Seven seeds jill bialosky biography

View the Study Pack. Author Biography. Plot Summary. Historical Context. Critical Overview. Critical Essay 1. Critical Essay 2. Topics for Further Study. The bright light that the speaker has attempted to enclose and shut in her brain is moving out, in the simile itself, to the elements, just as the child is ready to be born into the natural world.

Lines 39 and 40 presumably refer to the unborn child, although of course she could not literally have planted any seeds. But perhaps more confusingly, they allude to a "mother's grief" that has not been established in the poem itself. Bialosky meditates throughout Subterranean on child suicide, child death, and death from premature birth, but it is unnecessary to stick firmly with one of these sources from the evidence in this poem.

In fact, from what has taken place so far in "Seven Seeds," this grief seems more likely to come from the mother's hesitancy to release her unborn daughter into the decaying garden of life and death. It remains unexplained, however, and this mother's grief could also refer to the poet's themes of unconfined versus confined desire. In the final two lines of the poem, the simile of the star of apple seeds and bright desire receives a final twist: the seeds have been planted in the garden to grow.

This is interesting because it makes the poet's thematic thinking about desire even more complex, as it turns the external meaning gone from closed in the speaker's brain to "exposed to the elements" and back again into something internal and growing. Bialosky merges her thoughts about birth and desire just as she merged Persephone and her daughter into a single, tempted being, and she manages to communicate a variety of complex insights about how these two ideas are secretly related in various internal and external spaces.

So one of the main themes of the poem is the consciousness of this mother—particularly how she reflects on the process of birth. In part she does so by imagining herself in the role of the child, desiring to come out of the womb but also finding a temptation to stay in this dark, confined, timeless place. Persephone's story provides a way for the mother to access her daughter's thoughts, as well as suggesting a variety of thoughts about how birth is connected with desire and temptation.

The bond between mother and daughter is something on which Bialosky is meditating very carefully, but she is also exploring themes suggested by the mythological reference to Persephone's temptation in the underworld. The poet is interested in the process of birth in the psyche of the mother, for example. The result is not a rigid argument, but a series of evocative observations, images, and unlikely associations, which displays Bialosky's unique perceptions about birth and what it is like to be a mother.

One of the themes Bialosky examines most thoroughly throughout Subterranean is the question of what constitutes desire—desire in love, as a mother, as an artist, and as a general or unspecified temptation. The speaker of the poem seems to desire the bright light outdoors, but she is also tempted by the interior, confined, indoor space. Similarly, Persephone in the imagination of the speaker desires to break from her confined underworld at the same time she desires the pomegranate seeds.

Bialosky is exploring the duality of desire before she goes on to tie it to the "veins and arteries" of the cherry tree and the "crimson" lips of the mythical figure having succumbed to temptation. Desire is established as a complex idea, both dangerous and divine, related to grief and death but also to growth and creation. Mythological allusion is a vital element of "Seven Seeds.

The Demeter-Persephone myth provides the poet with a common basis that readers can understand and allows her to allude to a seven seeds jill bialosky biography of images and thoughts outside the restricted and relatively small world of her current work. She is thereby able to develop something more than a simple impression, something that comments on the fundamental assumptions and values of Western society.

Alluding to mythology also adds a sense of timelessness and erudition to the work, although some readers may not be familiar with the myth or its contemporary associations. As noted in the poem summary above, Bialosky sometimes imbues non-human objects with human characteristics. The two main examples of this occur in lines 4—5, when leaves are given "arteries," and in lines 36—37, when an apple is given "flesh.

Personification enhances Bialosky's ability to underscore the melding of the worlds of the speaker, her daughter, and Persephone, because it melds character to place and makes identity more fluid.

Seven seeds jill bialosky biography: Author Biography. Jill Bialosky

For example, the first instance of personification allows the reader to imagine that the arteries of the speaker are extending into the garden, and the second instance binds the child in a physical way to her mother's brain, as well as the garden. Personification also serves as a connecting point for these key ideas, since a similar stylistic technique makes the reader think of its other instance, particularly in a case such as this where both examples are tied to the garden.

The other reason this device is particularly suitable for "Seven Seeds" is that a key character in the poem, Demeter, is an inherent example of personification. The earth goddess is, in a sense, the "garden" imbued with human characteristics. The key stylistic devices in "Seven Seeds" are the extended comparisons that overlap and form layers in order to provide a complex and carefully structured visual poem.

The speaker begins by comparing herself to a bird "confined to her nest. Then the second stanza begins by giving plant qualities with the word "sprouted" to an unborn child. These layers of comparison continue until the simile in the lines thirty-five to thirty-eight of a star of apple seeds being compared to a light in the speaker's brain.

All of these comparisons are carefully employed in order to highlight thematic considerations, and to create a visual sense of the ideas in the poem. There is so much overlap and layering because the speaker overlaps her identity with those of her unborn daughter and the mythical figure of Persephone. For example, when Persephone's lips are stained crimson, the poet is visually connecting them to the cherry tree and the apple and therefore, by simile, to the objects of desire connected to the garden.

