knew, added another layer to the nostalgia because it made me want for a time that they were still alive.

Carver, "The Student's Wife"

  Carver so creatively captured such extreme emotions of desperation and yearning in his piece “The Student's Wife.” I loved how these strong emotions were conveyed so subtly through a conversation. The details were not thrown at the reader but rather woven into the melancholic conversation and descriptions. The subtle build up of tension was continuous throughout the piece. I got impatient a few times when Nan kept on with the conversations, and when Carver confined the setting to the room. However, I felt this was a very interesting way to make me relate to the character-Nan who was miserable and desperate to break free from the life she was living.

My favourite part was the ending. It was so unexpected and such a big contrast to the subtle conveyance of desperation. It almost felt like an explosion of the tension that was building up. I thought it perfectly summed up and magnified the serious issue at hand.

lynn Emanuel "Frying Trout While Drunk"

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree resonates loudly to me in the piece. We are tormented our whole lives by the actions of our parents. The happy, the sad, the bitter, the fun, the memories of them always stay with us. I really enjoyed the colorful writing it felt as though we were reliving the memories of a distraught youth.

The tenderness and painful oblivion he writes in regard to her mother echoes. We are so enamored through youth of our parents, but hindsight of our youth can sometimes leave us harboring different emotions towards those who raised us.  

I sometimes find myself looking at my own actions thinking, “wow, I am just like my mother…” we are raised in the image of our parents, they are everything they never wanted to be and the cyclical pattern continues as offspring repopulate the planet.

Carver's "The Student's Wife"

I really admired this short prose piece, especially since difficulty in falling asleep is something I'm faced with almost every night. But in all seriousness, I think what Carver does here the best is the dialogue he crafts between Mike and Nan. Over the course of this piece, their relationship goes from normal/happy, to unhappy/dysfunctional/unfulfilled. This in large part is shown with the dialogue, because over the course of the night, the longer Nan can't manage to fall asleep, Mike becomes more and more able to, and even does so while she's trying to talk to him. Also, Mike's responses become more and more monosyllabic over the course of the night/piece. Another key part of this piece too was the anecdotal parts, i.e. when Nan relates her dream to Mike, or when they're taking about their night on the Tilton River. Carver crafts these little monologues of imagery very well, and they embody the classic "show, don't tell" trope that writers are taught to strive for. Lots of sensory descriptions that really paint the scene in other words. In those little passages, we also see a side of the couple that isn't in the text's "real time" so to speak, and the reader is led to believe, or at least, the connotation of these passages makes it seem like we, as the reader, are supposed to interpret this as the times when the couple was happy. Even the small details on how the bed looks, and the contour of the blankets and Mike and Nan in the bed are so well crafted and genuine. Furthermore, Carver's descriptions of the bed illuminate the crux of the piece at the end, where Nan comes back and the husband is right in the middle, under the ball of a blanket and a pillow. The fact that they can't both sleep soundly in bed, except when she leaves and he's passed out, says so much in so little, especially with the prayer at the end, which resonated with me after my initial read.

All in all, Carver masters "Show, Don't Tell," in this piece. (As I'm sure he does in all of his pieces.) Specifically with the student's wife, Carver achieves this with his dialogue that runs all throughout the piece, as well as his invention with the dream and the reminiscing of the lake. Both of these aspects are accented by Carver's sensory appeal and earnest all throughout.

Lynn Emanuel's "Photograph of Ramona Posing"

Emily Hughes

October 7, 2014

Lynn Emanuel's poem presents a unique dichotomy, juxtaposing sensual physicality with innocent and childlike ignorance. This comparison is immediately constructed within the poem's first sentence, when Emanuel describes the Father "Smudging the nipple with his thumb / In the tough, awkward way / Children rub their eyes when tired." The creation of Ramona's character, emphasized through this charcoal sketch imagery, is somehow erotic and juvenile simultaneously.

Later in the poem, Ramona is described as "This girl whose gold tooth / Father polished with his tongue" -- an aggressively lustful image. However, this vividly repulsive image is contrasted by the following line, in which Emanuel writes that Ramona could "fill the fields with weeping painters" -- a heavily romanticized description.

This dichotomy is all structured using the repeated phrase: "Life is not pretty / Although she does not believe it." These two lines assert a sort of forced innocence to Emanuel's Ramona; they provide her with a deliberately contradicting character. By creating this strong opposition of images, Lynn Emanuel is able to paint a more real and vivid character.

"Cherrylog Road" by James Dickey

The first thing I liked about this poem was the structure of it. It looked like a tower of bricks stacked across the pages. I read them much too quickly though, assuming a straightforward structure would indicate straightforward narrative. Instead I found a very mobile piece that took me for a ride off Highway 106 and into an unfamiliar lot. I wasn't able to keep up with the ride at first, but when I took my foot off the throttle I was able to appreciate the piece much more. Dickey is very successful in showing the reader the emotions of the narrator by way of his actions and language.

What I found most interesting about this piece was the live Dickey imbued the junkyard with. In fact, he even uses it to impart the movement of the live characters, describing how the inhabitants of the yard move to parallel the intimacies of the narrator and Doris Holbrook.