Beneath the summer sky, a field of wheat,

Golden sheathes grown and cut by sweeping blade,

Full and bright, what you sow is what you reap.

Once men were little bothered by the heat,

And when snow falls they hibernate and fade,

To wait the summer sky, a field of wheat.

We dance and sing to a different beat,

Pounding drums of gold and cymbals of jade,

Gold and green, what you sow is what you reap.

Devotees call our buildings no small feat,

Fat metal giants, preferably made

Over a summer sky, a field of wheat.

Five miles down the line, the train hits concrete,

Screaming wheels cannot move past the blockade,

Twist and turn, what you sow is what you reap.

To render pain and labor obsolete,

We gather ashes of the Earth to trade

Acres of summer sky and fields of wheat.

By then our transformation is complete,

A thousand dreams cannot stop the decay

Eating the summer sky, the field of wheat,

Beg and plead, what you sow is what you reap.

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I chose a villanelle because the repetition is wonderful. The position of the refrains brings so much cohesiveness to the piece, and at the same time lessens the work the poet must put into it because 9 out of the 18 lines are already written. My first favorite poem - the first poem I ever read and thought, "Wow, this poem is awesome" - was Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," a poem also in villanelle form.

There is something about the repetition and rhyme scheme of formalist poetry that strikes a chord in me - indeed, I believe, in all of us. The man who first conceived the complicated structure of the villanelee must have been a genius. The repeating pattern of refrains and rhymes, tied together at the end by a quatrain, brings shape to the poem. When I first read "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," I wasn't aware that it was written in decades-established structure. I simply knew that here was a poet who knew how to compose a poem.

Writing free verse if easier than writing in a formal structure. You don't have to pay attention to rhyme, meter, or rhythm. Writing GOOD free verse, however, is harder than writing in formal structure for the exact same reasons. There are over 170,000 words in the English language and simple mathematics tells us that there are a near infinite amount of combinations in which to arrange a subset of those words. Formal structure, by virtue of its strict meter and rhyme scheme, cuts those combinations down, even if just slightly.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Death seldom comes with easy grace,

Grasping at the seams of well-worn life.

An end to a beginning is not out-of-place,

And all things, eventually, must fade from sight.

So, poor poet, take pity on your father,

Who, having lived long, now waits to start,

A journey he cannot undertake with another.

Weep quietly, poor poet, and play your part.

David Gessner Reflection

Like the Tayari Jones reading, what was most fascinating about David Gessner was not his writing but himself. From the very first moment he got on, when he showed us the "trailer" to his newest book, I instantly knew that here was a man who was infinitely more interesting than anything he could put on a page.

Gessner has a talent for story telling. His talks to the audience like they are old friends. Each word flows from one to the next like current in a river. When he is describing the river he paddled on or the bar he attended, I could picture them perfectly in my mind. When he described the picnic he took with his friend, holding his hand up to chest level and saying, "The grass was yeh-high," I felt as if I was there with him, wondering on the dangers of hidden ticks. His language is simple and void of ornament, accentuating his earnestness and the down-to-earth feel of his stories.

The thing that struck me the most was his story about going down to the Gulf of Mexico. He talked about how it was like its own country, with BP employees in hazmats everywhere cleaning up the oil spill. I am working on it. Me. On the project to clean up the Gulf. The research lab I'm a part of is analyzing the damage done on the corals in the Gulf as a result of the oil spill. I was tempted to raise my hand and tell him, but ultimately refrained.

Capricorn

Twin twisting seashells spiraling

With fleece as flawless as the first footprint

In virgin snow. He comes with hooves trampling

The stars like they are grass, in solitude swimming through deep sea,

In tranquility careening through vast swatches of galaxy.

Revision

Original

About an hour after we arrived, we came upon a line of people. I didn’t think much of it when I first saw it, figuring that it was probably people buying ice cream or something. As we walked on, however, I began to realize that the line was huge. Take every rollercoaster line at the amusement park and sum them all together, and maybe they will sum to half its total length. I walked for thirty straight minutes alongside it and couldn’t see where it started or began. The people in it were more often sitting down than standing up. I studied them, trying to understand what was worth waiting tens of hours under a summer sun.

“It’s the line to enter Mao Zhe Dong’s tomb,” the tour guide said. “People from all over China come here to pay respects to him.”

