Senior Portfolio Seminar

I have found Gerard’s writing to be difficult to get through. It’s hard to find the “why” or “what for” in her essays and I wondered the same things in “The Mayor of Williams Park.” We meet G.W. Rolle, a man who has been in and out of jail, on and off the streets, and who has also earned a degree in philosphy at Syracuse and published a book with the intent to finish another. But I don’t get the sense that I know what G.W. looks like or that I can imagine the sound of his voice. I know a lot of things about him, that he’s religious, that he’s served thousands of homeless people in the basement of a Lutheran church, but I don’t know him like I could know a character in a fictional novel. There is space between the reader and G.W. and I don’t think we’re being asked to relate to him. I feel the same way about Gerard in this essay. There’s nothing internal, no comment on something insensitive a police officer might have said or something inspirational that might have come from G.W. She is reporting the daily lives of the homeless as well as relaying statistics and facts about the homeless culture in Florida and its minimal change and even worsening condition over the years. We began with a highly personal, highly introspective essay and are moving further and further away from any closeness with Gerard.

The structure of this essay reads like a documentary film. Gerard sets the scene for us, but in a very mundane, very quotidian way. Each time she is at the church she describe the morning’s breakfast, the “trays of eggs, grits, home fries, sausage…” etc. and later the same basics of the “pot of coffee” and “large bowl of cut fruit.” But I want to know about the people she is meeting. At the heart of this essay, I want to say, is the urge to push us to sympathize with the homeless and to acknowledge that they are quite literally treated like animals and they are continually neglected by the government. G.W. even mentions that he encourages the others to feed eachother “because when you ‘feed people’ they sound like animals in a zoo” (191). But she doesn’t say any of this.

I’m also interested in the biblical passage before the essay. Prayers and blessings are repeated, the last with G.W. reciting “And thank you, God, that we’re not where we used to be. Lord, help us.” This seems to be a theme in G.W.’s life, continuing to fall and get back up, trying to better himself, but I’m not sure what it says about the essay. The ending feels anticlimactic. G.W. wants to take up yoga, the Missio Dei church is without a home, but only temporarily. “This has happened before” (224). It’ll happen again.

“The Freeze-Dried Groom” by Margaret Atwood was one of those stories that kept getting stranger and stranger. Each turn managed to be a surprise, even though the title of the story gave away the biggest twist of all. As I was reading I was impressed with the creativity of Atwood to have so many different plot points in a story. It started out with a couple divorcing and it seemed like it was going to be a simple love story. Then it turned out that Sam is some kind of sketchy furniture dealer and he was using his wife for her money. Then we assume he’s a drug dealer and he’s involved in storage unit auctions. Then he finds a dead body. Then he meets the woman who was responsible for the dead body. Then instead of running away like a sane person, he meets her at a motel. I’m not trying to summarize the story, I’m just pointing out the strange twists of the story that Atwood keeps introducing but manages to relate all the plot points together.

Ben is not at all a sympathetic character but he’s still enjoyable to read about. Atwood seems to be skilled at creating characters who are unlikable in many ways but still compelling for the reader. In the case of Ben, Atwood might achieve this by making Gwyneth unsympathetic as well. We only see her through the eyes of Ben but her actions are cold and distant, perhaps warranted, but still don’t make her a warm and likable character. In this way, Ben’s actions towards her don’t make us, the readers, hate him.  If Gwyneth had been a completely charismatic character that the reader loved, Ben might never have been redeemable enough to care about.

There’s a great voice behind the character Ben. When he talks about the auctioneer, he’s bitter and rude but funny in a dark way and that seems very true to his character. He puts importance on things like doughnut holes and car brands. He sees someone else has doughnut holes and then needs to get his own. It seems very true to character. I think Atwood has done a good job of making Ben seem real and believable, despite the rather unbelievable experience he is going through.

On that note, Atwood also does a good job of creating a character who reacts in a pretty subtle way to finding a dead body in a storage unit. It helps that he is doing illegal things as well in the same storage unit so it’s not like he can call the cops. He’s also getting out of a very boring, mundane relationship, which would explain why he’s excited by a murderer. Atwood sets up a lot of plot points that allow for Ben to not freak out about a dead body/murderer and then call the cops.

