Writing Community

I recently received some feedback on one of my posts “Looking to the Future”.

The feedback was from a  grant writing blog, stemmed from livingwellgrants.com. The purpose of this blog is to inform people of what is going on today in the world of grants, as well as possible paths and careers that are popping up for grant writers. I think that this is a useful website for anyone interesting in professional writing.

I love being able to find any and all information that I need, so I find sites like this one to be very useful and informative, not only for it’s content, but also for all the links and sources it provides.

Just getting the word out about this new information. I still have yet to set up a meeting with my adviser about possible career paths, as well as additional courses I am interested in. I am finding lately that most things that influence me have been coming from chance.  The more information that I randomly acquire, the more my views and goals are changed when it comes to my education.

I think that I need to start reaching out more to my fellow writers. Becoming a member of a “writing community” might be able to help me keep my head on straight. The more my feet stay on the ground, the better my capability will be to make good decisions.

Robert Lowell

We discussed the poetry of Robert Lowell in class today. Much of his poetry is categorized under “Confessional Poetry”. This is a particular sub-genre where the poet expresses much about his or herself, and often refers to himself rather than a narrator in poems. The subject matter is often bleak if not depressing. This style is sometimes seen as whiny, but it also wildy appreciated as transmuting emotions into art.

Lowell himself is a transitional figure. He often travels between confessional and impersonal. His poem, “Walking in the Blue” is definitely a confessional poem. This is a poem about Lowell’s stay at a mental institution. In the poem, he describes his feelings of isolation from the world, often relating them to some fish imagery. He describes himself and the other patients of “ossified young” meaning people who have become forever stuck in the mind-set that they were when they originally became mentally ill

Lowell’s poem “Skunk Hour” is also a confessional poem. In it he describes his own decline, as well as the decline of New England. On the surface things appear to be functional, but as we delve deeper we can see that they are not as they appear to be. Sea and fish imagery appear again in this poem, also describing Lowell’s isolation.

Lowell’s poem “For the Union Dead” is the most impersonal of all three of these poems. It is not confessional because of the distance between the reader and the speaker. The title suggests a elegy. This poem is about the tackiness of the modern world, and the questioning of the pasts sacrifice. There is a big contrast between the past and present, which gives it a sort of “Waste Land” quality. The content of the poem is the speakers sadness over the tearing down of an aquarium that he loved very much when he was a child. This shows the modern world as being physical and precarious. Lowell sticks to his fish imagery, giving connections to the emotions he is feeling. In the end the aquarium is turned into a parking lot, which states a lot about the present human state.