I’m a Woman Alone

As I finished up the tragic Act 5 of Hamlet, I paid close attention to try and derive the lesson or meaning that Shakespeare was trying to get across in his masterpiece. He dissected and intertwined so many major themes: love, hate, revenge, death, betrayal, greed. There is evidence to support several different theories under each of these major topics. However, the theme that I found most convincing and intriguing was death. Hamlet’s quest for truth, revenge, and justice began with the death of his father and ended with his own death. As the plot advances, Hamlet develops an obsession with death. He constantly thinks about revenge, the afterlife, and the consequences of suicide opposed to the advantages of living. Throughout the middle part of the play, when he slays Polonius and plots to avenge his father’s death, the reader (or audience) looses sight of Hamlet’s sensitive and human side. The scene in the graveyard, when Hamlet is so disturbed over the gravedigger’s treatment of the skulls, shows that he still is humbled and emotional when faced with death. I believe that this is also the point where Hamlet realizes that he can not come out of the hole he has dug himself; he knows that he has committed too many sins and has too many enemies to survive.

HAMLET

65        “That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. How the

              knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jawbone,

              that did the first murder! It might be the pate of a politician,

              which this ass now o’erreaches, one that would circumvent

              God, might it not?”

Hamlet then reflects on the death of his dear old friend and childhood jester, Yorick. He notes how no matter if you are a peasant or Alexander the Great, everyone ends up in the same place: decayed and rotten in the ground. It seems that this is the point where Hamlet realizes and comes to terms with death, after debating it in his head and obsessing over it for the whole play. He doesn’t mention his seemingly strong belief in the after life, in heaven, hell, purgatory and most importantly paying for your sins. At this point, in the dark graveyard, he bluntly accepts that he is going to die and become worm food, like everybody else.

HAMLET

             “To what base uses we may return, Horatio. Why may not

              imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it

180            stopping a bunghole?”

The last scene in the play caps off all the action and plotlines in the novel, everyone one of them with death. Although Hamlet eventually achieves his sought after revenge by slaying Claudius, I have to wonder how Shakespeare meant it to come across to his audience. Was the final revenge worth Hamlet’s depression and final death? Did he mean the end to be sad or hopeful. In a way, I can see how the tragic ending could be interpreted in a hopeful way. Hamlet’s death, by this time, seemed inevitable and if he had lived he had lost all those close to him anyway. The evils (Claudius and Gertrude) had been taken care of and the corrupt regime was terminated, meaning a good future for the country. It also seems fitting that Horatio was the only one to survive. Throughout the play he symbolized intelligence, loyalty, and wisdom; Shakespeare could have made him the sole survivor on purpose to say that these qualities will always triumph over spite, revenge, and evil ( which were all present in some degree in Claudius, Polonius, Gertrude, Hamlet, and Laertes).

The first parts of Act IV serves to develop Shakespeare’s characters and set up for action to take place. Gertrude in particular is focused in this scene and her actions show that her nature is to do what is best for herself, indifferent to the outcome of those around her. For instance, after promising Hamlet she would help him and not tell anyone what had happened and been discussed when Hamlet killed Polonius, she immediately told Claudius the crime Hamlet had committed. Gertrude and Claudius’ conversation about what to do with Hamlet is completely focused on what would be the best path to take to preserve their popularity throughout the kingdom, with no regard for what was best for Hamlet. Their utter phoniness and selfishness fools everyone, convinces Ophelia to reject Hamlet, and leaves Hamlet almost entirely alone. Even when reasoning with himself, Claudius lies and convinces himself that he is acting in a genuine and loving nature:

CLAUDIUS

             “O heavy deed!

              It had been so with us, had we been there.

15            His liberty is full of threats to all—

              To you yourself, to us, to everyone.

              Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?

              It will be laid to us, whose providence

              Should have kept short, restrained and out of haunt,

20            This mad young man. But so much was our love,”

Hamlet’s comical puns regarding the murder of Polonius and mockery of Claudius and Gertrude, even in a situation as serious as murder, point out Claudius and Gertrude as ridiculous and phony. The reader also gains hope that Hamlet will find a way out of this situation and not fall to his uncle’s plan to execute him in England.

