PASTICH

E
Is not the woman moulded by your wish
A Cockatrice of a most intricate kind?
You have, my friend, the high fantastic mind
To clasp the cold enamel of a fish
As breastplate for a bosom tigerish;
To make a dove a dragon; or to bind
A panther skin upon the escaping hind:
You mix ambiguous spices in your dish.

Will there remain, when thus embellished I

Sprout wings, or am by cloven heels improved,
Am atom of the lady that you loved?
Does Christ or Lucifer seal this alchemy?
Is there not lacking from your synthesis
Someone you may occasionally miss

Portrait d'une Femme

BY EZRA POUND
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,

London has swept about you this score years

And bright ships left you this or that in fee:

Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,

Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.

Great minds have sought you lacking someone else.

You have been second always. Tragical?

No. You preferred it to the usual thing:

One dull man, dulling and uxorious,

 One average mind with one thought less, each year.

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit

Hours, where something might have floated up.

And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.

You are a person of some interest, one comes to you

And takes strange gain away:

Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;

Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,

Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else

That might prove useful and yet never proves,

That never fits a corner or shows use,

Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:

The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;

Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,

These are your riches, your great store; and yet

For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,

Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:

In the slow float of differing light and deep,

No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,

Nothing that's quite your own.

Yet this is you.

In A Nutshell

Ah, the female muse. We read about her raven black eyes in William Shakespeare's sonnets;

Scottish poet Robert Burns describes his lover as a red, red rose; and for William Wordsworth,

she's...his sister.

Yes, the female muse comes in all shapes and sizes, but she's graced the lines of poetry for

about as long as poetry has been around. We can even think of her as a poetic convention

in other words, a motif or theme that occurs again and again throughout the history of poetry.
We have poems celebrating marriages, elegies mourning someone's death, coming-of-age

poems, epic adventures, and then a whole category of verse devoted to the female muse.

In "Portrait d'une Femme," Ezra Pound doesn't just try to give us a picture of some woman

he knows he tackles this poetic convention head-on. He writes a type of poem that he

knows Shakespeare, Burns, Wordsworth, and company have all written before him. We could

say that this poem is as much about writing about a woman as it is about the woman herself.

Check out the title. "Portrait d'une Femme" (French for "Portrait of a Woman") not only tells us

that the object of this poem is a woman, it also refers back to Henry James's novel The

Portrait of a Lady, and it links this poem to others with the same title, such as those written

by poets T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams (who both opt for the English version, "Portrait

of a Lady"). A whole library of literature comes tumbling into this poem through its title.

It's also important to remember that "Portrait d'une Femme" was first published in 1912, in

Pound's poetry collection Ripostes. The 1910s mark the rise of avant-garde modernism, a

period when artists and writers tried to make work that was shocking, strange, and totally

unlike anything from the past. Pound is, after all, the guy who famously declared, "MAKE IT

NEW." So while we're reading the poem, we have to think: how does Pound surprise or upset

expectations of what a typical portrait should be like? How is this woman described

differently than the descriptions of female muses we've seen before? What kinds of new

insights or possibilities does Pound give to this poetic convention?

And if we learn something cool and interesting about this particular woman too, that's even

better. Some literary scholars have suggested that Pound's muse was Florence Farr, an

actress and writer who was good friends with poet William Butler Yeats and romantically

involved with playwright George Bernard Shaw. Many who knew Farr, including Shaw, saw her

as the epitome of the "New Woman," a feminist ideal that defies conventional gender roles

and, above all, pursues her own liberty. Think of Nora at the end of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's

House. In fact, Farr starred in a number of Ibsen's plays. As an empowered modern writer,

Farr would have been one of Pound's peers which is a "shape and size" for the female muse

we haven't yet encountered in poetry. How well does Pound handle this? Well, that's left for

us to see....
 When you look at someone's Facebook, you look briefly at the "About Me," "Political Views,"
and "Favorite Music" sections, and then you check out what schools they've gone to or where
they work. But let's be honest here: the really interesting stuff is on their wall, where you
eavesdrop on their conversations with friends and see what they go around doing all day. So
many people say that their favorite movie is The Big Lebowski that it doesn't really tell us
anything about their personality. But if you see that this person's been trading chickens on
Farmville all day? Ding ding ding! (Or maybe we should mimic emergency sirens here...)

We find that people's interactions and actions are much more interesting indicators of their

personalities than what they say their personalities are like. And in "Portrait d'une

Femme,"Ezra Pound shows that he already figured that out almost 100 years before Facebook

or MySpace became part of our daily lives.

