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Sex Without Love-Sharon Olds

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  I did not like this poem. It kind of grossed me out, but maybe that’s the intention, given that the narrator doesn’t like or understand the idea of loveless sex. However, it’s not the concept of loveless sex that bothers me, it’s the comparisons and certain word choices made throughout the poem. I despised lines two through eight, which say “Beautiful as dancers, / gliding over each other like ice-skaters / over the ice, fingers hooked / inside each other’s bodies, faces / red as steak, wine, wet as the / children at birth whose mothers are going to / give them away.” We talked a bit about it in class, but the ice-skating part is odd; it says ‘gliding’ over each other, which is a lot better than saying something like, I don’t know, running each other over with blades , but it’s still unpleasant to think about. I think that the comparison is meant to be subtly unsettling; the next segment is questionable as well, describing fingers as “hooked inside each other’s bodies”. ‘Hooked’ ma
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The Red Wheelbarrow-William Carlos Williams

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  The fact that this poem is so short makes me feel like I need to try writing a blog post about it. The poem is a single sentence, split into four tiny stanzas. It looks like this:  so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens It depicts a scene that I imagine to be peaceful: a wheelbarrow next to a couple of chickens, caught up in a gentle rainfall. Maybe the only intention behind the poem is to create this soft image, but it’s poetry, so of course I’m going to pick and pick until I can assign some sort of meaning to it. When I imagine this scene, I can’t help but think that the wheelbarrow has survived something, not personally (obviously; it’s a wheelbarrow), but in a nostalgic way. The only experience I can think to relate this to is owning the same pair of shoes for years on end; they go everywhere with you, and for whatever reason, you feel weirdly attached and sad when they wear out. It’s kind of a reach, but in a way, in a way , you
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Stop All the Clocks, Cut Off the Telephone-W. H. Auden

     I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I don’t like sad poetry, but this one deserves to be an exception. I love AABB rhyming and the poem is fairly straightforward, which I appreciate; the narrator is crushed from the loss of their lover, whether it’s due to a breakup or death, and the poem is said narrator’s lamentation to the world. Grief escalates over the course of four stanzas, becoming more extreme as the narrator gives up on everything. The last stanza is my favorite: “The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; / Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; / For nothing now can ever come to any good.” I love how this stanza makes the world sound like a stage full of props; all of these endless, immovable elements of our world sound insignificant, nothing in comparison to the terrible loss that has plagued the narrator. It feels like the end of an unsuccessful show; the props have been packed away and the stage is bare.
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The Flea-John Donne

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     I enjoy when people take mundane or unusual things and give them meaning, which is precisely what’s done here (I don’t like the context BUT I’ll explain that later); the poem is about two people that were bitten by the same flea. It’s not romantic or even appealing, but the narrator manages to paint the blood-bloated flea as some kind of ritualistic, meaningful thing that shouldn’t be desecrated, lest the relationship (spirits?) of the lover and themselves be damned. The narrator takes this stance as a weird, macabre, and slightly childish response to their lover’s refusal to have sex, claiming that the mixing of their blood within the flea is something more divine than sex or marriage. The narrator then tries to guilt their lover into sparing the flea’s life by describing the flea as a vessel of their love, a third life, an extension of themselves. It’s super weird; luckily, our unfortunate lover doesn’t buy into that and squishes the flea anyway. It’s a strange little piece. I
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Death of a Salesman-Arthur Miller

     I didn’t think that reading the Death of a Salesman script was bad; I understood the premise and was kept relatively interested, despite the focus on dialogue. However, I think it’s definitely better to experience Death of a Salesman as a movie. Having a solid image of a character is always nice; when I read, I have vague ideas of character’s appearance, but it’s charming to see specific characteristics on actual faces. I also didn’t like reading names at the beginning of each line, so watching the movie made it easier to focus on the plot and less on who was speaking. The movie does a really good job of showing just how obsessed Willy is with the American dream, money, and reputation; it didn’t register with me while reading the play, but Willy isn’t the kind of person I imagined him to be. I thought he was run-down, sad, and crushed by the repeated failures he couldn’t recover from, which I still think is relevant and true, but he doesn’t outwardly express that kind of sorrow, f
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Men's Restroom Chronicles

       I feel like the men’s bathroom will be gross, but at the same time, I realize that I have this preconceived notion partially because of stereotypes. Dorms that are all men and no women are typically depicted as being messy or gross, but thinking back, I’ve not really been in many spaces like that. However, I’m from a household of six women and three men, and can certainly verify that the bathroom my dad and brother use is not as clean as the one I share with my sisters. I don’t expect this to be horrendous though, mostly because it’s a bathroom on a college campus in an academic building; there’s some standard of cleanliness here.       Firstly, it was bland. I knew that it (probably, probably ) wasn’t going to be dirty because we have janitors, but it was basically the same as the women’s room, maybe even a bit cleaner. The floor was blue rather than beige, and there were two urinals and one stall. I feel like there's always a lot of random toilet paper bits on the women’s
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The Lady with the Dog-Anton Chekhov

       I actually enjoyed this reading, despite disliking the main character; Dmitri, an older man of about forty, is a bit of a woman hater. He refers to women as “the lower race” and dislikes intellectual women, finding more appeal in passivity and innocence, a huge red flag in my eyes. He doesn’t even have higher grounds to stand on; it’s stated within the story that “without his ‘lower race’ he could not have existed a single day.” He’s a very unlikeable man, overall, so I’m disappointed to say that I really enjoyed certain parts of the story where he talked about his ‘love’ for Anna Sergeyevna. Paragraph 86 was particularly great in my eyes; it says “Anna Sergeyevna too, came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her his heart contracted, and he understood clearly that for him there was in the whole world no creature so near, so precious, and so important to him; she, this little woman, in no way remarkable, lost in a provincial crowd, with a vulgar lorgnette
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