Gertrude and Claudius’ guilt is also peaking in this Act. Ophelia’s insanity and depression disturbs and spikes their guilt, especially in scene V when Gertrude doesn’t want to talk to or see poor Ophelia. It is unlike Gertrude’s usually sweet nature to refuse to see Ophelia when she is struggling, especially since earlier on in the play she showed such affection and liking to Ophelia. This breaking down of her carefully manicured kind and angelic reputation shows that her guilt might be really getting to her, as Hamlet had hoped. Claudius makes a comment about how bad things happen in waves, which also could mean he blames himself for Ophelia’s insanity, having himself started the wave when he murdered the King. He says”

CLAUDIUS

              Oh, this is the poison of deep grief. It springs

50            All from her father’s death, and now behold!

              O Gertrude, Gertrude,

              When sorrows come, they come not single spies

              But in battalions. First, her father slain.

              Next, your son gone, and he most violent author

55            Of his own just remove. The people muddied,

              O my dear Gertrude, this,

              Like to a murdering piece, in many places

70            Gives me superfluous death.”

When Laertes confronts Claudius, Claudius manipulates Laertes’ thirst for revenge over his father’s death to raise his popularity. When Laertes asked him why he didn’t immediately take action against Hamlet for his crime, he explained that anything he did to Hamlet would enrage the public and hurt him more than Hamlet. Even after saying this to Laertes, Claudius encourages him to make a public action 

              “To show yourself in deed your father’s son

              More than in words?”

Claudius knows perfectly well that if Laertes did something of this nature he would enrage the public and be demonized for it, but I believe that this is exactly Claudius’s intention. He will help Laertes to publicly and gruesomely kill Hamlet, and when the public is outraged he will embrace them and become even more loved. However, I have a feeling that Hamlet, again, will prove himself to be one step ahead of Claudius’s evil plans and come out on top to escape death and publicly humiliate Claudius and Gertrude.

Act III unveils a lot about Hamlet’s cleverness and ability to outsmart those trying to bring him down, mainly Claudius. Although he convinces the other characters that he is going insane, he is completely aware of what is going on and always one step ahead of Polonius and Claudius. He walks into their staged conversations with Ophelia and Gertrude, never revealing too much and still acting within his crazy alias to keep them at bay to his true plan. It is almost as if he knows that the men are hiding in the room during the conversations. In the first encounter, with Ophelia, he gave them the information they needed ( that his love for Ophelia wasn’t causing his grief), and spoke so much of his dislike of marriage and the fake and bimbo-like roles that women play in society that he threw Claudius and Polonius onto a completely different path:

CLAUDIUS

              “Love? His affections do not that way tend.

              Nor what he spake, though it lacked form a little,

165            Was not like madness. There’s something in his soul

              O’er which his melancholy sits on brood,

              And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose

              Will be some danger”

Here, Claudius recognizes that Hamlet has something in his soul, deeper than love, that he has been dwelling on and has been getting at him. At this point, he doesn’t think that Hamlet is going crazy anymore but that a trip to London will give him time to think and fresh air to clear this mess up. Polonius’s response adds to the argument in my previous post, in which I explained how Polonius’s actions and his habit of favoring one child over another are to raise his social status and essentially prove to the King that although he is not technically royalty, he is valuable to the kingdom and not socially disadvantaged. Even after the King himself decided Hamlet’s seeming insanity wasn’t derived from love, Polonius insists on getting the last word and contradicting Claudius:

POLONIUS

              “It shall do well. But yet do I believe

              The origin and commencement of his grief

              Sprung from neglected love”

Another element that interested me in this act was the mistrust of women in everything Claudius and Polonius do, and the way in which the women accept it. For example, in all of Claudius and Polonius’s schemes to figure out what was wrong with Hamlet, they had him meet with Ophelia and Gertrude. Instead of just having the women report back to them, they hid in the room to see for themselves, never even considering that the women would be capable or trustworthy to give their own insights. After the conversation between Hamlet and Ophelia, as Ophelia was panicking and distraught over Hamlet’s state of mind, all her father had to say to her was “How now?” and that he had no need to hear from her her opinions on what had happened.

POLONIUS

              “We heard it all.—My lord, do as you please.

              But, if you hold it fit, after the play

              Let his queen mother all alone entreat him

              To show his grief. Let her be round with him,

185            And I’ll be placed, so please you, in the ear

              Of all their conference.”

This scene shows different sides to Polonius and his relationships with his children. Earlier in the play it seemed as though Polonius favored Laertes when he virtually ignored Ophelia and talked animatedly with Laertes. In Act 2 scene 1, the reader learns that he doesn’t fully trust Laertes when he sends Reynaldo to Paris to spy on him and ask people what he has been doing. Laertes and Ophelia effectively switch roles as Ophelia becomes the more important child in Act 2. Polonius seems extremely, if not excessively concerned with Hamlet’s behavior and Ophelia’s emotions. This behavior makes me think that Polonius has other motives besides helping Ophelia: maybe getting closer to the King to gain land or status, or to remain in a position of power and authority among his children. Even with the situation of Hamlet’s insanity, he claims that he should have seen it coming and it’s his fault for not stopping this obvious, amateur dilemma:

            “That hath made him mad.

