My Perspective on the Semester

Since blogging about haiku’s brought us so much joy, we decided to use a series of haikus to explain the semester and to tie together themes from Trimble, Ed’s teaching, and the Core 102 readings. Although haikus can be restrictive because of their syllable counts and three-line format, we feel they mirror the confining nature of this semester’s readings. We read mostly epics, dramas, and poems, all of which have their own limitations, so by explaining their connections through haikus, we forced ourselves to peep (to gaze) into the writing processes of the authors we had the pleasure to read this semester.

Inspired by Homer and Milton, we begin our poem with an invocation to a muse. Like Milton, our muse is not one of the nine classical muses. But we differ from Milton in that we also do not invoke the Holy Spirit. Rather, we invoke a much more powerful muse, Edward Kozaczka. We implore him to bestow his endless knowledge upon us, and he complies by guiding us through The Odyssey, Oedipus, Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, Writing with Style, Pygmalion, Arcadia and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24.

While each of these works receives specific reference, we also subtly allude to Arcadia through our disjointed style. Stoppard blurs the distinction between past and present by having both appear on stage at the same time, and our poem works similarly, seamlessly shifting from an ancient epic poem (The Odyssey) to a contemporary book on style (Writing with Style). The disjointed, yet understandable style forces the reader to forget barriers of time and recognize everything as homogeneous within one semester of learning.

While we touch on themes of blindness, creation, and perception, I find our stylistic experimentation more compelling than simple references to the works. To this point, my favorite stanza of the poem reads:

Blindness is not bad
Just a matter of perspective
See what I did there?

Here, the haiku’s 5, 7, 5 syllable pattern breaks with the word “perspective.” This not only alludes to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24, but also comments on the importance of perspective relative to our semester. From Trimble we learned that we must consider the perspective of our reader, and to alter our writing to interest a specific audience. From Aristotle, we learned his hierarchy of writing forms, and how writing can be broken down to a science. And from Milton we learned to evaluate our lives through a fallen perspective, and to approach life with more humility. These are but a few examples of perspective, and the theme could be applied to every work we read.

We end out poem by inviting the reader to explore his own perspective about life, about our readings, and about our poem. We end with “In Arcadia Ego” because this acts as the culmination of perspective. Since the phrase has been “Written on the tombs,” it reminds us that while we are equal in death, the life experiences leading to this culmination shape the world differently for each person. Our poem mimics this structure, as no matter how much the poem jumps around, every reader ends up in Arcadia. But the perspectives each person experiences before he arrives at this point make the individual visits to Arcadia unique, just as we each had a unique experience in Ed’s class. So as we depart, we accept that although we may know not the heart, we are grateful that through the painter we have seen his skill, and have become better writers as a result.