Third Charm's a Time

I'm doing it again. I'm in the library, in an even better corner, writing my overdue supercrap. Another name for the supercrap is an analysis of any book of collected poetry that we discussed in the class... requirements? Rumors state it's around 4 pages. Not bad, just now I've gotta do it. By tomorrow, along with two other new poems and a test. And that's just for this class. And even if it were all I had to do for school, that'd just be my school requirments. And, assuming I'd actually gotten every bit of extra Helium content read and reviews done, I'd still have my stuff to write. And even if I'd done that, there's still the encyclopedia to read.

Yeah.


FUN.


Yeah, here we go:

ENGLISH HOMEWORK: Poetry Writing.

Book: Jan Beatty's "Mad River."

Synopsis: This is a three part collection of related poetry, about the poet's experiences in the Pittsburgh/western Pennsylvania area. In the case that the poems occur elsewhere, or a location is neither specified nor implied, they contain the tone of 'western Pennsylvania,' in terms of the speaker's reation to her surroundings; the speaker sounds as though she's from that area. For the majority of the poems, it can be assumed they are either directly from Beatty or from some similiar literary incarnation, or that they come from a neutral, narrative voice. The later is less common.

Descriptions the tone are entirely in lue with the nature of the setting---western PA has a uniquely rural setting and a firm cultural attitude, forged, if you will, by its richly industrial heritage.

All of the poetry is reactional, ironic, and cynical. The speaker is often times asking questions that have no answer (at least, none as far as the speaker can tell), or pointing out the irony or corruption in very raw, very real situations. Whenever the speaker brings herself into her work, she speaks honestly---she, too, is part of those 'very real situations,' and is well aware that those questions have no answer.

Thesis: Jan Beatty's "Mad River" is a deeply exhertive nontopical study on the ruder, rougher, stronger elements of life, placing emphasis on personal experience over universal 'umbrella' concepts; it is about self-searching, not about finding, perhaps claiming that the search is more important than the find, or even that the process of the search itself becomes, in the end, the find.