CONCEPCION HOLY CROSS COLLEGE

Minane, Concepcion, Tarlac

EDUCATION DEPARTMENT
Second Semester A.Y. 2022 – 2023

RESEARCH IN

CONTEMPORARY, EMERGENT AND

LITERATURE

Submitted by:
Gomez, Pauleene G.
BSEd English 3-A

Submitted to:
Jayrold Velasco
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
BY RANDALL JARRELL

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell, (born May 6, 1914, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.—died October 14, 1965, Chapel Hill, North
Carolina), American poet, novelist, and critic who is noted for revitalizing the reputations of Robert Frost,
Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams in the 1950s. Childhood was one of the major themes of
Jarrell’s verse, and he wrote about his own extensively in The Lost World (1965). With an M.A. from
Vanderbilt University (1938), he began his career as a teacher. His first book of verse, Blood for a Stranger,
was published in 1942, the same year he joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. Many of his best poems appeared
in Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) and Losses (1948), both of which dwell on war-based themes.
Jarrell was noted for his acerbic, witty, and erudite criticism. In a volume of essays titled Randall Jarrell,
1914-1965, nearly all of the writers praised his critical faculties. They also noted, commented Stephen
Spender in the New York Review of Books, “a cruel streak in Jarrell when he attacked poets he didn’t like.”
Jarrell could be harsh, critics agreed, but his vehemence was a barometer of his love for literature. Robert
Lowell wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Jarrell was “almost brutally serious about literature.”
Lowell conceded that he was famed for his “murderous intuitive phrases,” but defended Jarrell by asserting
that he took “as much joy in rescuing the reputation of a sleeping good writer as in chloroforming a mediocre
one.” And Helen Vendler wrote in the New York Times Book Review that “nobody loved poets more or
better than Randall Jarrell—and irony, indifference or superciliousness in the presence of the remarkable
seemed to him capital sins” Suzanne Ferguson, in her book Poetry of Randall Jarrell, alleged that his
criticism, with standards based on “broad, deep reading in all kinds of writing,” would “ask always, both
explicitly and implicitly, whether the poem tells truth about the world; whether it helps the reader see a little
farther, a little more clearly the dark and light of his situation.”

Jarrell tried to guide the reader not just by the content but also the style of his writing. A straightforward
approach was as important to Jarrell in his own writing as in that of the writers he reviewed, noted D.J.
Enright in Listener: “Just as common feeling informs his best poetry, so what underlies Randall Jarrell’s
criticism is common sense—that quality derided by frothy phonies who have failed to notice how uncommon
it is—strengthened and clarified by exactly remembered reading, considerable knowledge of what is essential
to know, and his own experience in the art of writing.” Jarrell’s insistence on clarity and accessibility in
writing alienated him from some academics; his denouncement of the New Criticism set him even further
afield. According to Hilton Kramer in New Leader, the advent of the New Criticism “induced a profound
despair over the very nature of the critical vocation, and his response to that despair was to adopt a tone and a
method markedly different from the despised weightiness and solemnity he saw overtaking the whole literary
enterprise. This change in his critical outlook had the unfortunate effect of depriving Jarrell of a certain
seriousness.” Michael Dirda interpreted Jarrell’s stance in a more positive way: “In a time when criticism was

already turning professional and academic, Jarrell spoke as a reader, one who tried to convey his enthusiasm
or his disappointment in a book as sharply as he could manage.”
The American writer Randall Jarrell published "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" In 1945, the final year
of World War II. The poem’s speaker suggests that he slips from the protection of his mother’s womb into
“the State,” where he finds himself in a ball turret (the round compartment on a bomber plane from which a
gunner shoots). Metaphorically presenting the turret as another kind of womb, the speaker implies that he’s
as helpless as a baby—a comment on the vulnerability of innocent young men who suddenly find themselves
facing the horrors of war. The final line, in which the military matter-of-factly rinses the dead speaker’s
remains from the plane, is a grim reflection on the way war treats young soldiers as expendable pieces of
equipment.

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet

BY DANA GIOIA

The tales we tell are either false or true,

But neither purpose is the point. We weave
The fabric of our own existence out of words,
And the right story tells us who we are.
Perhaps it is the words that summon us.
The tale is often wiser than the teller.
There is no naked truth but what we wear.