In his book Gaudier-Brzeska, Pound writes:

In the "search for oneself," in the "search for sincere self-expression," one gropes, and one

finds, some seeming verity. One says, "I am" this, that, or the other, and with the words

scarcely uttered one ceases to be that thing.

"Verity" is a fancy word for "truth," and here Pound is saying that we all try to say, truthfully,

who we are, but as soon as we say it, it's no longer true. Is anything you could write under

"About Me" truly who you are? Do any of us really even know who we are?

Yeah, whoa, deep questions...so let's go back to the woman in "Portrait d'une Femme." Maybe

the fact that we don't get descriptions like, "The woman has black eyes," "The woman is my

lover," or "The woman is a kickbutt feminist," in Pound's poem can be really frustrating. But

on the other hand, avoiding these statements may be the only way Pound can sustain our

interest in the woman. How long can we really care about a bunch of definite, blanket

statements that we already suspect won't give us a true picture of who this woman is?

somewhereihavenevertravelled,gladlybeyond

E. E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond

any experience,your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and

my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility:whose texture

compels me with the colour of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens;only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

From Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used

with the permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. Copyright 1923, 1931, 1935, 1940,

1951, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Copyright

1976, 1978, 1979 by George James Firmage.

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation,

spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new,

highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.

In A Nutshell

No doubt, E. E. Cummings was a rebel. Even before he made his name as a poet, he was

rubbing authority figures the wrong way. One famous story happened during World War I,

when Cummings was volunteering as an ambulance driver in France. Cummings got annoyed

with all the rules and started sending coded messages back home just to see if anybody

would notice. They noticed, alright, and Cummings got locked up in an internment camp

under suspicion that he might be a traitor and a spy. He actually wrote a novel about the

whole experience called The Enormous Room. (Click here for more of the deets on

Cummings's crazy life story.)

Cummings's wartime rabble rousing was nothing compared to what he was soon to unleash

on the literary world. See, our rebel-poet was also a painter and became really inspired by

Modernist art movements like Surrealism and Cubism, which exploded the rules of traditional

painting. Cummings didn't see any reason why poetry couldn't recreate itself just as radically

as the world of art was doing at the time. So he brewed up a signature style that thumbed its

nose at traditional rules of poetry and took the form into new dimensions. Of course, you

can't expect to go around breaking a bunch of rules without ticking some people off. Some
 critics accused Cummings of being weird for weird's sake, while others seemed to think that

he just had no idea how to write a "real" poem.

Like all his other work, "somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond," first

published in his collection ViVa (1931), caught flak for Cummings's experimental use of

punctuation, spacing, and capitalizationall part of Cummings's signature style. The joke's

on Cummings's critics, though. Whatever bad press this poem has gotten, today it's hands

down one of his most popular (ranking right up there with "in Just"). It also just so happens to

be one on the most beloved love poems of all time, so nyah nyah. In general, Cummings was

like, "Whatevs" to his critics, standing by his work. In his own words, "Nothing measurable

can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and

everything untrue doesn't matter a very good God damn" (Cummings, A Miscellany

Revisited).

Love is complicated. We mean really complicated. Sometimes it makes you feel awesome.
Sometimes it makes you feel like something you might find at the bottom of your garbage
disposal. What's amazing about " somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond" by E. E.
Cummings is that it takes all the extremes of love into account and somehow finds the
beauty in them. Both the highs and the lows are part of the appeal for the speaker.

Now, maybe you've never been in love (although chances are you will be someday). Even if

you've never experienced romantic love, though, chances are you love something or

somebody in some way. Maybe it's your parents, or a friend, or your dog, or some Zen-like

mixture of yogurt and toppings at Pinkberry. No matter what it is, there're highs and lows,

and this poem manages to capture the un-capturable way that there's beauty in both.

(Oh, and if you think that Pinkberry part was a stretch, then you've just never had the right

combo of yogurt and delicious toppingsjust sayin'.)

This Is Just To Say

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which
you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

n A Nutshell

William Carlos Williams may be most famous for his 1934 poem, "This Is Just To Say." Sure,

his poem "The Red Wheelbarrow," is super famous, but "This Is Just To Say" has all the high

drama of a soap opera with its juicy, shocking confession:

The speaker has eaten all the plums!