              I am sorry that with better heed and judgment

              I had not quoted him. I feared he did but trifle

              And meant to wreck thee. But beshrew my jealousy!

              By heaven, it is as proper to our age

115            To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions

              As it is common for the younger sort

              To lack discretion. Come, go we to the king.

              This must be known, which, being kept close, might move”  

When Polonius tells the eager Gertrude and Claudius about what he thinks is the matter with Hamlet, he holds back and draws them out to, making them beg him for the story. In this way, Polonius even asserts his power when he is addressing his king and queen, which was a bold and controversial move in society and shows his thirst for power and status. His passive aggressive personality could mean that he knows that Claudius holds the crown of Denmark wrongly.

                        POLONIUS

              “This business is well ended.

              My liege and madam, to expostulate

              What majesty should be, what duty is,

90            Why day is day, night night, and time is time,

              Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.

              Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit

              And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,

              I will be brief: your noble son is mad.

95            Mad call I it, for, to define true madness,

              What is ‘t but to be nothing else but mad?

              But let that go.”

The first Act of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been one of my favorite works of Shakespeare I’ve read so far. What particularly interests me is the intricate family dynamics and the comedy that is entwined into the text. Shakespeare’s ability to subtly and cleverly incorporate humor is made evident in the scene in the woods when Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus are chasing the ghost through the woods and finally get to talk to him, when the Ghost keeps rumbling the earth and demanding the men swear not to tell what they have seen.

            Ghost: “Swear by his sword.”

            Hamlet:”Well said, old mole! Canst work I’ the earth so fast? A worthy

                        Pioneer!”

I compared the reading to my favorite work of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, when I was examining the male and female dynamics. Like Juliet, Ophelia is strong, intelligent, and not the typical young woman of her time. She went against her father’s wishes and meddles with the strict social structure in society by having an intimate relationship with royalty and not being royalty herself. The conversation with Ophelia and her father evidences that Ophelia does not fall to her fathers demands and is individual, unlike most women in her time and culture:

            Ophelia:”My lord, he hath importuned me with love in honorable fashion.”

            Polonius:”Ay, fashion you may call it. Go to, go to!

            Ophelia: “And hath given countenance to his speech, my lord, with almost all

                               The holy vows of heaven.”

Romeo And Juliet contained a similar conflict of a young couple in love with the intense disproval of their families and society. They got around it by devising a plan to fake their own deaths and run away together, which makes me think that Hamlet and Ophelia may eventually develop a plan of their own to free their love from the shackles of society and leave the kingdom to be truly happy and free. 

My own Diane creation (I hope you like it):

I talk to my dog

All the time

When I am alone in my house

And my husband is away at work

He listens intently to my thoughts and stories

However boring or long-winded they may be

A different species than the

Darting

Distracted

Eyes and ears of my husband.

Sometimes I wonder

Who came up with the idea that “dog is man’s best friend”

When all the men I’ve known would rather befriend

Their cell phone

Long lists of clients

That woman that serves him drinks after work

At the place down the road.

Within earshot of our chipped wooden porch

Where I sit with our golden haired dog wondering

Wondering why you can’t just stay home a night with me and the damn dog

Wondering when I stopped being interesting

Wondering why I’m still sitting here, wondering

I wrote this poem to try and incorporate as many elements of Wakoski’s poetry as I could, while using my own words. I kept in mind her strong roots in Feminist ideas, conversational diction, short lines, relatable and vivid imagery, and a plotline that incorporates metaphors to get a message across. Like Wakoski, I implied that men can be harmful to women in that they force them to take on certain unnatural elements to be “entertaining” and satisfactory. In my poem, a woman speaks about how her husband is always preoccupied with work and distracted by other woman, and how that hurts her. She feels depressed and sub-par because her husband has stopped showing interest in her, yet is frustrated and mad that she cares so much. I tried to mimic Diane’s profound skill of creating believable, invoking female characters that get the reader to step back and evaluate women in our society today. To ask themselves: Is there a problem? How can we fix this? Diane Wakoski’s skilled used of imagery and flowing rhythm and ideas are things that I hope to master and apply someday.

