Peer Response (X2), Week Six

• Peer Response #1: Brandy's Free Entry1 Week 6

Brandy,

Yay for Billy Collins writing about Emily Dickinson and undressing her!
For one, I really enjoy this title... simply because I love Emily Dickinson :) To be honest, that is what drew me to this piece; prime example of what Dr. Davidson was saying last Thursday about the title being a free advertisement- turns out he knows what he is talking about after all.ha-ha.

Anyway, on to Collins's poem:
I just absolutely love this whole idea of the narrator intimately telling/describing a recounted memory of watching (in a voyeuristic manner)EMILY DICKINSON undressing. Fabulous. Especially because the narrator is also making the readership voyeurs as well. I think rhetoric of the piece also does a nice job of encapsulating sensual imagery as this scene is, more or less, being "undressed". It's seem to be a kind of ironic meta-textual moment for me- which is freaking awesome.

To critique Collins, for a second, however, the last stanza feels a little displaced. I'm not exactly sure what is going on now, or what the narrator is explaining to me... because it seems the narrator is really speaking about the material or about the aesthetic, or even about Dickinson... so I would ask, what's up with this? What is really going on here?

I think it would be a great idea to try and improv' this piece... or to practice a recursive method on this poem. :) I want to see you do this!!

• Peer Response #2: MacKenzie's In-Class Exercise

 
MacKenzie,

I absolutely love so much about this piece! You have some really fantastic imagery in these lines, which helps to highlight (while simultaneously highlighting) the "juggling" method. I particularly like (and am interested in) the instability of time. By this, I mean that I am having a hard time parsing through, or distinguishing between, the framework of time in the piece. I can't fully tell if this scene took place all at once, or if some of what the narrator is describing happened in the past. Is parts of the text formulated by a nostalgic moment, a kind of psychoanalytic stream-of-consciousness? Either way, I admire the juxtaposition between landscape and machinery... even to some extent the characters feel mechanic. I hope to see you do more with this piece! :)