We'll pause for appropriate gasps. And then a befuddled eyebrow raise or two. You're bound

to be a little confused. How can what seems to be a refrigerator note be widely considered a

poetic masterpiece? Because William Carlos Williams wrote it, that's why.

We might start to answer this question by looking at Williams' life. He was a doctor by day,

earning his living by working as a general practitioner and pediatric doctor in New Jersey, and

a poet by night. So the guy was pretty familiar with the working life, the everydaythe

mundane. He knew it well from both his own life and the lives of his patients, who were often

in working class families and struggled with poverty.

So, as you read Williams' poetry, especially poems like "This Is Just To Say," imagine this

doctor, squeezing moments of poetry out of his busy life, packed with everyday tasks that

don't seem all that interesting. Things that we all dolike eat the food we know someone

else was savingbecome poetry under Williams' hand.

Come on, admit it. You ate the last apple in the fridge even though you knew your brother
wanted to take it for lunch. You ate some of the cookies your mom was making to give out as
presents. You borrowed your sister's car without filling up the gas.
We've all done things like thiswe know we probably shouldn't, but, for some reason, we fall

prey to the temptation, and, like the speaker of this poem does, we eat the plums someone

else was saving.

Of course, there are a ton of deeper, darker interpretations of this poem: some people say it's

repeating the fall of Adam and Eve, who ate forbidden fruit; some people say it's about

repressed sexuality; some people say it's about nothing at all. Some people think the poem is

outright hilarious.

Sure, all of those people could be right, but we think Williams would sit there with a grin on

his face, surprised at all of these whacko meanings people were coming up with.

That's because we agree with the people who say this poem is meant to be a found poem.

Maybe, we think, Williams really did eat the plums that were in the icebox, and left this note

as an actual apology. Now, the scholars with their fancy theories might scoff at this. What

kind of poem is that, they might say.

Yet it's their theories, and the ability for theories and thoughts to arise from something so

simple, that make this poem profound. Look at all of the complexities and all of the beauty,

the poem seems to say, that can arise from such an everyday, uncontrived moment.

So, as you read, explore every meaning you possibly can. Use your imagination. Maybe the

poem is a hidden metaphor for something sexual, or the fall from the Garden of Eden. Even

better, maybe you can find something in this poem that no else can find. Or maybe, a dude

ate some plums and feels guilty about it.

Remember, as you read, the simplicity, the everyday life at the heart of this poem, and smile.

"I forgive you," we think as we read, forgetting that it's not even our plums he's eaten.

And if all else fails, at least learn a lesson. If you really want to do something you shouldn't,

you should probably ask first. Or at the very least leave an apology note afterwards.

SONNET 18 PARAPHRASE
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Shall I compare you to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate: You are more lovely and more constant:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of Rough winds shake the beloved buds of May
 May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: And summer is far too short:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, At times the sun is too hot,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; Or often goes behind the clouds;
And every fair from fair sometime declines, And everything beautiful sometime will lose its
beauty,
By chance, or nature's changing course, By misfortune or by nature's planned out
untrimm'd; course.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade But your youth shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor will you lose the beauty that you possess;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his Nor will death claim you for his own,
shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; Because in my eternal verse you will live
forever.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long as there are people on this earth,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee. So long will this poem live on, making you
immortal.
that fair thou ow'st (10): i.e., that beauty you possess.

in eternal lines...growest (12): The poet is using a grafting metaphor in this line. Grafting
is a technique used to join parts from two plants with cords so that they grow as one. Thus
the beloved becomes immortal, grafted to time with the poet's cords (his "eternal lines"). For
commentary on whether this sonnet is really "one long exercise in self-glorification", please
see below.

_____

Sonnet 18 is the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most
straightforward in language and intent. The stability of love and its power to immortalize the
subject of the poet's verse is the theme.

The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the
image of his friend into that of a perfect being. His friend is first compared to summer in the
octave, but, at the start of the third quatrain (9), he is summer, and thus, he has
metamorphosed into the standard by which true beauty can and should be judged. The
poet's only answer to such profound joy and beauty is to ensure that his friend be forever in
human memory, saved from the oblivion that accompanies death. He achieves this through
his verse, believing that, as history writes itself, his friend will become one with time. The
final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in mankind, his poetry
too will live on, and ensure the immortality of his muse.

