Charlie Blondell - Assignment 3

"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" was written by American poet Wallace Stevens, one of the prominent figures in the modernism movement. The poem has 13 individual stanzas that each have unique descriptions of the activities of a blackbird. Although nontraditional haiku is used in the poem, imagery is the main writing technique used to convey the author's intent. Stevens references to snow and winter twice in the poem, at the beginning and end of the piece, giving the reader a sense of a full circle. The description of a circle is also stated in one of the stanzas when the author claims that the blackbird "marked the edge of one of many circles" when it flew out of sight. The circle referred to is the round shape of our vision because of the shape of our eyes. In retrospect, this is supposed to illustrate how everything we see and do in our lives comes in full rotation, that everything is a cycle. Another point, directly about the blackbird, is the fact that blackbirds, like many other things in our life, are maybe never noticed or acknowledged, but do have significance and would be missed if they were absent. Stevens claims that a man and a woman make one, and a man and a woman and a blackbird also make one. Here, he is claiming that the blackbird is a key piece in our life, and it does not need to have a positive or negative effect to be important.

Jackson Pollack was one of the most unique visual artists in the twentieth century and influential persons of the abstract expressionist movement. His work consisted of large canvases of seemingly unplanned and random blobs of paint scattered around the board. He claimed that "it doesn't make much difference how the pain is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement." I could not agree more. Art is all about preference. No right nor wrong conclusion can be made about an artists interpretation or personal expression. Critique is only necessary for newspaper articles and online blogs. As Pollack said, pain is individual. However, pain can be something to be empathized. In that statement alone, it is clear that although feelings can be expressed in completely creative and individual ways, they can be shared to a broad spectrum of interested consumers.