So let me bring this story to our bed.

The world, I say, depends upon a spell
Spoken each night by lovers unaware
Of their own sorcery. In innocence
Or agony the same words must be said,
Or the raging moon will darken in the sky.
The night grow still. The winds of dawn expire.

And if I’m wrong, it cannot be by much.

We know our own existence came from touch,
The new soul summoned into life by lust.
And love’s shy tongue awakens in such fire—
Flesh against flesh and midnight whispering—
As if the only purpose of desire
Were to express its infinite unfolding.

And so, my love, we are two lunatics,

Secretaries to the wordless moon,
Lying awake, together or apart,
Transcribing every touch or aching absence
Into our endless, intimate palaver,
Body to body, naked to the night,

Appareled only in our utterance.

It seems almost a requirement for a poet to have an unconventional résumé, but Dana Gioia’s is perhaps
notable for being so conventionally unpoetic. A graduate of Stanford Business School, Gioia claims to be
“the only person, in history, who went to business school to be a poet.” He later rose to become a vice
president at General Foods, where he marketed products such as Kool-Aid. These experiences in the
corporate world, Gioia states, “taught me a lot of things that have helped me as a poet.” In 1992, he
committed himself to writing full-time. Most recently, he served as chairperson of the National Endowment
for the Arts from 2003 to 2008.

Though Gioia has worked in various high-level positions, his approach to poetry might be deemed populist.
Born in a suburb of Los Angeles, Gioia remembers his mother, a Mexican-American who he says had no
advanced education, reading and reciting poetry to him at an early age. “Consequently,” he declares, “I have
never considered poetry an intrinsically difficult art whose mysteries can be appreciated only by a trained
intellectual.” As head of the NEA, he increased the budget and launched several successful initiatives,
including Operation Homecoming, which provides writing workshops to U.S. soldiers and their spouses. He
has also taught poetry at the university level and sits on the board of several arts foundations.

Gioia completed an MA in comparative literature at Harvard University and is an active translator of Latin,
Italian, German, and Romanian poetry. While at Harvard, he studied with the poets Robert Fitzgerald and
Elizabeth Bishop. His collections include Pity the Beautiful (2012); Interrogations at Noon (2001), winner of
the American Book Award; The Gods of Winter (1991); and Daily Horoscope (1986). A collection of new
and selected poems, 99 Poems, was published in 2016. Although Gioia writes in free verse, he is known
primarily for his formal work, and has been included in the school of New Formalism, a movement in the
1990s by American poets to bring traditional verse forms back to the fore. Reviewer Kevin Walzer notes that
“Gioia’s range, in both style and subject, is unusually broad. In his lyric poems, he works equally well in free
verse and traditional forms, and in fact merges them in many cases; he works hard to give his metrical poems
the colloquial quality of the best free verse, while his classically-trained ear gives his free verse a sure sense
of rhythm that approaches a formal measure.”

Also a noted critic, Gioia has authored some influential and widely referenced essays on American poetry. In
particular, his 1991 Atlantic Monthly essay, “Can Poetry Matter?,” argues that poetry has lost its central
status in contemporary culture. The essay generated so much feedback that he later turned it into a book of
the same title, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. For several years, he has also
served as a commentator on American literature for BBC Radio and as a classical music critic for San
Francisco magazine. His interest and training in music composition has led him to write opera libretti for
Nosferatu (1998) and Tony Caruso’s Final Broadcast (2008).

Gioia has founded and codirected two major literary conferences: the West Chester University summer
conference on Form and Narrative, and Teaching Poetry, which is dedicated to improving the teaching of
poetry in high schools. He is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of
Southern California and lives in both Los Angeles and Sonoma County. In 2015, Gioia was named Poet
Laureate of California.

Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet

BY EAVAN BOLAND – 1944-2020
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
That a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
Not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
One fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.

Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
White pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
Under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
What really happened is

This: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word

To convey that what is gone is gone forever and
Never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

Where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name

And drowned it.