Interestingly, not everyone is willing to accept the role of Sonnet 18 as the ultimate English
love poem. As James Boyd-White puts it:
What kind of love does 'this' in fact give to 'thee'? We know nothing of the beloveds form or
height or hair or eyes or bearing, nothing of her character or mind, nothing of her at all,
really. This 'love poem' is actually written not in praise of the beloved, as it seems, but in
praise of itself. Death shall not brag, says the poet; the poet shall brag. This famous sonnet is
on this view one long exercise in self-glorification, not a love poem at all; surely not suitable
for earnest recitation at a wedding or anniversary party, or in a Valentine. (142)
Note that James Boyd-White refers to the beloved as "her", but it is almost universally
accepted by scholars that the poet's love interest is a young man in sonnets 1-126.

Sonnets 18-25 are often discussed as a group, as they all focus on the poet's affection for his
friend.

.
.

Notes
dun (3): i.e., a dull brownish gray.

roses damasked, red and white (5): This line is possibly an allusion to the rose known as
the York and Lancaster variety, which the House of Tudor adopted as its symbol after the War
of the Roses. The York and Lancaster rose is red and white streaked, symbolic of the union of
the Red Rose of Lancaster and the White Rose of York. Compare The Taming of the Shrew:
"Such war of white and red within her cheeks!" (4.5.32). Shakespeare mentions the damask
rose often in his plays. Compare also Twelfth Night:

She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. (2.4.118)

than the breath...reeks (8): i.e., than in the breath that comes out of (reeks from) my
mistress.
As the whole sonnet is a parody of the conventional love sonnets written by Shakespeare's
contemporaries, one should think of the most common meaning of reeks, i.e.,stinks.
Shakespeare uses reeks often in his serious work, which illustrates the modern meaning of
the word was common. Compare Macbeth:

Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds

Or memorise another Golgotha,
I cannot tell. (1.2.44)

rare (13): special.

she (14): woman.

belied (14): misrepresented.

with false compare (14): i.e., by unbelievable, ridiculous comparisons.

Sonnet 130 is the poet's pragmatic tribute to his uncomely mistress, commonly referred to as
the dark lady because of her dun complexion. The dark lady, who ultimately betrays the poet,
appears in sonnets 127 to 154. Sonnet 130 is clearly a parody of the conventional love
sonnet, made popular by Petrarch and, in particular, made popular in England by Sidney's
use of the Petrarchan form in his epic poem Astrophel and Stella.

If you compare the stanzas of Astrophel and Stella to Sonnet 130, you will see exactly what
elements of the conventional love sonnet Shakespeare is light-heartedly mocking. In Sonnet
130, there is no use of grandiose metaphor or allusion; he does not compare his love to
Venus, there is no evocation to Morpheus, etc. The ordinary beauty and humanity of his lover
are important to Shakespeare in this sonnet, and he deliberately uses typical love poetry
metaphors against themselves.

In Sidney's work, for example, the features of the poet's lover are as beautiful and, at times,
more beautiful than the finest pearls, diamonds, rubies, and silk. In Sonnet 130, the
references to such objects of perfection are indeed present, but they are there to illustrate
that his lover is not as beautiful -- a total rejection of Petrarch form and content. Shakespeare
utilizes a new structure, through which the straightforward theme of his lovers simplicity can
be developed in the three quatrains and neatly concluded in the final couplet.

Thus, Shakespeare is using all the techniques available, including the sonnet structure itself,
to enhance his parody of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet typified by Sidneys work. But
Shakespeare ends the sonnet by proclaiming his love for his mistress despite her lack of
adornment, so he does finally embrace the fundamental theme in Petrarch's sonnets: total
and consuming love.

One final note: To Elizabethan readers, Shakespeare's comparison of hair to 'wires' would
refer to the finely-spun gold threads woven into fancy hair nets. Many poets of the time used
this term as a benchmark of beauty, including Spenser:

Some angel she had been,

Her long loose yellow locks like golden wire,
Sprinkled with pearl, and pearling flowers atween,
Do like a golden mantle her attire,
And being crowned with a garland green. (Epithal).

To the Reader
BY BEN JONSON
Pray thee, take care, that takst my book in hand,

To read it well: that is, to understand.

Ben Jonson was a masterful poet as well as a dramatist. His poetry, with some justification,

has the reputation of being remote from modern readers. A dedicated classicist, Jonson

emphasized clarity of form and phrase over expression of emotion, and many of his poems

seem to be exercises in cleverness and wit rather than attempts to express an idea or image

well. Others of his poems, however, retain their power and vision: To Celia, for example, has

given the English language the phrase Drink to me only with thine eyes.

