E-lit Module 4

Student A

Something that struck me while reading Quasha's blog is when he says language is different when we read for a specific purpose, like reading a poem, rather then letting language talk to us. A poem is never meaningless or senseless. He says we must surrender to the poem by continuously reading it until we forget what we think we know and listen to what the poem is actually saying. Text isn't senseless or meaningless, even if it doesn't follow our preconceived notions. Quasha mentions altersensory reading. He says poets like Mac Low used his voice to convey the meaning of the language in the poems. Listening to the author's inflection, tone and cadence when performing the poem allows us to connect to it. I think our assignments over the  last couple weeks show that nothing is ever meaningless. Everyone can find meaning in anything. Quasha instructs us to keep reading the poem over and over until we find the meaning. On another note, what is Stein trying to say in her essay? One thing is for sure... I would not have wanted to be in the lecture where this essay was originally delivered.  My head started hurting just from trying to read and decipher her confused, run-on writing. The only thing I took from the essay is that it is about composition and time. Time and composition changes with each circumstance...or doesn't change? AHHHH!!! Can someone please tell me what she is trying to say? Her sentences constantly repeat and turn in on themselves. Then the next set of lines contradict what she previously said. I feel like she is having an argument with herself, and she just wrote everything that rambled through her mind.  Layli Long Soldier's piece came across as a conversation or lesson. Her side notes seem to be a look into her thoughts or an explanation about why something is written a certain way. It feels like a lesson to me because she states a fact, and then she jumps back to give the student more in-depth details. At the end, she says this whole tangent started off with the desire to write about grass. I love the end of the poem because of how artistically she spaced out the last couple lines. The spacing allows the reader to actually feel the swinging of the body, as if you were on a swing. 

Student B

In consideration of our readings this week, the main theme that stood out to me was the overarching idea that text is flexible. In a sense, like the meaningless poems we were encouraged to write, and like the Library of Babel, text (in the form of sentences, poems and other structured writings, words, etc) has meaning beyond what it is constructed to portray. The meaning can have numerous contexts and interpretations. The cool thing about the writings this week is that the content of each writing is constructed to portray the very idea of what I understood to be the overarching idea of text- meaning, text and its fluidity to have multiple meanings beyond its intended use is the content of its writing. For example, Layli Long Soldier uses the anecdote of "eating grass." It's intended use was malicious in it's original context; however, Long Soldier later mentions that "eating grass" would go on to become part of an ironic and beautiful (in that its construction was well crafted, whether that be on purpose or on accident) metaphor in a completely different context. Additionally and worth being noted, that same context transcends the boundaries of writing- another example of fluidity.  Fluidity is important to note especially in text because it can transcend not only from text to physical atmospheres but from a certain tone to another, from one meaning to another, from formal pieces to creative artwork, and so on. Gertrude Stein's "Composition as Explanation" highlights this point. She uses the repetition of words and phrases as an adjunct to support her, funnily enough, explanation of the topic at hand. With this structural decision, Stein produced a piece that reads one way, sounds another, is put in and out of different contexts, and moves easily from one thing to another (a lecture as an opposed to an art piece as an example). The readings for this week use language to speak on a cycle of fluidity that will forever come and go, from meaning to meaning and finally back to its intended meaning. I have been especially interested in the fluidity of text (and language) ever since I had taken a linguistics course. I say this because I believe that language is, and will eventually, becoming fluid enough to its speakers to not imply one rigid meaning. In linguistics, we learned that there is really no right or wrong when it comes to language. We are so used to formal documents and formal rules that sometimes its easy for us to take language and text in one rigid context. However, with the introduction of text messages, social media, writings like the ones we read for this week, and other things, we have the ongoing ability to notice texts' fluidity.