silent partner

Since the poetry we dealt with this week were about death, I was reminded of a dream I had about a friend of mine who died. I thought I may already made an entry about this but on looking back, it seems I hadn't.
I cannot remember all the details of the dream, as it was a while back, but basically I was back where I grew up and went around to the house my friend grew up in. Her aunt now lives there alone. In the dream, which felt very real, my friend was alive again and had returned to the house. The whole dream was about how she had felt that she had to disappear and that's what she had done and has not died at all. And now she was back.

I dreamt that I was going to be swimming in the Olympics and I was talking beside an architects model of the pool. I was telling the people there that I needed to swim in the actual pool before the competition to practise. Another swimmer was there and she wasn't the best and neither was I, but I was telling her that maybe on the day the atmopshere would lift us and we would perform like never before.

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**An extra bit posted 03/11/07**
Prof. Tougaw pointed out to me that some of the authors I listed in this guide are more likely to come up than the others so I thought I should share - Plath, Rich, Roethke and Lowell - and it would be a good idea to be familiar with a few more of their works.
So here are a few other titles from Norton:
Theodore Rothke : Cuttings, My Papa's Waltz, Night Crow, I Knew a Woman, Wish for a Young Wife, In a Dark Time, The Waking.
Sylvia Plath : Morning Song, Lady Lazarus, Daddy, Blackberrying, Child.
Adrienne Rich : Storm Warnings, Snapshots of a Daughter-in Law,
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, Diving into the Wreck, Power, Transcendental Etude.
Robert Lowell : The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, Mr. Edwards and the Spider, Memories of West Street and Lepke, Skunk Hour, For the Union Dead

My friend (who dreamt about Diane Von Furtenberg and being on interview in a new restaurant) had another another dream recently about working in a restaurant. This time it was a bi-level restaurant - totally different layout. The place was brand new and still under construction and he was one of the construction workers.

Better and worse than I thought?!
I really had not done any studying - just read over a few study guides and did my own, so I was not prepared. When I opened it first I laughed (nervously!) when I realised that I did not recognise anything. However, once I started to write I did start to pick up clues and recognise many of the periods (or close to it) and sometimes even the author too. I found that there were definite clues in the subject matter which can help point us in the right direction. Also, writing something about a passage usually led to more.

As I am coming up short on having enough dreams to write about.. I thought I'd instead do an entry about a dream site I found on the web. It's called dreamtree. The page that I found first was it's one on is "Dreams in Film" as it lists movies that have connections to dreaming.
http://www.dreamtree.com/Culture/Film.htm
It struck me how often movies use dreams and in many different ways.
But the rest of the site is extensive. There is a Dreams in Literature page with excerpts from famous works which relate to dreams - may even be worth a glance with the exam in mind.
Main page link : http://www.dreamtree.com/
Scroll along the icons at the bottom of the page - each one has a different heading and page they link to when clicked.

When writing about poetry, I straight away go for the meaning and interpretation, but for the test it will be important to show some knowledge of poetry in general and to have those poetic terms in mind to use. I have a book for another class which concentrate on meter and form. I thought I would summarize a few bit from this book, as they may have some useful info for us to use on the test.

Towards the Corner 1998
Juan Munoz (1953-2001)

Taken from the Tate's description....
"Muñoz never wanted to be seen as a Spanish artist, but there is an element of the grotesque in his work that belongs to a long tradition from the court dwarves of Velázquez through to Goya, Dalí and the films of Luis Buñuel."
The image is a bit too small to make this out, but it says the men are identical and silently laughing. It also suggests that they are all absorbed in a joke that actively excludes the viewer. I would guess that they could even be laughing at the viewer and while the sculpture is enjoyable to look at and admire, it could make the viewer uncomfortable. I'd like to see it up close to experience it.

To Link to the main page for "Poetry and Dream" click :
http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/CollectionDisplays?showid=1258

I found this one harder - after I studied...! From doing the two samples the way I see the test now is - I do need to know for definite some of the authors and works. It just makes it so much easier to write about them. Also that knowing nine of them probably won't happen. In the case of not knowing, I need to know something intelligent about each time period so I can write that.
I find it frustrating that sometimes it's better to guess and sometimes not - I am still more on the side of guessing because if I get it wrong - I may have gotten it close and that could help . Also if I put no author I think that says for sure I just don't know it. I understand that it's not good to come out and say it's Joyce when it's actually Beowulf but saying Shelley instead of Keats and talking about the Romantics at least shows I know the name of some Romantic poet.
I think I will be using the phrases 'it may be' or 'perhaps it is.." in this exam...
As we have been told, the marking is subjective, so I suppose our approach may be also.
Best of luck to all of us!

Almost can't believe that it IS the end of March and the essay and exam are over! Honestly, the exam wasn't that bad - I think everyone recognised a few - so we should be ok. It gives you confidence to guess some of the others when you are sure of some of them. When I read the passage with all the Irish place names I went with "Joyce" because basically his name stuck in my brain, from the sample exams, so was happy to hear afterwards that it actually was him. The poetry section - it was definitely a good thing that there were 4 poems and a choice. It's true that doing an essay like that in an hour and a half is a bit 'quick and dirty' but all in all, that part was do-able too. It really helped that we were well prepared for the format etc. - thanks to our Prof.