I found several blogs discussing Wakoski’s work and posted comments on them: https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8081959&postID=1558481265364136679&page=1 and https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=8081959&postID=4578756945078743815&page=1

Although I loved exploring the work of Diane Wakoski during this project, I’m not a big fan of the blog setting. I liked the assignments, but I think I would do a more thurough job if it was on paper or printed in some way. Projects done 100% online make the project harder to keep up with and follow. I did enjoy sharing my blog with the class and incorporating youtube videos into the presentation, to give the class a taste of the awesome work of my poet. The anthology assignment was particularly good for me because usually when I run across a poet, I only read one or two poems. With this assignment I got in-depth knowledge and became familiar with Diane Wakoski and her creative mind. 

As for people that Diane Wakoski hung out with, the most popularly listed buddies of hers are  Thom Gunn,Josephine Miles, and Tom Parkinson. Diane worked closely with Josephine Miles when she was at Berkeley in California, and Josephine passed away in May of 1985. She was a poet and literary critic as well as the first woman to be tenured in the English department at Berkeley. Her strong support of the advancement of woman involvement and spiritual liberation made her a perfect companion for Wakoski, who included these topics in basically every piece of her writing. Miles was fascinated with Beat poetry, which Wakoski was involved with as well. Beat poetry focused on changing consciousness and defying conventional writing. 

Thomas F. Parkinson (1920-1992) Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, was a poet in his own right; an expert on the poetry of W. B. Yeats; and one of the first academic authorities to write about the Beat poets and novelists of San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s. It makes sense that he had an influence on Wakoski because she idolized Yeats and once again, was a Beat poet herself. He worked at Berkeley when Wakoski attended there and was an inspiring and informative teacher to her.

As you can see, Wakoski’s main influences were her professors at Berkeley and she held them as very crucial to her development as a poet. In an interview with Claire Healey: “When I was about seven years old. I wrote many sonnets and began taking writing courses in the fifties at Berkeley. I was encouraged by Tom Parkinson and Josephine Miles, and admired Robinson Jeffers and T. S. Eliot. I think I was fortunate to be in college in the late fifties, at the time of the San Francisco poetry renaissance. Everyone around the college was as involved with contemporary poetry as people in the poetry scene in San Francisco, and that’s unusual for…”

Also in this interview, Wakoski speaks of her stronger influence that isn’t in human form, and that is her search for beauty. For her, beauty is revealed as it is filtered through the mind and body, but she is of the opinion that the world of poetry eventually resides in the internal world of the emotions.”

A California Newspaper called SouthCoast Today published an article on Diane Wakoski and her influences and style as a poet:” Many critics agree that her first book, “Coins and Coffins” (Hawk’s Well Press, 1962), through her fourth, “Inside the Blood Factory” (Doubleday, 1968), are symbolic of the poet’s “imagistic phase.” 

 In these early poems, Ms. Wakoski credits T.S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell as major influences. Although she writes in the narrative style, referring to her as a “confessional poet” would be a great misnomer. She does not quite fit that category, for there is much more to her than naive confessionals of her life’s events. 
 ”The poems go beyond what is real in the physical world, and transcend to what is real to the poet in her imagination, which proves to be wildly original. 
 In “Coins and Coffins,” for example, she writes in her poem “Justice is Reason Enough” of a fictitious relationship with a fictitious brother, David. In the poem, David commits suicide after seducing his sister, and the mother can’t stop asking the question “why?” This poem best distinguishes Ms. Wakoski from being a “Confessional poet” as some early critics had called her. In this piece, she successfully uses a series of images in the associative process. Many readers of this poem originally thought the poem a true story, unable to separate the narrator from the poet. 

Being a poet since the 1960′s, Diane Wakoski was part of the “deep image” movement, which means she’s resonant, has a stylised and heroic tone, and uses long poems as free-standing images. She also uses imagery and experiences to create deep meanings. Recent Poets similar to Wakoski in these aspects are: Jerome Rothenberg, Robert Kelly, and Clayton Eshelman. When she was in college at Berkeley, she participated in Thom Gunn’s poetry workshops and this is where she studied many modernist poets who would influence her writing. According to gunn, his poetry is based on contrast and contradiction. Gunn, like Wakoski uses free verse and intellectual discipline to create simple yet meaningful poems. In terms of big-time poets that Wakoski looks up to, her list includes Robert Lowell, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Ginsberg.

