Reply to comment

This is clearly becoming a recurring theme for me. I blew up when we were analyzing Kindred, and now Gertrude Stein? Is this a good thing? It sure is an interesting reversal from my prior nerves surrounding speaking in class. Maybe I operate best when angry.

I have to say, rather proudly, that my horrible analysis of the first stanza of Lifting Belly may have been the first time I haven't been embarrassed about being wrong. I still absolutely do not grasp what is going on in that piece. I can't even really wrap my mind around our class discussion about dimensions and definitions and placeholders and grammatical markers... Maybe Gstein (as smigliori would call her) and I are just not meant to be friends.

I myself was disappointed when I learned that Hacker was a transition into the Stein piece. The Canzone we read was one that I analyzed for another English class last semester, and I was looking forward to seeing how the class would dive into it. Alas, it was not to be. To a certain degree I respond to Hacker's "bluntness," although not necessarily to the poem smigliori posted, and I think that reading further poetry from authors that I have some familiarity with might help (Cisneros, for example, is an old friend).