In “The Noiseness of Sleep,” I was most attracted to the alliteration. The first line of the poem begins with the hard, C of careful, and ends, similarly, with the word carry. Further down, in the poem’s third stanza, are the words “coaxing” and “calm,” which share the same alliterative quality. Seldom, in this poem, are lines end-stopped. The second line of the poem ends in a comma but, often, lines continue without a syntactical break. I also enjoyed the contents of this poem, the lines:

“I’ve been a long time worried  

about grasping infinity  

and coaxing some calm  

out of the softest part  

of the pins and needles 

of me. . . .”

Why does Limón put two poems, similar in structure, back-to-back? I noticed this also in the last poems we read from her book, “The Vine,” and “After You Toss Around the Ashes,” which are prose poems. Why might  “The Noisiness of Sleep,” and “We are Surprised” be ordered the way they are?

One of my favorite images from the second poem, “We are Surprised,” is “roadside stray cats.” In the poems we’ve read thus far, Limón has always been very specific in her descriptions of land, and animals. Why might this be? What effect does this specificity have on her poems?

In the next poem, “The Long Ride,” I enjoyed one of the lines which ends the poem: “How good it is to love / live things. . . .” This line, like so many in Limón’s poems, is complicated, and nuanced, and completely unhinging. What does this poem say about death more broadly?

I’d be interested in knowing which poems were classroom favorites, and which were more difficult to parse. Which poems had particularly interesting diction, enjambment, or forms?

I’ve been enjoying the structure of Bright Dead Things because a group of poems tend to have one focus so it creates a story throughout the poems.

“The Nosiness of Sleep” was a bit confusing to me. If it didn’t have that title I think I would have been completely lost. The structure was interesting, how it was broken up into two line stanzas but the sentences carried on from some stanzas to the next so there was no pause in thought between them but there was a physical pause. It had an interesting, dramatic effect. For example, one stanza ends on “you’ve only fallen into” and then the reader has to wait for the next stanza to find out what it is that someone has fallen into. Or “the plan is simple-” and then the reader as to wait until the next stanza to find out what the plan is.

“We are Surprised” had the same sort of structure with the two line stanzas and the word moon stood out to me since she talked about the moon of surrender in the last poem. The poem started out with a very dark message but I think ended on a more positive idea of self importance.

“The Long Ride” was structured very differently in one long stanza, fitting with the title of the poem. It follows along with the current theme of death, which I think is reoccuring in this section of poems. She also brings horses in again. Previously she had used horses as something uplifting. I think horses are positive in this poem again. The choice to call them “live things” stood out because of the title of the book, Bright Dead Things.

In seven lines of “Before” there is a very quick summary of her childhood which was interesting. I think she really captured the image of a seven year old on a motorcycle.

“Torn” got really religious which was interesting because I hadn’t notice much religious imagery in the previous poems. It was a good backdrop for the poem since everyone would know the religious connotation and it requires less explanation in the poem itself.

“Field Bling” right off the bat had an interesting title since field and bling don’t generally go together. She had a lot of descriptions of fireflies that were really interesting ways to describe fireflies but I also don’t know if I quite understand this poem. It seems a little more upbeat than the previous poems which was a nice break.

“In the Country of Resurrection” was back to the two line stanza structure and is focused on death still, this time in a possum. She talks about animals quite a bit in her poetry. It had a fairly gruesome description. She does end on how much life there is in the kitchen so perhaps this poem is a summary of this death section of the book but ends on a more positive note in the kitchen.  

This is a story devoted to Charlie Macauley, the man who has appeared and re-appeared only in glimpses. In the stories before this, we’re led to believe that Charlie is a sympathetic character, a troubled man who suffers from post-traumatic stress but has some kind of darkness we can’t fully grasp. And then we learn that he’s been having an affair. After an awkward phone call between Charlie and Marilyn during which she says “You’re supposed to be having fun — well, I know it’s not fun, but I mean I know it’s your time, and –” I started to wonder if maybe Marilyn knew about Tracy, maybe they had some kind of agreement. But we come to find out that Charlie’s inner demons are much worse than just the PTSD. He’s got an ongoing affair, a practically loveless marriage, there’s some serious beef with God, and now this woman is begging him for money, a lot of money.

