Response 1, Week 2

To Queenie's free write "First day Freshman":

I can't fully describe how much I enjoyed reading this piece. It's not entirely a Nonsense poem, but it's not exactly Futurist or even Dadaist. I think the closest genre to which one can file this poem is under the Surrealist banner (or one of its many derivatives). It's as if you took Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," and everything ee cummings, Pablo Neruda, and Kurt Schwitters ever wrote.

I think these could help you, given the structure of this piece:

1. Pablo Neruda, "Sonnet LXVI (I do not love you)"
2. ee cummings, "i love you much(most beautiful darling"
3. T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
4. Gertrude Stein, "If I Told Him"
5. Patti Smith, "Perfect Moon"
6. John Ashbery, "Glazunoviana"
7. Leonard Cohen, "Tower of Song"
8. Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird"
9. Richard Huelsenbeck, "To Ludwig the cocotte"
10. Yevegny Yevtushenko, "I Would Like"

With the experimental direction you are taking with this piece, those ten poems are must-reads. All of them are insanely important in some manner. Also, if you haven't before, then look up the Beatles song "I Am the Walrus" or David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs." These songs, too, may spark more inspiration.

"Philosophers pondered on the purple-ness of God" is my favorite line. Noam Chomsky would call this nonsensical language, but I experienced something quite different and probably not intended--when I read it for the first time, I thought to myself, "Hm...how purple is God?" For a moment, I became part of the nonsense--I the reader gave the line a small measure of reality. That is, of course, a powerful notion--the writer and speaker don't do the work; the reader does. The reader gives life--even to the apparent nonsense