Learn some manners, Sir Gawain

6/30
A true knight tosses
His lady’s salad when she
Wants her salad tossed.

Why "The Jew of Malta" is classified as a comedy

6/29
Barabas poisons
The whole convent. Killing nuns
Is hilarious.

Woman Warrior has some outstanding character development

6/28
Nothing speaks to me
Like a retard with a box
Of pornography.

How homosocial of you, Herman

6/27
Now boys, circle up:
Let’s squeeze ourselves into the
Very sperm of kindness.

Is it, Lord Tennyson?

6/26
’Tis better to have
Read and hated than never
To have read at all.

The First Rule of William Collins Is That You Do Not Talk About William Collins

6/25
If you have to ask
Who the next great poet will be,
Then it isn’t you.

James Thomson, You Make Me Angry

6/24
I read your poem;
My soul died. When I find your
Grave, I’ll piss on it.

But You Keep Telling Yourself That, Beowulf

6/23
You killed a giant,
His mother, and a dragon?
I don’t believe you.

A Dramatic Monologue About Robert Browning Written in the Style of Robert Browning and Told From the Perspective of Robert Browning

6/22
I will not adhere
To your rules of art but please
Pass the potatoes.

I might be alone on this one, but...

6/21
I’d like to see blind
Milton knock that Papist fuck
Dryden on his ass.

In which the author expresses his state of mind in explicit terms

6/20
Penis fuck penis
Fuck penis fuck penis fuck
Penis fuck penis.

It Makes You Nobel-Prize-Winning Retarded

6/19
Walcott: Just because
The island was called Helen
Doesn’t make you Greek.

Chaucer, Troilus, Feminism

6/18
It’s not really rape
When her uncle is right there
Helping you fuck her.

Beloved Beverage

6/17
Nothing tastier
To beat the summer heat than
Breast milk mixed with blood.

Ms. Glorian, Where Are You?

As an aside, I thought I might finally share my notes from a stellar performance at this year's MadLit conference: Mandy Glorian's work on the form of the personal essay.

Those unacquainted with Ms. Glorian's academic work will surely know her creative work, as she has succeeded where three and a half centuries of poets have failed: Glorian has rewritten John Milton's long, laborious, and ultimately dull epic poem, Paradise Lost. "The Tree of No" rattled the literary world with its elegant simplicity, rhapsodic musicality, and its daring forthrightness. Though some have argued for its shocking stupidity (one recent critic accused Ms. Glorian of poetic blasphemy and suggested that she be strung up from said "Tree of No") others have hailed her as a visionary. "Sons and Daughters of Mandy," as they call themselves, have begun the necessary work to rewrite literary history. Adaire Falcker and Daniel Lowenstine have laid claim to the rest of Milton's swollen corpus, beginning with Comus. D. Oucheb Ag, a graduate student at Rutgers - generally regarded as the nation's finest program in English Literature - has begun a project to paraphrase Shakespeare's sonnets; Al Legorical Name (pronounced Nah-meh), a creative writer at the University of Iowa, has shown definitively that Dickens' work can be improved by rendering it into stick figure drawings, thus eliminating the arbitrary nature of its excessive language; and Nire Refekytab, University of Wisconsin (Madison) writing fellow and future Nobel Prize candidate, has published her intentions to preemptively limit her poetry to Glorian guidelines.

Without further ado, here are my notes (my thoughts are in parenthesis). Those of you who were lucky enough to hear this magnificent essay should feel free to contribute your own notes.
- Montaigne was the first to puzzle over the question, "What do I know?" The more he asked, the more he realized he didn't know. He had to write himself.
- Montaigne was a swamp. (I had no idea.)
- Cultural apocalypse: psychological bifurcation of the self
- (Why are we talking about Ulysses? Shit, is Ulysses an essay?)
- Essay and fiction fuse. (Oh. Um.)
- Only in the modernist period could Borges say that the truth does not exist.
- Borges's essays are like bright pinatas.
- God is no longer paring his fingernails; instead, he's pinning the tail on the donkey.
- Essays turned to phantoms because there is no more self.
- (The girl seated next to Ms. Glorian on the panel is rolling her eyes.)
- New essayists turn away from themselves.
- Flickers of facts with festering fictions.
- Inner wanderings have turned to outward, and the "I" becomes a fiction.
- The blog is the new form of the essay.
- (Random insertion of "ok.")
- (That was ridiculous.)

As a further aside, I figured out how to make it easier to comment on posts. If you'd like to share your thoughts about Ms. Glorian's work or anything else on this blog, feel free.

1776

6/16
That white Sustenance —
Despair — unloving, unloved —
Intentionally —

You and Me Both, Mr. Yeats

6/15
Beautiful roses!
What? The rose is Ireland?
I hate the Irish.

Dear Mr. Donne

6/14
When you wash your sins
Away with Christ’s blood, try to
Get those cum stains out.

signifying nothing

6/13
sound so fucking good
and the quentins both of them
fury and he hush

Tale of a Turd

6/12
Good, dear, shitty Swift!
Why are you so angry? Oh.
Right. All men are turds.

I owe you a haiku on Sterne

6/11
Uncle Toby, the widow
---- ---- suck -- anything.
Let down your breeches.

Center of the Universe

6/10
Nature! Transcendence!
Charming, Mr. Emerson,
But completely wrong.

Stage Directions

6/9
As far as we know,
That bear might still be dining
On Antigonus.

Pope

6/8
Feathers ev’rywhere!
Beak, blood, and awful squawking:
The Rape of the Cock.

Crashaw

6/7
Dead babies, super
Duper sexy Jesus wounds,
And Milk All the Way.

Austen

6/6
Handsome, clever, rich
Emma got genital warts
From Mr. Knightly.

T.S.

6/5
Shantih Shantih Shut
The fuck up you pretentious
Mother-fucking prick.

George Eliot

6/4
Nobody told me
Middlemarch was nine thousand
Pages. George: eat shit.

Midnight's Children

6/3
I’m fragmentating!
Wah! Everybody look
At me! Eat chutney.

Mrs. Dalloway

6/2
I bought the flowers
Myself. I’m so fucking sick
Of her constant shit.

Threshold

6/1
So now it begins!
What? Drinks? Pie? Socializing?
It begins later.

MASHP 2007

Welcome to the MA Summer Haiku Project 2007. For your reading enjoyment, I will write and post one haiku every day while reading for the last-ever MA exam in English Literature at the University of Wisconsin. The haikus may be references to literary works or to the experience of reading these works; perhaps they will refer to nothing at all.

If you enjoy these whimsical nothings, please let me know. If you do not, fuck you, I never liked you anyways.