Diane Wakoski has looked to William Carlos Williams’ work throughout her career for inspiration and an example of simplicity and intimacy in writing. Writing in the “Williams mode”, Wakoski creates personal and conversational poems, such as “Junk Jewelry”. The following excerpt of “Junk Jewelry” uses common diction and flows as if Wakoski is lounging with one of her friends, discussing the jewelry her husband buys for her:

My husband buys me pearls,

the kind I like-freshwater, with their appearance

of gnarling and twisted nacre, but though

my horoscope always says I will love jewels, I

rarely deck myself witht hese pearls,

and I regularly over the years have lost at least one

and usually finally the second one of any pair of expensive

       gold

earrings he buys for me. He knows

I want a wedding ring,

but it is the one jewel he never will

offer. A golden heart necklace for a recent anniversary,

and the next year a diamond for it. At Christmas, a subdued

and magical pair of antique amber drops to go with

my lucky amber tear necklace on an expensive gold chain he

       gave me

the year bear.

Williams developed his poetry to attempt to create a “singularly American, entirely fresh “feel by experimenting with meter and lineation and centering the characters and matter of his poems on everyday life and the lives of regular people. His language and concepts were accesible to every reader, which were traits admired by Wakoski and included in her poetry. As you can see in “Junk Jewelry” (above), the poem is a simple narrative that describes every day elements like reading horoscopes, attempts of men to buy the perfect jewelry for their wives, and the speaker’s crisis of wanting a wedding ring from the man she loves. In his poem “To a Poor Old Woman”, Williams utilizes very common language and straightforward content:

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

 

Robert Lowell, although extremely different from Williams, also provided an influence on Wakoski’s work. He was known for exploring the dark side of America’s Puritan legacy and used formal poetry that included a masterful handling of meter and rhyme. He became a passionate objector during World War II and also protested agains Vietnam. In his life, he went to jail for his actions during the two wars and was often depressed and in psychological turmoil. After the brunt of these tough times passed, Lowell loosened his obsession with traditional form and meter and began to write more from personal experience. His poem “Dolphin” speaks from the first person, as Wakoski often does when sharing her personal observations and experiences.

“Dolphin”

My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting 

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

This poem, starting as a description of a dolphin, involves into a window into Lowell’s mind and philosphy. It shares with the reader that he thinks he has ” plotted perhaps too freely with my life, not avoiding injury to others, not avoiding injury to myself. Diane Wakoski’s poem ” Red Bandana” serves the same purpose and also speaks from the first person, giving the reader a glance inside what she thinks of herself and the world around her:

I too, as I say, like to wear red bandannas, but to me
they are like wearing the sunshine
on my head
or around my neck, and I
didn’t think anyone could look at me
with my red bandanna smile,
wide as the Rio Grande River on my face,
which despite the summer is as white as a sailors summer uniform,
and not smile back. But you didn’t, and I don’t know why I am surprised. If I can change,
why cant the world? In the past I would have tried to
win you over, seduce you into poetry or truth. But today, you’ve left me
not smiling, and even less interested than I was before I met you
in bull fights,
in blood sport,

less willing to smile at you or
at any young matador or new sailor with my
once deductive, though never dishonest,
red-bandanna smile.

“Diane Wakoski, the poet, weaves a cacophony of texts—from myths to cultural icons, from scientific treatises to fairy tales, from the elements of personal biography to the text of The Wizard of Oz, from the architecture of the casino to the landscape of the desert—into a parodic, intertextual pastiche in order to interrogate, to critique, to subvert, and to rearrange the givens these texts assert. Further, in experimenting with alternative positionalities from which to view “reality,” she tests and explores feminine/feminist constructions, perceptions, and subjectivit(ies). by the “language” and by the “myths” of these texts to define women’s place, women’s experience, women’s roles, potentialities, and futures—indeed our very subjectivity. ”

“she must wend her way through the chaos of informing cultural texts—the images, allusions, fragments, letters, myths, features, sites, and names Wakoski weaves into her poetry. To the first-time reader, the sheer volume and apparent incongruence of this chaos overwhelms at times with apparent confusion, even disunity and triviality. But therein lies her challenge. She claims the poet must institute façades/masks/surfaces in order to strip them away (322). This patina of textuality replicates what we experience in our life-journey and insists we investigate exteriors to discover the great secrets (Wakoski, “Whitman? No, Wordsworth” 16) that lurk under the surface—layers and layers of potential meaning. Such stripping away enables enlightenment. In Toward a New Poetry, Wakoski defines enlightenment as “when you have to go through this journey of taking away your innocence and seeing things” 

 Cordelia Maxwell of Louisiana State University believes that Wakoski’s intertextuality is more utilized to portray the roles of women in literature and their mental psyche:

Diane was born in 1937 in Whittier, California and studied at the University of California at Berkeley. A poet during the 60′s, her work was considered part of the “deep image” and highly confessional. Her book, Emerald Ice:Selected Poems won the prestigious William Carlos Williams Award. She now lives in East Lansing where she has been teaching at Michigan State University since 1976, teaching creative writing.

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