Here's a little quiz. Match up the writer with the work. To make it a little harder there may be a few "orphans," poems with no authors, or authors with no works on the list. Obviously anyone could figure these out fast with a little googling. The point is to see how much you know just off the top of your head. (I was inspired by Ron's quiz he gives to his ignorant students.)
Pablo Neruda
Reverdy
Rimbaud
Claudio Rodríguez
Cavafy
César Vallejo
José Lezama Lima
St. John-Perse
Pere Gimferrer
Pedro Martínez
André Breton
Robert Juarroz
David Jones
Antonio Machado
René Char
Victor Hugo
Nicanor Parra
Antonio Gamoneda
María Victoria Atencia
Celan
Poems and Antipoems
Trilce
The Leaves of Hypnos
Gift of Drunkenness
The Book of Poisons
Waiting for the Barbarians
The Art of Being a Grandfather
Vertical Poetry
One Hundred Sonnets of Love
Anathemata
Most of the Time
Fields of Castile
Raúl's Sister
Threadsuns
Marta & María
Eating Gorillas
Anabasis
The Drunken Boat
Nadja
Death of Narcissus
13 comentarios:
Jonathan,
Both you and Ron are suffering Ed Hirsch Syndrome, assuming that your core knowledge should be every other ?post-avant? poet?s core knowledge. Everybody?s culture differs, and they needn?t necessarily overlap. Unless one?s most interested in puffing oneself up, there?s little point to such an exercise. I could make a list of obscure and not-so blues musicians, or ?wildfowl as the hunter sees them??to prove what exactly?
John Latta
I mean, of course, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. My cultural background only aberrantly admits right-leaning professorial demagogues.
Not at all. If someone is in an MFA program and doesn't know that Sylvia Plath wrote Ariel and Frank O'Hara wrote Lunch Poems, there is something seriously the matter. If someone expressed an interest in studying botany, I'd expect the person to know what a pine tree was.
You mean Ed Hirsch and E.D Hirsch are two separate guys? I'd have never guessed.
I don't assume that everyone *should* know everything I do. I just thought it would be a fun quiz, to counterbalance Ron's America-centric examples. I'm expecting a reasonably well-read poet, with a tiny bit of knowledge of modern and Spanish, French, and Latin American poetry, to know about a half of these and be able to deduce or correctly guess a few more. I deliberately put in some easy ones and some harder ones so that the results would be more spread out along the curve.
Jonathan,
You're still demanding of a student a particular pre-determined cultural literacy, a core knowledge that denies the sufficiency of the culture the student may arrive with. Maybe all hip-hop lyrics, maybe all Ozark lingo ("noodlin' catfish," "pogey bait," "butthole cousin" talk). We're talking about writing after all: who put Plath and O'Hara up there as cultural models and why shouldn't the student proceed to construct her own models with her butthole cousin talk? Saying, well you can't do anything if you don't know Plath / O'Hara makes her knowledge insufficient, makes her "stupid."
I'd expect a botanist to know a variety of pines, white, red, Scotch, jack, loblolly, et al. I'd expect a writer to know that too. Perhaps more importantly than knowing Plath / O'Hara.
John
Of course I deny the sufficiency of the culture the student comes in with. That's a given. I deny the sufficiency of my own culture. I'm still working on being a well read person.
Why shouldn't the aspriring writer have a little curiosity about the writers who've come before? In no other field do we make such allowances for ignorance for those studying at the graduate level. I never said they were stupid, just ignorant. Of course an apiring poet whose never heard of Frank O'Hara is ignorant. He doen't even know what he doesn't know. Everyone speaks a language and knows his or her local slang; everyone grows up knowing the words to the popular music of the day. How that amounts to a sufficient literary culture is beyond me.
Here is what I've got:
-Celan - Threadsuns
-René Char - The Leaves of Hypnos
-Waiting for the Barbarians - Cavafy ... Oh, wait, Cavafy is not listed
-Reverdy - The Book of Poisons
-Rimbaud - The Drunken Boat
-Neruda - One Hundred Sonnets of Love
-Breton - Nadja
I should know which poem was written by Hugo, but I am drawing a blank.
Cafavy is listed, number 5 on the list. Your Reverdy is wrong, unless Reverdy also wrote a book by this title.
Reverdy didn't write it. I tend to associate most names that sound somewhat familiar with his oeuvre, because I am not familiar enough with his work. (so I am guilty of guessing on that one)
geez isola, who doesnt like games?
neruda: 100 sonnets of love
reverdy: vertical poetry (?)
rimbaud: The drunken boat
Cavafy: waiting for the barbarians
César Vallejo: trilce
St. John-Perse: anabasis
André Breton: nadja
Antonio Machado: fields of castile (?)
René Char: leaves of hypnos
Nicanor Parra: Poems and Antipoems
Celan: threadsuns
make sure you post the answers too please!
peace
All those are right except for Reverdy: Plupart du temps (most of the time).
The words of Jonathan in 2:47PM should be carved in marble (monumentum aere).
A spanish teacher.
Funny how both Craig and I got Réverdy wrong ...
I think all have been guessed at this point. Pedro Martínez does not exist. That was a decoy. No works by Gimferrer are on the list.
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