This is a complex relationship the poet purposefully creates in order to express her ideas about what is connected in theme; this technique allows Bialosky to make her most important observations. She melds characters and ideas to suit her meditations, which are themselves complex themes that blend together. Following the comparison and visual connection of words and ideas allows for a much fuller understanding of both the style and the meaning of the poem.

Although many of her poems refer to the Midwest American homeland of her youth, Bialosky is part of the contemporary writing scene in New York City. She teaches a poetry workshop at Columbia University and has an influential role as a high-profile editor in the large publishing company W. But "Seven Seeds" is not easily associated with any particular aesthetic or poetic movement.

It has loose connections to postmodernism, an influential theoretical movement involving among other elements the abandonment of a traditional linear narrative. But this can be largely attributed to this theory's general influence on contemporary works; although the poem questions identity and jumps between time periods, it has no characteristics that strictly identify it as "postmodern.

A variety of cultural speculations are available from the other poems in Subterraneansuch as a resonance of Midwestern American life for an adolescent; nevertheless, the literal location of "Seven Seeds" is not specified. Perhaps this is partly because it allows more freedom for the speaker to enter an ancient mythological role-play. In fact, the most important historical and cultural background for the poem is the sustained classical reference in stanzas 3 and 4.

Sources provide varying reasons why the god of the underworld, Hades, seized Persephone from the meadow where she was playing, and raped her. Some say it was because he was struck in seven seeds jill bialosky biography at the order of the goddess Aphrodite, and some say he asked his brother Zeus beforehand if he could do so. In any case, the girl's mother Demeter, goddess of agriculture, became frantic and rendered the earth cold and barren of crops while searching for her lost daughter.

Demeter came to the pool through which Hades had entered the underworld, but the naiad Cyane, who used to live there, had been melted into a pool after trying to stop Hades from carrying down his victim, and could not tell Demeter what had happened. On the tenth day, however, Demeter discovered that Hades had captured Persephone and brought her to the underworld in his chariot.

The original Homeric hymn states that she heard this from Helios, the sun god, but Ovid's text mentions that she found out from Arethusa, a lover of the river god Alpheus. When Demeter learned of Persephone's abduction, she immediately appealed to Zeus that Hades bring her daughter back to her, saying in Metamorphoses that her daughter did not deserve to have a robber for a husband.

Zeus agrees that she can be released, but on one condition: the fates have forbidden anyone from eating food in the underworld before they are returned above, so Persephone must not have had anything to eat while with Hades.

Seven seeds jill bialosky biography: This concise study guide

Demeter soon learns, however, that her daughter has already eaten seven pomegranate seeds—either because Hades forced them into her mouth or because she was tempted of her own will. Persephone must therefore become the wife of Hades. But Demeter is too upset and the earth is too barren; so, not wishing to see the balance between mother and daughter destroyed, Zeus decides to make a compromise.

He decrees that Persephone may return to her mother for part of the year either one-half or one-third, depending on the source ; and this is why Demeter only allows crops to grow for part of the year.

Seven seeds jill bialosky biography: Editor, poet, and novelist Jill

Bialosky's Subterranean has been generally quite favorably reviewed. Critics such as the well-known Harold Bloom are quoted on the back of the collection itself with superlatives about her voice and style. Bialosky's "varied and original" aesthetic, and presents a list of the poet's ambitious thematic goals, including "Desire, virginity, fertility and motherhood, … the passions of her life before children, the seductions of suicide, and the comforts of art.

Not all commentary has been solely positive. A Publishers Weekly critic points out that Bialosky's tendency to focus on the ground of conventional wisdom is not very compelling: "The poems work this ground with manic insistence, and, despite the fervid effort, harvest insights that are curiously banal. A more long-term critical response remains to be seen.

Trudell is a freelance writer with a bachelor's degree in English literature. In the following essay, Trudell discusses Bialosky's unique use of the Demeter-Persephone myth in her poem. The myth of Demeter and Persephone has been significant to American women's writing since the late nineteenth century. It provided a common groundwork for certain types of female artistic thinking during the industrial revolution, including the search for a feminine voice and identity within a male-dominated world.

Josephine Donovan writes in her book After the Fall : The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow that the myth "allegorizes the transformation from a matricentric preindustrial culture—Demeter's realm—to a male-dominated capitalist-industrialist ethos, characterized by growing professionalism and bureaucracy: the realm of patriarchal captivity;" to the authors in the title, the ancient story was an appropriate metaphor for the female experience at this time of social upheaval.

Donovan's book goes on to describe how authors such as these formed a tradition of interpreting the myth. Bialosky, writing over a hundred years later, inevitably works out of this tradition as well. Critical Essay 1. Critical Essay 2. Topics for Further Study.

Seven seeds jill bialosky biography: An introduction to Seven Seeds

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