Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone is very experimental in the way its lens plays with the reader’s perceptions throughout the story. The character through whom we experience the sleepy town of Nowhereville, 13-year-old Mallory Moss, arguably isn’t the protagonist of this story. The character arc she undergoes as the story progresses is very nonlinear due to the nature of the storytelling. Told in flashbacks from days leading up to “The Incident,” while switching to its aftermath (in the present), Mallory attempts to find her missing friend with the help of ex-friends Ingrid and Kath. When Jennifer goes missing, the entire town is shaken up. Mallory, our narrator, is at the heart of the tragedy. The book starts out framing Mallory as a popular girl at the top of her middle school social hierarchy, with Reagan and Tess as her closest friends. As both plot lines progress, however, Keller’s clever narrative choices carefully examine themes of change, social structures, bullying, and friendship through a realistic, honest point of view. The storyline leading up to “The Incident” starts when Jennifer Chan moves into the house across the street. Mallory’s lens through which she views the world shifts. Jennifer Chan is, as the book describes her, extraterrestrial. Mallory befriends her when she first moves to Nowhereville, but soon feels like she is forced to cut her off in order to maintain her perception in school. Mallory brings her past decisions to light and navigates her friendships with Ingrid and Kath, Reagan and Tess, but more specifically, her short-lived initial friendship with Jennifer, the titular character of the story, who believes we are not alone in our existence. She believes there are aliens somewhere, out there, and we learn about her backstory through snippets of her diary, titled “Jennifer Chan’s Guide To The Universe, Vol 1. through 7.” Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone is an incredibly relatable and gripping mystery/middle school drama that uses its narrator to weave together a story about self-identity, and I found myself and my friends throughout the pages of the book. I would highly recommend this book to anyone and everyone. Jennifer Chan Is Not Alone by Tae Keller. Random House Books for Young Readers, 2022. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
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Poetry Soup Ep. 2 – “The Keeper of Sheep” by Fernando Pessoa
Ep. 2: “The Keeper of Sheep” by Fernando Pessoa Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Each episode, I’ll discuss a different poem and poet. Today, I’ll be talking about two different poets – one real and one fake. Can a poem be written by someone who doesn’t even exist? “The Keeper of Sheep” is written by Alberto Caeiro, which is a heteronym invented by the poet and writer Fernando Pessoa. A heteronym is different from a pseudonym, because a pseudonym is just a name, while a heteronym is an entire personality. I’ll talk more about the heteronym Alberto Caeiro later. But first, a little bit about Fernando Pessoa. Fernando Pessoa was born on June 13, 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal. When Pessoa was six years old, he made up his first heteronym, a man by the name of Chevalier de Pas. Pessoa created at least seventy-two heteronyms throughout his lifetime. Pessoa was a poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher, and philosopher. He was deeply influenced by English poets like William Shakespeare and Percy Bysshe Shelley. You can also see the influence of Walt Whitman in much of Pessoa’s work, including the poem we’ll be reading today. Fernando Pessoa died on November 30, 1935, in Lisbon, Portugal, at the age of 47. But now there’s another poet to talk about – Alberto Caeiro. In creating Caeiro, Pessoa had come up with a whole new personality with an entire history. Caeiro has had only a grade school education – he is a peasant who is in touch with his surroundings and is greatly influenced by them, yet not curious about their existence. According to Pessoa, Alberto Caeiro does not question the things around him – he has interesting ideas, but he simply takes in his surroundings without asking “why.” Speaking in the voice of another heteronym, Ricardo Reis, Pessoa said, “Caeiro, like Whitman, leaves me perplexed. We are thrown off our critical attitude by so extraordinary a phenomenon. We have never seen anything like it. Even after Whitman, Caeiro is strange and terrible, appallingly new.” Based on the personality of the heteronym Fernando Pessoa might be writing under at the time, the perspective of the poems differed in this way. Octavio Paz even called Caeiro the “innocent poet.” Since “The Keeper of Sheep” is a long poem, I’m only going to read part one and part nine. However, these parts are amazing even by themselves! I never kept sheep, But it’s as if I’d done so. My soul is like a shepherd. It knows wind and sun Walking hand in hand with the Seasons Observing, and following along. All of Nature’s unpeopled peacefulness Comes to sit alongside me. Still I’m sad, as a sunset is To the imagination, When it grows cold at the end of the plain And you feel the night come in Like s butterfly through the window, But my sadness is comforting Because it’s right and natural And because it’s what the soul should feel When it already thinks it exists And the hands pick flowers And the soul takes no notice. Like the clanking of cowbells Beyond the bend in the road, My thoughts are happy. My only regret is knowing they’re happy Because if I didn’t know it, They’d be glad and happy Instead of unhappy and glad. Thinking is discomforting like walking in the rain When the wind increases, making it look as if it’s raining harder. I’ve no ambitions or desires. My being a poet isn’t an ambition. It’s my way of being alone. And if sometimes in my fancy I desire to be a lamb (Or the whole flock of sheep So I can go over the hillside And be many happy things at the same time), It’s only because I feel what I’m writing when the sun sets Or when a cloud’s hand passes over the light And a silence runs off through the grass. When I sit down to write a poem Or when ambling along the main roads and bypaths, I write lines on the paper of my thoughts, I feel the staff in my hands And glimpse an outline of myself On top of some low-lying hill, Watching over my flock and seeing my ideas, Or watching over my ideas and seeing my flock, And smiling vaguely like one who doesn’t understand what’s said And likes to pretend he does. I greet everyone who’ll read me, Tipping my wide-brimmed hat to them As they see me at my door Just as the coach tips the top of the hill. I salute them