Irish Folk Music Concert

Mairtin de Cogain and Jimmy Crowley were great! I really enjoyed the music they played. I really could not understand what they were saying half the time though. They were both very entertaining. Mairtin's story about the car was very humorous. My favorite song they played was the one about the Titanic. I enjoyed the music that went along with the story they were telling. Crowley was very talented in playing the instruments he did. They both were very good entertainers. I am going to put The Wind That Shakes the Barley on my Netflix queue because I enjoyed de Cogain so much.

Spoken Word Poet Mike McGee

I LOVED Mike McGee. His way of interacting with the crowd and laid back personality made it a relaxed atmosphere. Every single one of his poems was amazing. My favorite was about death and McGee having an eating contest to see who would win McGee's soul. He was also very funny almost all of the poems he performed contained weird comparisons and humorous word choices. He performed from 8-10:30 it did not feel like I was there for that long. Time flew by as he told amazing poem after poem. I thought he had a much lighter subject base than the last poet. I'm glad I got to see him perform.

April 15 Readings

I enjoyed reading all of the authors this week. Each had their own special quality that made their writings peak my interest.
Adrienne Rich's Storm Warnings really appealed to me. The way she described the situation was very relatable to me. I have seen many hurricanes and road them through waiting to survey the damage outside. The last line is so true " These are the things that we have learned to do who live in troubled regions" it becomes second nature to close up the house when bad weather comes. At the beginning she even talks about knowing the weather better than the barometer. The words she uses to describe the weather create strong images in my mind. In her other poem Snapshots of a Daughter-in- Law she is kind of like a contemporary Plath. The last stanza was bittersweet it alluded that there were changes to come but one is always being reborn into new ideas and identities. The poem had a strong feminist air to it. Rich explores the advancement of women through time. She ends with the beginning in a way. With women being reborn through out their life it creates a stronger connection with their past. My favorite poem of hers was Diving Through the Wreck. Rich acknowledges women's fight for civil rights in the past as well as the present. There is a strong tie to the unconscious embedded into diving into the unknown. She also creates a since of problems with the images of the wreck, knife, and being below the surface. By her finding the wreck it creates a sense of recovery which could be linked to the recovery of women's rights. Rich creates a myth for women to look upon when needing a sign of hope.
Micheal S. Harper has a writing style that infuses the jazz structure with writing. He is very spontaneous in his writing with a rhythmic and music openness. He also writes a lot about past events. Harper celebrates African American culture in all of his writings. In American History Harper uses lots of history to create a tragic poem. He speaks of slaves coming to American to be sold and little girls being killed. All of his poems were very interesting and created a different view point of situations.
Komunyakaa like Harper had a jazz like structure to his poems. His writings were very personal and in a way confessional. The structure was not like other writers during that time. He had a very unique way of looking at things.
Li- Young Lee had an emphasis on material things with specific pin points. He was able to make me hungry when I was reading Eating Alone and Eating Together. Like Hemingway he uses sensual imagery to grab your attention and switch from one thing to another. Lee uses the "icy metal spigot" to change from present to past. He is also a lot like Bishop, he writes about things and starts with things in his poetry.

After This By: Alice McDermott

I did not really enjoy After This. I read Child of My Heart prior to reading After this and enjoyed it a lot more. After this seemed to be a bunch of short stories linked together by the same characters. Each "short story" was very good but it made the book disjointed. The storied jumped from decades creating a burr of time. There was a lack of structure during the story I felt as if there was no high point to the story. I did enjoy the repetition of the piano player she used. The tone was bittersweet. The intermixing of sweetness and sorrow created hope and possibility. With hope there is a twist of a sadder but wiser view that is taken. This most defiantly is an anti-war novel. Along with the anti-war theme the American Dream is put into question. McDermott hints towards the American Dream just being a mythical creature never meant to be caught. The main theme I got from After This was to always have hope.

Readings for 4/1

Sylvia Plath sparked my interest this week. Her poems were a revealing peep into her life. She used the Holocaust a lot in both of her poems. I thought that was very interesting. She is able to create a strong image in readers mind's with her strong wording. I really enjoyed Child! The way she starts off with a kind of innocence then at the end BAM the real world is there. She makes the world feel so empty when she says "Not this troublous wringing of hands, this dark ceiling without a star." I hate when I cannot see stars in the sky. I get excited when I am able to see a constellation in the sky. With that one line she is able to take a certain part of life away. In Daddy Plath shows that she has serious issues with her father. It was interesting to read how she expressed her feelings about her father.
James Baldwin's story Good Country People was really entertaining. It paralleled with The Confidence Man by having a con artist. The last paragraph of the story where the guy takes her leg and tells her "one time I got a woman's glass eye this way" made me crack up. She ended up getting taken advantage of instead of her taking advantage of the guy. Things just went down hill for her. She lost her leg and her man friend.
Elizabeth Bishops poem Fish was very entertaining. She was able to admire every detail of a fish like he was a god. She describe everything on the fish with dramatic wording that lets the reader feel as if they are seeing the fish for themselves. I enjoyed how she described all the hooks as "a five- haired beard of wisdom" it was a very intriguing way to describe past escapes from being caught.
All-in-all I enjoyed this weeks reading very much they were are similar but different in big ways.