Eavan Boland was born in Dublin, Ireland. Over the course of her long career, Eavan Boland emerged as one
of the foremost female voices in Irish literature. Throughout her many collections of poetry, in her prose
memoir Object Lessons (1995), and in her work as a noted anthologist and teacher, Boland honed an
appreciation for the ordinary in life. The poet and critic Ruth Padel described Boland’s “commitment to lyric
grace and feminism” even as her subjects tend to “the fabric of domestic life, myth, love, history, and Irish
rural landscape.” Keenly aware of the problematic associations and troubled place that women hold in Irish
culture and history, Boland always wrote out of an urge to make an honest account of female experience.
Boland’s poetry is known for subverting traditional constructions of womanhood, as well as offering fresh
perspectives on Irish history and mythology. Her fifth book, In Her Own Image (1980), brought Boland
international recognition and acclaim. Exploring topics such as domestic violence, anorexia, infanticide, and
cancer, the book also announced Boland’s ongoing concern with inaccurate and muffled portrayals of women
in Irish literature and society. Her next books, including Night Feed (1982) and her first volume of selected
poems Outside History (1990), continued to explore questions of female identity. Hers is a voice, in the
words of Melanie Rehak in the New York Times Book Review, “that is by now famous for its unwavering
feminism as well as its devotion to both the joys of domesticity and her native Ireland.” In a Time of
Violence (1994), shortlisted for the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize, contains poems that gesture toward private
and political realities at once. In poems such as “That the Science of Cartography is Limited” and “Anna
Liffey,” Boland constructs a world that is influenced by history, the present day, and mythology and yet
remains intensely personal. It is a recipe that Boland perfected in her work since.

To Those Who Have Lost Everything

BY FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN
Crossed
In despair
Many deserts
Full of hope

Carrying
Their empty
Fists of sorrow
Everywhere

Mouthing
A bitter night
Of shovels
And nails

“you’re nothing
You’re shit
Your home’s
Nowhere”—

Mountains
Will speak
For you

Rain
Will flesh
Your bones

Green again
Among ashes
After a long fire

Started in
A fantasy island
Some time ago

Turning
Natives
Into aliens
A prolific writer for adults and children, Francisco X. Alarcón was born in California and grew up in
Guadalajara, Mexico. Alarcón returned to the United States to attend California State University at Long
Beach, and he earned his MA from Stanford University. His collections of poetry for adults include Body in
Flames/Cuerpo en llamas (1990); De amor oscuro/Of Dark Love (1991); Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation
(1992), winner of the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; From the Other Side of
Night/Del otro lado de la noche: New and Selected Poems (2002); Ce Uno One: Poemas para el Nuevo
Sol/Poems for the New Sun (2010); Borderless Butterflies: Earth Haikus and Other Poems/Mariposas sin
fronteras: Haikus terrenales y otros poemas (2014); and Canto hondo/Deep Song (2015).

Latino and gay identity, mythology, the Nahuatl language, Mesoamerican history, and American culture are
all portrayed in Alarcón’s writing. On a Fulbright fellowship to Mexico City in 1982, Alarcón discovered the
writings of a Mexican priest (also named Alarcón) who had transcribed native songs during the Inquisition in
the 1600s. Translations of the priest’s work, native songs and incantations, and Alarcón’s own poems make
up his collection Snake Poems: An Aztec Invocation. Suzanne Matson, reviewing the book in the Harvard
Review, commented: “Alarcón foretells a new American poetics—an all-encompassing ‘eco-poetics’ in
which a common language of the elements, plants, and animals is recited and celebrated.”

Alarcón’s books for children include the bilingual poetry collections in the Magical Cycle of the Seasons
Series: Laughing Tomatoes: And Other Spring Poems/Jitomates risuenos: y otros poemas de primavera
(1997), which won the National Parenting Publications Gold Award; From the Bellybutton of the Moon and
Other Summer Poems/Del ombligo de la luna: y otros poemas de verano (1998), winner of the American
Library Association’s Pura Belpré Honor Award for Latino Literature; Angels Ride Bikes: And Other Fall
Poems/Los angeles andan en bicicleta: y otros poemas de otoño (1999); and Iguana in the Snow: And Other
Winter Poems/Iguanas en la nieve: y otros poemas de invierno (2001).