and wish them sunshine, And rain when rain is called for, And may their houses contain Near an open window Somebody’s favorite chair Where they sit, reading my poems. And when reading my poems thinkin Of me as something quite natural – An ancient tree, for instance, In whose shade they thumped down When they were children, tired after play, Wiping the sweat off their hot foreheads With the sleeve of their striped smocks. (Translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown) “The Keeper of Sheep” is a beautiful poem, and this is proven even in just the first part. Referring to the title, the poem is technically about “a” keeper of sheep, and Caeiro proves that he both is and is not this shepherd. He does not have any sheep, and therefore he does not watch over any – but his mind is full and he is content with his thoughts, which he must arrange and keep, like sheep. This is an extended conceit – it’s a metaphor that runs throughout the entire poem. So, really, this poem, like so many poems, is about Caeiro’s mind and his being a poet. Caeiro also says how he wants to be a lamb, or, in fact, a whole flock of lambs (so he can be “many happy things at the same time.”) So, basically, referring back to the extended
Poetry Soup Ep. 1: “The Painter” by John Ashbery
Mission Statement A lot of people don’t realize how great poetry can be, and there are very few places where young people can be introduced to great poets. I created Poetry Soup to share my love for poetry and to inspire others to read more of it. In this podcast, which will come out 1-2 times a month, I will read and discuss poems by some of my favorite poets, such as Wislawa Szymborska, Tomaz Salumun, and Wallace Stevens. I hope you enjoy it! Ep. 1: “The Painter” by John Ashbery Transcript Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Each episode, I’ll discuss a different poem and poet. Today, I’ll be talking about a sestina by John Ashbery. Imagine a painter that could never even begin a single painting. This is the subject of John Ashbery’s “The Painter.” This poem is a beautiful sestina (we’ll talk more about sestinas later) that Conner, the instructor of one of the Stone Soup writing workshops, brought up in one of his classes. John Ashbery was born on July 28, 1927, in Rochester, New York, the US. He was a member of the New York School of Poets, a group of poets, many of whom lived in New York City, who had similar writing styles. The school included some of my favorite poets. James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, and Frank O’Hara were all members. Ashbery wrote a lot during his lifetime, including a novel called A Nest of Ninnies (published in 1969) with Schuyler and many poetry collections, including Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, which was published in 1975 and won three awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Award. Ashbery also penned several plays and was an art critic (in fact, a book called Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by Daniel Bergman, was published in 1989, containing Ashbery’s collected art reviews). Ashbery’s poems were also compiled into Collected Poems, 1956-1987, which made Ashbery the first poet to ever be published in the Library of America (LOA) series. John Ashbery died on September 3, 2017, in Hudson, New York, US, at the age of 90. Now I’m going to read “The Painter.” Afterwards, I’ll talk about it! Sitting between the sea and the buildings He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait. But just as children imagine a prayer Is merely silence, he expected his subject To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, Plaster its own portrait on the canvas. So there was never any paint on his canvas Until the people who lived in the buildings Put him to work: “Try using the brush As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait, Something less angry and large, and more subject To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.” How could he explain to them his prayer That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas? He chose his wife for a new subject, Making her vast, like ruined buildings, As if, forgetting itself, the portrait Had expressed itself without a brush. Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer: “My soul, when I paint this next portrait Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.” The news spread like wildfire through the buildings: He had gone back to the sea for his subject. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! Too exhausted even to lift his brush, He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer Now, of putting ourselves on canvas, Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!” Others declared it a self-portrait. Finally all indications of a subject Began to fade, leaving the canvas Perfectly white. He put down the brush. At once a howl, that was also a prayer, Arose from the overcrowded buildings. They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer. This is a miraculous example of a sestina — but what is a sestina? A sestina is a poetic form with all lines ending the same way. Did you notice how certain words repeated throughout the poem? Those are the six end words. Each line has to end with them, but they shift position in different stanzas. Each stanza has six lines. Each line ends with a word. The last word of the last line is the word that ends the first line of the next stanza. The end word of the first line becomes the end word of the second line. It’s a really complicated pattern, so it’s always helpful to have an example poem! A sestina has seven stanzas. The last stanza has three lines and uses two of the end words in each line. Sometimes, because this form can be restrictive, sestinas can sound clunky. “The Painter,” however, has done a very good job of flowing just like a free-form poem should. Now I am led to talk about the poem itself. I’m not trying to be cliche when I say that this poem emphasizes the power of creativity. In the beginning of the poem, the painter sits and stares at the sea — but he doesn’t paint. The people in the buildings tell him to “try using the brush” and actually paint something. They tell him that if he can’t paint the sea, he should choose something else for his subject, so he chooses his wife. However, the painter still does not draw anything and returns to the sea as his subject. The ending of his poem is strange. The people become so angry that they throw his canvas off the top of the building into the ocean — but even though he has not painted anything, he is so involved in his art that the blank portrait has become himself. They are one and the same. In the last line, “as though