A tomb. The heat was well past ninety and people voluntarily waited hours to see a dead man reviled by most people around the globe. It was bizarre. Mao Zhe Dong was a tyrant, I learned in high school, who unwittingly killed millions of his own people. His policies eradicated academia in society and raised to high positions the uneducated poor. He destroyed Chinese artifacts and oppressed Chinese history in pursuit of modernity. He killed anyone who disagreed. And here, now, right in front of me, were thousands of people who walked straight into the oven to lay flowers at his grave.

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Revised (Point of View Change)

An hour after they arrived arrived, they came upon a line of people. He didn’t think much of it at first, figuring that it was probably people buying ice cream or something. As they walked on, however, he began to realize that the line was huge. If every roller coaster line at the amusement park was added together, maybe they will sum to half its total length. He walked for thirty straight minutes alongside it and couldn’t see where it started or began. The people in it were more often sitting down than standing up. He studied them, trying to understand what was worth waiting tens of hours under a summer sun.

“It’s the line to enter Mao Zhe Dong’s tomb,” the tour guide said. “People from all over China come here to pay respects to him.”

A tomb. He could not understand. The heat was well past ninety and people voluntarily waited hours to see a dead man reviled by most people around the globe? Mao Zhe Dong was a tyrant, he knew, who unwittingly killed millions of his own people. His policies eradicated academia in society and raised to high positions the uneducated poor. He destroyed Chinese artifacts and oppressed Chinese history in pursuit of modernity. He killed anyone who disagreed. And here, now, right in Tiananmen Square, were thousands of people who walked straight into the oven to lay flowers at his grave.

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Changing the point of view was a terrible idea. The essay was explicitly written with first-person view in mind; in third-person, it was simply impossible for me to convey my emotions and thoughts because a third-person view is much more limited in scope. It was not as easy as simply changing all the I's to Him's and My's to His'. I was forced to change some sentences around so that they better fit the more limited third-person narrator, and in the process lose quite a bit of the meaning I was trying to convey.

Tayari Jones Reflection

What I found most fascinating about the Tayari Jones reading was not her reading but Tayari Jones herself. Her reading was fantastic, don't get me wrong - the flow was superb and the dialogue was some of the most natural dialogue I've heard - but Tayari Jones herself far outshadowed her own work.

It was after she finished reading, when she was taking questions from the audience, that I really started to become interested. Her humor, her tone, her answers - they were fascinating. From the way she immediately jumped into her reading with barely any self-introduction, I was not expecting her to have such a casual, humorous personality. I lost track of the number of times she made the audience laugh (her recollection about the "damn good knife" her father bought her mother still makes me smile as I write this). Perhaps more importantly, however, were her actual answers. She answered each one with honesty and deftness, telling us about how she comes up with her dialogue, how symbolism is innate to a work, how nobody around you will ever read a novel you wrote but they'll sure damn say they did and proudly display the book in their homes. Tayari Jones herself was much more alive than any of the characters she wrote.

On Realness

How real is fiction? When we read a book or watch a movie, there are times we feel the characters right next to us as living, breathing humans. They all have their dreams, their fears, their own personalities. Yet beneath it all, perhaps even dominating this feeling of realness, is the knowledge that they are not real - they are the product of the author's imagination, conjured to the likeliness of life, but at their heart have never really existed. It is sad, almost, to think that no matter how great the trials a fictional character overcomes, at the end of the day they are forever bound to uselessness simply by virtue of never having existed.

But have they existed? Undoubtedly not - there will never be a Darth Vader or Sherlock Holmes. What matters, however, is not their existence to the world at large but their existence to the reader. As long as their was once a point in time where the reader believes them, where they feel their heart ache with their sadness, where they feel their spirits soar with their jubilation - that is enough. For the reader, for that one moment, the fictional character is real.

There are 6 billion people in the world. They are all real. This is undeniable fact. Each of them leaves their imprint upon the world, a trait unfortunately not shared by fictional characters. But let us think for a moment. How real is your family to you? Your friends? Your teachers?

Now let us ask some other questions. How real is the boy in Africa to you? How real is the young businessman in China? The Hispanic gas station attendant on the other side of the country? The president of the Langcolm Republic? They are indeed real people, but have they impacted your lives? If someone told you that the existence of the president of the Langcolm Republic has been a huge prank constructed by everybody you know for the sole purpose of deceiving you into believing his existence, would you believe them? How real is reality?