There’s almost a fundamental sadness about him. Where Patty Nicely and Tommy Guptill recover from their trauma, we sense that they’re going to be alright, Charlie McCauley seems to have a more permanent depression, a dark cloud looming overhead. I have begun to notice, however, that along with the sadness comes some kind of acceptance or forgiveness in these stories as well. “He wanted to fall on his knees, and what would he pray for? Forgiveness. There was nothing else to pray for, not if you were Charlie Macauley,” (111). I’m also interested in the role of desire and forbidden desire in these stories. Each romantic relationship is flawed in some terrible way, or something is lacking — Tommy lies to his wife Shirley about his spiritual experience, Patty’s first husband Sebastian was not only sexually abused but also died, the Peterson-Cornell’s relationship is one of secrecy and betrayal and Charlie is involved with a prostitute. They all would rather be with someone, anyone, than be alone.

Another thing, in each previous mention of Charlie, he seems to be consumed by PTSD. The other characters only describe him as a war vet, so I waited for a vivid description, something graphic, something traumatic…but it never came. But I began to realize that we don’t really need to know exactly what happened because he is overwhelmed by his past: the opening paragraph begins with war imagery of the “unlovely motel lot…at war with the rest of the world” (92) and with the reoccurrence of the “hit-thumb theory.” Its definition is sort of hard to follow but this idea that there is a moment of calm, a “spaciousness of calm” following a painful blow, occurs during more than the first mention. The very idea of war is this terrifying waiting, waiting for a blow from the enemy that will inevitably come. It’s the silence depicted in movies before the shots are fired and the battlefield is decorated with blood. Until finally, Charlie isn’t sure he can feel the pain anymore. “And so he waited. It would come: the wave upon wave of raw pain after a blow like this, oh yes, it would come” (114).

1. Do you think Charlie is a sympathetic Character?
2. Do you think his sadness differs from Patty, Tommy, etc.?
3. While the stories are linked by characters, what overarching themes do you see linking them as well?
4. What purpose does PTSD serve in this story?
5. What role does desire play in this story and in others?
6. How does the “hit-thumb theory” appear in the story?

I was surprised, as I often am while reading Strout, that Charlie, the man we’d met in a previous chapter, acted so dishonestly.  We see him, in this chapter, engage with a prostitute called Tracy. He even treats his wife, Marilyn, as if she were completely unbearable. (99) I enjoyed the section, toward the beginning of the chapter, when we first meet Tracy. Strout writes:

 “Now she looked at him with a sardonic, apologetic expression. “I need money,” she said. And she sighed deeply, putting her hand on the bedspread. The fingers each had a ring, including her thumb, and it was still surprising to him how his mind was trying to remind him–Charlie, for God’s sake, take note!–how repulsive so many parts of her should be to him and yet were not.”

It seems Charlie feels Tracy is unbearable, too. I found it interesting that Strout would transform Charlie in this way. Of the few questions I have, one of them is: why? Most all of Strout’s characters are well developed, and/or multi-dimensional. Charlie is one of those characters. Before this chapter, I’d thought of him only as a military veteran– the man for whom Patty Nicely had feelings. Having read further, I eventually realized that Charlie is, like all of us, completely, and utterly flawed. Why does it take Charlie doing cheating on his wife, for me, the reader, to realize his humanity? Is this how Strout crafts her characters into full, well-rounded people?

To be honest, I struggle with pinpointing what this essay is about. It would be easy to say that it’s a recollection of losing innocence, but I want to know it’s more complicated than that. Gerard uses one-liners at the end of paragraphs, and often before a space break, to lead the reader in that direction.

• “It’s self-made (128).”
• “Just think of all the people I’ll meet (133).”
• “‘Trust me. Do it now (135).'”
• “By the end of class, I’m sober (144).” And the scene leading up to this.
• “It comes back to me, and I know I’ve been set free (147).”
• When asked where she is at a party: “‘I don’t know,’ I say (152).”

The list goes on, and also matches the theme of this essay: teenage angst. Gerard is a strong writer, and the scenes are vivid, but I think something we need to discuss in this essay is cliché, and the purpose of such a detailed recollection of a wild adolescence.

