Booklet of Poems and Essay - ENGL 230B
Hey! I've officially finished my first semester of graduate school for English - Concentration in Creative Writing. To celebrate, I've compiled the four poems and the essay I wrote for my poetry course: ENGL 230B - Advanced Poetry Writing. I hope you enjoy taking a gander at my work :) - Austin
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …”
– T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The Memories That Nostalgia Creates
“The remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
- Marcel Proust, La Recherche
I.
If you held this lemon… and thought of a lime,
then you see the same mirage as me.
Pen jabbed and slit a circle in the flesh
to put a bushel in place to hold our weed…
The yellow ember highlights the hills
of my fingers bent. Butane sits on the surface,
a marijauna hell. Lime shucks its juice, my gums sponge;
the crickets beep and the owls hoodoo… hoodoo.
Do you recall you tried to eat the lime?
For what you smoke from, you become in time,
or something philosophical like that,
and I laughed, and I laughed.
II.
I lean to rest on the counter laminate
in a distant house of a distant city
away from the memory– my iris’
brown brightening yellow,
and I think,
is this memory my own creation?
A feeling I’ve hemmed, you’d call it
nostalgia,
but do I know what I really felt?
Anxious, waiting
for the red and blue lights to illuminate
the park, or waiting
for my phone to ring,
my mother calling.
I fabricate nostalgia, as if what I have today
is nothing when compared to the goodness
I had once felt when I was a boy.
I wonder why I forgo the goodness in my life.
III.
I drive my past my family, friends, lovers,
and all the things
that I have built in this city
never peering behind me to wave.
Like the gray clouds mask the sun rays,
my past enshrouds my present.
How do I escape the pattern
without dimming the magic of the fiction
I’ve created?
It’s as if I’m a character in a story written by myself.
IV.
Where the line blends is unknown to me,
but I must find it so I can step from it
and leap
into the future.
I have no vision beyond the clouds
until I rise up into them.
I am on the ground,
I am beneath the clouds–
I need to see the sun.
The burning yellow will engulf me
and free me of the trail I’ve paved
behind me and grazed in front of me.
I need to stand on the ledge
and fly.
Fin.
The Study of Golf
The way the white ball spins
and leaves its speckles
in the dew on the blades
of grass; tells me
the shooting stars sprinkle
their dust on planetary systems
and then collide
in nebulae–
black holes.
Twenty feet away from the hole
I am putting for birdie.
The system is
a grandfather clock.
The ball rolls and bounces,
it kicks up water drops,
trickling towards the hole
on a perfect line and pace.
I am the son
but swap me with Daedalus.
I am the master craftsman of this tale
who carves false realities in wood
and weaves words through distorted
glasses.
I am the son
who hears the shrill caw
of a table saw,
who smells sawdust
sitting in the air like rain.
I am the son
who watches his father
carry a weighty window on his shoulder
up a rickety, yellow scaffold
caked in drywall mud.
I am the son
who watches his father
be trampled by wildebeest
who notices the sun spots
gathering atop his father’s
darkening skin–
the sun emblazoned,
suspended in space,
chilling at its core,
roaring into soundless night.
Oddities Off the Five Freeway
Fluorescent light rains onto cracked concrete–
there’s a blue Chevron sign, the price changes
everyday. We’re in the middle of the night,
Area 51 has more inhabitants
than this empty gas station off the five.
The clerk is sitting behind
the counter like he’s a robot:
programmed to sell you cigarettes and gum.
His 1985 Volvo sits in a parking space
and it hasn’t moved since 2001.
The trash cans are empty,
the gas tanks underground are full,
and the only person who observes
the oddities of this other planet is you;
outside of your coupe, ears pricked
to every cricket chirp, eyes alert
for every phantom movement in the shadows,
in a place that only appeared when you appeared,
and when you’re gone, it will be too.
Control and Technique; A Study of A History of Free Verse and Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’
“There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate.”
– T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
The argument against free verse is that there is no such poetry that is worth reading and writing that is without poetic technique. Eliot himself argued, in 1917, that “Vers libre does not exist” (To Criticize 183) and, twenty-five years later, “no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job” (On Poets 31). Yet, here is the leading man of free verse poetry in the Modern era. There are systematic deviations on what free verse is, and this paper will conclude that Eliot is the prime example for what free verse truly is.
Free verse is not to be disenfranchised by the understanding that there is no form. Chris Beyers, assistant professor of literature, composition, and poetry at Assumption College in Massachusetts, writes in his historicist book A History of Free Verse, “Though the artist is controlled to some degree by his material, the work of art is not growing out of some inner source of energy; instead, it is shaped by the conscious activity of the artist” (54). Whether the piece of art is sentimental or “of the heart”, as poetry is commonly understood to be, the organicism of the piece is still controlled. While there is no regular form to Eliot’s poetry, there are still direct techniques that are within the history of poetry, and more exceptionally, of his and his contemporaries' creation. A. R. Jones, writing in Critical Survey, explains the power of repetition in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, where Eliot creates
a verbal, textual unity based on constantly recurring words, phrases and images and that these bind the poem together. This constant repetition also gives an overwhelming impression of a mind imprisoned, trapped within itself and within the mesh of language. The poem articulates inadequacy, and, like the fog and smoke that isolates Prufrock’s world, his language also conceals him from reality. It is in this verbal patterning that we can most clearly see how technique and subject, form and content, are indivisible. (219)
The control that Eliot displays is evident being the premier poet of his time. The haunting of meter, the haunting of form, the haunting of traditional poetic techniques (such as rhyme) are all evident throughout Eliot’s canon. What Eliot disgraces is the perception that poetry is the regurgitation of heavy emotion and sentimentality. He states in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things” (Egoist 73). Hence, we have an echo chamber of poetic ideas and personal notions that resonate until the frequency is written on to a page. The ‘escape’ is the act of writing itself. The poet, calling upon his poetic idols, his historic breadth, and his dedication to craft curates an expression of the world before us. What we are left with is free verse. There is nothing loose, or rather, ‘free’, about it. Poetry is a system of control, and the handbook is the poets before us. The great ones, like Thomas Stearns Eliot, write in their own pages. Let’s not forget though that he, too, was inspired by the poets before him. As he carried on traditions then created his own, we do the same within our own practice of the poetic genre that is free verse.
Works Cited
Beyers, Chris. A History of Free Verse. University of Arkansas Press, 2017.
Eliot, T. S. On Poets and Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Poetry Foundation, 15 Aug. 2024, www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock.
Eliot, T. S. To Criticize the Critic. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1965.
Eliot, T. S. 1919. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Egoist, vol. 6, nos. 4&5, pp. 54–73.
Jones, A. R. “Prufrock Revisited.” Critical Survey, vol. 3, no. 4, 1968, pp. 215–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41549304. Accessed 26 Mar. 2025.
Feel free to interact and let me know which is your favorite :)
With thanks,
Austin Aragona