The difficulty of Jonsons poetry originates in large part in his very mastery of poetic form.

Jonson was a student of literature, and he was a man of letters with few equals in any era. He

studied the poetic forms of classical Greek and Latin literature as well as those of later

European literature, and he used what he learned in his own work. The result is a body of

poetry that is very diverse, including salutations and love poems, homilies and satires,

epigrams and lyrics. Much of the poetry appeals primarily to academics because of its

experimental qualities and its displays of technical virtuosity. Yet those who allow themselves

to be put off by Jonsons prodigious intellectualism miss some of the finest verse in English.

Jonson was also a prodigious writer of masquesdramatic allegorical entertainments, usually

prepared to celebrate special occasions and presented at court. Jonsons masques have in

common with his poetry technical achievement and, with much of his occasional verse, a

focus on the virtues, real and reputed, of nobility and royalty. Although the emphasis was on

spectacle and celebration of the aristocracy, Jonson tried to make his masques legitimate

works of literature, and they have enjoyed increasing critical attention in recent years.

eware: Do Not Read This Poem

by Ishmael Reed
tonite, thriller was
about an old woman, so vain she
surrounded herself with
many mirrors
it got so bad that finally she
locked herself indoors & her
whole life became the

mirrors

one day the villagers broke

into her house, but she was too
swift for them. she disappeared

into a mirror
each tenant who bought the house
after that, lost a loved one to
the old woman in the mirror:
first a little girl
then a young woman
then the young woman's husband

the hunger of this poem is legendary

it has taken in many victims
back off from this poem
it has drawn in your feet
back off from this poem
it has drawn in your legs

back off from thias poem

it is a greedy mirror
you are into this poem. from

the waist down

nobody can hear you can they?
this poem has had you up to here
belch
this poem aint got no manners
you cant call out from this poem
relax now & go with this poem

move & roll on to this poem

do not resist this poem
this poem has your eyes
this poem has his head
this poem has his arms
this poem has his fingers
this poem has his fingertips
 this poem is the reader & the
reader the poem

statistic: the US bureau of missing persons re-

ports that in 1968 over 100,000 people

disappeared leaving no solid clues
nor trace only
a space in the lives of their friends

Thematically, beware: do not read this poem is a complex case. It is about language, about

art, about people, and about politics. Language and art are intimately bound to one another,

and they are central aspects of culture. Culture, at least in part, makes people. The poem is

therefore about how people are made by, and lost to (other), cultures. It is a protest against

cultural dominance, and it works by concrete demonstration.

In the immediate sense, the poems theme is about how the poem itself affects, even creates

its reader by involving the reader in the world created by the poem. That concept is an

exhibition of the power of poetry, for poetry is an act of speech, showing that language, how

one uses language, is vital to ones existence. The poem also shows how a culture can

swallow one up, denying ones real existence. It rejects the idea of art as a simple mirror

reflecting life; art is, rather, a living experience.

There are some generic conventions in the poem that may seem at first to be merely

decorative or entertaining, but they actually represent essential elements of the theme. In

the first section, the convention of the European folktale is derived from a literary, European

tradition. This folktale is presented as the product of modern technologya television plot

which makes it very European American, mechanical and hypnotizing in a negative way. Too,

the tale, with its ol woman, essentially a witch, in...

Beware: do not read this poem is written in free verse, divided into six unequal stanzas.

There are no capital letters, and the poem has many spelling irregularities and abbreviations,

with apparently random spacing in many lines. There are very few punctuation marks except

for an occasional comma or slash, usually in an odd place. However, a single voice speaks

the whole poem, and, although there are no neat markers to indicate divisions, the poem can
be divided into three distinct parts. Moreover, despite its appearance on the page, the

grammar of the poem is straightforward and clear.

A story is told in the first three stanzas. This story, a kind of modern folktale, is related by the

speaker as he synopsizes the plot of a television show he has just watched (tonite, thriller).

The episode concerned an old woman who was so vain that she filled her house with mirrors,

becoming finally so wrapped up in the mirrors that they became her life and she locked

herself indoors. Eventually the villagers broke into her house, but she escaped by

disappearing into a mirror. Thereafter, she seemed to haunt the house. Everyone who lived

there lost a loved one to/ the ol woman in the mirror.

In the fourth stanza the poem changes; instead of narrative fantasy, the poem becomes more

discursive, and the speech pattern becomes more concrete. Now the voice speaks of the

poem itself as though it were the mirrors or the old...