Irish Poetry!

Today in my Modern British Authors class, we discussed this poem by Eavan Boland - an Irish, female poet. I haven't enjoyed MANY of the works we've read for this class. But we recently forayed into the great world of post-modernism and contemporary literature. I was so struck by this poem that I had to share:

"Anorexic" by Eavan Boland
Flesh is heretic.
My body is a witch.
I am burning it.

Yes I am torching
ber curves and paps and wiles.
They scorch in my self denials.

How she meshed my head
in the half-truths
of her fevers

till I renounced
milk and honey
and the taste of lunch.

I vomited
her hungers.
Now the bitch is burning.

I am starved and curveless.
I am skin and bone.
She has learned her lesson.

Thin as a rib
I turn in sleep.
My dreams probe

a claustrophobia
a sensuous enclosure.
How warm it was and wide

once by a warm drum,
once by the song of his breath
and in his sleeping side.

Only a little more,
only a few more days
sinless, foodless,

I will slip
back into him again
as if I had never been away.

Caged so
I will grow
angular and holy

past pain,
keeping his heart
such company

as will make me forget
in a small space
the fall

into forked dark,
into python needs
heaving to hips and breasts
and lips and heat
and sweat and fat and greed

For those of you who might be lost and don't have the benefit of the foot notes that I had access to, the speaker of the poem is Eve, and she wishes she could go back into Adam as his rib rather than stay her own entity. What I love about this poem is how the problematic aspects of religion are being compared to, in essence, a disease: woman feels so much pressure to be perfect, the only logical thing to do is to return to man to be redeemed from the "sin" of Eve. I think what struck home to me about this work is the comparison to becoming thin and beautiful, more near to the "perfect idealized" woman in order to become more righteous. The woman who is curvy and luscious, well, that woman is sinful. I see this in many ways in my own religious culture - the idea that if one can be a close to an ideal size or figure as possible, the more god-like and worthy she is. Additionally, another critique I love is that, in the speaker's mind, for her to be perfect, she needs to be absorbed in patriarchy to become whole. It's poems like these that make me realize that how great God truly is, and how great my curvy, luscious, and sometimes sinful womanhood is. Without these types of glaring, blasphemous critiques, I think I would feel alone. Anyways, food for thought - any other takers? And I should mention, I normally don't dig on poetry.

Also, and not entirely randomly since I just broke out in my semi-annual cold sores induced by stress, I wanted to let you all know, according to GentialHerpes.com, you CAN spread oral herpes to genitals. http://www.herpes.com/genitalinfo.shtml. I was more curious than anything since I've heard many different sides to the story, so thank you google for educating me!  

Summer Time... and the Reading's Easy

I hope you all enjoyed my Sublime reference/pun. So, my geeky intellectual friends and I have risen to the challenge of a former professor/kick-ass mentor and made summer reading lists. Here are mine: I hope you feel inspired... especially to read banned books!

1. "Animal Farm" by George Orwell

2. "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston
3. "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" by Betty Smith
4. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
5. "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury
6. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy
7. "High Fidelity" by Nick Hornby
8. "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabakov
9. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" by Azar Nafisi
10. "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis
11. "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie
12. "The Country Girls" by Edna O'Brien
13. "The Green Hills of Africa" by Ernest Hemingway
14. "The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman" by Angela Carter
15. "Selected Poems" by Eavan Boland
16. "The Foreskin's Lament" by Shalom Auslander

I feel a little like a cheater by making a summer reading list, because, right now, my summer looks to be indefinite - no more school, at least for a few years, and no job offers. But, in the grand tradition of Cedar City summers, I'll pick a 16 week summer to work with so that I can get some quality reading in. Thanks Todd, Rae, Joe, and Grburbank for the great idea! I think we should, at some point, compare and see if we are making our goals.

Side note - there are a lot of staples on here that I haven't had the time to read. I own many of the books on this list so rather than buy new ones, I shall peruse my own selection. Please don't judge me :)

There are some big names on here that I haven't read - which makes me kind of sad since I'm finishing my Master of Arts .... in LITERATURE. But, there's no time like the present to catch up!