Gerard uses foreshadowing (163), and includes an epilogue. A literary device and structure I don’t feel as though I have seen often in essay, or given much thought to. This is important to mention because the purpose of essay, memoir, and other types of creative nonfiction are to utilize devices used in fiction to form a “true” narrative. This is what separates it from a report or an average news article. Another element of craft to point out is the present-tense. The purpose of this is for the emotionally wrought scenes to be felt actively, as opposed to a more passive approach by using the past tense. This may contribute to the thing I struggled with most in this essay, which is arguably cliché teenage angst and drama that dominates the scenes.

Questions:

What do we think this essay is about?

Is there a pattern or clear purpose in the abundant space breaks?

When a piece is written in present tense, can we assume the writer is looking back with more knowledge? How does this affect the “truth” of a present tense account?

Gerard travels a lot of space and time in this essay, but it seems to remain chronological. How do all of her different scenes contribute to the over all “point” of this essay?

In what way is this essay not a cliché?

“The Hit-Thumb Theory” by Elizabeth Strout centered around the complexity of Charlie, a man who was cheating on his wife with a prostitute that he has fallen in love with. He resents everything about his wife but feels pity for her and remembers times when he was overwhelmingly in love with her. He also has feelings of animosity towards Tracy, the prostitute/mistress, even almost hitting her. He’s got what I’m assuming is PTSD from the Vietnam War and he’s got some tension with religion. There’s a lot going on in a relatively short story but my favorite thing about this story was that Charlie was not a good guy driving around doing nice things, he was unlikable in a lot of places, sometimes sympathetic, which is very human. He was very reactive to things, which also seems true to how humans behave, and all of his flaws and history created a complex character.

It was interesting to have the man that Patty Nicely was in love with, back in “Windmills” be cheating on his wife. The fact that he had a wife so Patty dismissed the idea of him loving her was such a prevalent issue in her version of the story. To have him cheating on his wife with a prostitute in another story shows how different people are under the surface. It’d be very interesting to see a story from Marilyn’s point of view because she seems incredibly damaged and the people around her view her so negatively. After this story, she’s the character in this book that I’ve felt the most pity for.

Strout shows a lot about Charlie’s character through his interactions with other people and his views of other people. The change in view of his wife shows how damaged he’s become. The way he tolerates her phone call but gives her no real sympathy shows that he hasn’t got the heart to ignore her but he also doesn’t have the ability to comfort her. This seems to be a common theme with him. A very telling scene about Charlie that Strout included was the scene with his son shopping. He was so proud of his son for putting up with his wife trying to pick out a sweatshirt. He calls him “clean.” He wants to tell him that he’s a good guy and that’s he proud of him, but he is unable to. This scene had nothing to do with the narrative at hand, the one with Tracy, but by including it Strout is able to show another side of Charlie and another level to his complexity.

Another example of this was Charlie’s interaction with the memorial and the tourists who “respected” him while he cried. It’s a moment of weakness and a rare moment of him letting his guard down and being surprised by the outcome. This moment, I think, allows for the revelation at the end, about how frightening it is when people don’t feel pain. Throughout the story Charlie does not feel much pain and had he felt no pain at all or never had a moment where he let his guard down and was respected for it, then I’m not sure I would buy the ending as much as I did. I also think it’s very true to character that he has trouble overcoming that in the last line.

After having read the poem “Bellow,” I realized the only punctuation Limón used were commas, and semi-colons —  except for a period at the very end. After having read the poem again, this time more carefully, I paused after the phrases: “vultures furrowed brow of flight, and blasted sticky Canadian lawn thistle, not because they were well thought, but because I realized while there is so much Limón does with simple, everyday language, she doesn’t often use short, succinct phrases. Not only do the lengthy, complicated phrases help develop complexity in the poem, but by using the punctuation she does, Limón creates a fully comprehensive work.

After having read “After You Toss Around the Ashes,” I was once again impressed by  Limón’s writing. My favorite lines: “What was happening — for whole weeks–was all that was happening and happening,” and “What should we do with her ashes? Water or dirt. Water or dirt,” represent to me, how language functions in each of our lives. (Often, there aren’t complete sentences.) In this poem, we see the action or process of thinking.

Limón orders the words in each poem, and poems in the book collectively, as one might organize the small pieces of a much larger puzzle. So many poems in this section of her book are about death (“The Vine,” and “After You Toss Around the Ashes.”) I wonder if there are any other themes in the book–other than loss, of course.