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Assignments 9/8--Workshop group A: Samantha Deal, Michele Harris, Shea Mullaney, Jon Papas, Angela Voras-Hills TO ACCESS THE SITE: o USERNAME: cwpesser o PASSWORD: cwpesser ·TO POST WORK (PERSONAL USERNAME/PASSSWORD): o USERNAME: The first part of your e-mail address, up to the @ symbol (must match exactly) §Ex: forsyth@hotmail.com, username is “forsyth” §Ex: john.doe001@umb.edu, username is “john.doe001” o PASSWORD: The last four digits of your Student ID §Ex: Student ID is UMS 123456789, password is “6789” If you've used the system before, your password raises the last digit of your ID to the next #. In the example above, "6789" would become "6780" POSTING WORK To post an assignment on the site, click the icon for “Writing Room.” This will prompt you to enter your personal username and password (see above). From there you have the option to do several things. Click the link which says “Post assignment.” You will have to enter an assignment number, and a title. You can type right in the “content” box but here are a few suggestions: ·SPELLCHECK: This site does not have a spell check function. I find it best to type in WORD and copy and paste the work into the content box. ·WATCH FOR FORMATTING: Some of the formatting can be lost when you copy and paste from WORD, so if formatting is crucial to your piece, you’ll want to go back and adjust that. There are no underline or bold functions. ·WATCH THE TIME: If you are composing in the content box, keep an eye on the time. If you do not click “post” within 30 minutes, your session will time out and you will have to start over. ·NUMBERING ASSIGNMENTS: All assignments must be tagged with a whole number. (ex. 1, 2, 3, etc. Tags such as “1.1” or “1a” will NOT work). A number cannot be repeated. Talk with your professor about his or her preferences with regards to numbering assignment revisions or updates. ·REVISING/UPDATING ASSIGNMENTS: Once an assignment is posted, you may not edit or revise it. If you make changes to your original piece and whish to post your updates you will need to do so with a brand new posting/assignment number. Make sure you do not assign this a number which your professor will use for future assignments. ·A NOTE ABOUT ANONYMITY: There isn’t any. Everything you post will be flagged with your name, as well as the date and time you posted. Please bear this in mind when posting responses to the work of others, as well as assignments on deadline.
VIEWING THE WORK There are two ways you can view the work your classmates have posted. Both of these links are in the top right of your course homepage. ·CLASS PORTFOLIO: This will show you all of the assignments everyone in the class has posted. It will organize them by number, so you will see everyone’s posting for assignment #1, followed by everyone’s posting for assignment #2, etc. The titles for the assignments will show up as links, and you can view a posting by clicking on its title. ·STUDENT PROFILES: If you click on this link you will see a list of all of your classmates’ names. If you would like to see a particular person’s work, click on the “View Detail” link in the field all the way to the right. This will show you links to all of the assignments that student has posted. The “Student Profiles” page will also allow you to view everyone’s e-mail address. RESPONDING TO WORK Once you have opened an assignment someone has posted, you can then respond to the work. At the top of the assignment page you will see a link which says, “Post your comment.” This will open a new window and you will be prompted to give your personal name and password. You will then enter your comment in that window. Click “Post” when you are finished. Posted comments will appear below the original assignment and the name of the respondent will appear with them. Everyone has access to view others’ assignments and responses. PROVIDING ADDITIONAL INFORMATION You’ll notice that when you log in to the writing room, you also have the option to “Provide some additional information about yourself.” If you choose to do this, this information will appear at the top of your “Student Profile” page, along with your picture. Everything you post will be visible to your classmates and your professor 9/22 Southeast Corner The School of Beauty's a tavern now. The Madame is underground. Out at Lincoln, among the graves Her own is early found. Cuts grandly into the air The Madame lies contentedly. Her fortune, too, lies there, Converted into cool hard steel And right red velvet lining; While over her tan impassivity Shot silk is shining. Gwendolyn Brooks Aunt Jennifer's Tigers Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid. Adrienne Rich
The Man with Night Sweats I wake up cold, I who Prospered through dreams of heat Wake to their residue, Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield: Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored The body I could trust Even while I adored The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in Each challenge to the skin.
I cannot but be sorry The given shield was cracked, My mind reduced to hurry, My flesh reduced and wrecked.
I have to change the bed, But catch myself instead
Stopped upright where I am Hugging my body to me As if to shield it from The pains that will go through me,
As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
Thom Gunn
9/29 Acquainted With the Night I have been one acquainted with the night. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet But not to call me back or say good-bye; Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. A Silken Tent She is as in a field a silken tent Robert Frost
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning; but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply. And in my heart there sits a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.
MY FIRST POEM FOR YOU Kim Addonizio (1954- )
I like to touch your tattoos in complete darkness, when I can’t see them. I’m sure of where they are, know by heart the neat lines of lightning pulsing just above your nipple, can find, as if by instict, the blue swirls of water on your shoulder where a serpent twists, facing a dragon. When I pull you to me, taking you until we’re spent and quiet on the sheets, I love to kiss the pictures on your skin. They’ll last until you’re seared to ashes; whatever persists or turns to pain between us, they will still be there. Such permanence is terrifying. So I touch them in the dark; but touch them, trying.
From “Their Eyes Were Opened” Ann Marie Macari
XXII (Gold Littering Sidewalks) Gold littering sidewalks, fire falling from branches. Autumn’s last rush when I feel stripped, undone as a tree heading toward its long sleep, unable to escape. When the trees shake and burn to their essence grief comes on me sudden and deep. Don’t tell me to rise above it. Don’t say the body’s a ladder, start to climb. I’m rubbing myself in ash, I’m down to gristle and ember. I don’t think I can go any farther. Grasses afire, crackling in the wind. Leaves raining from volcanic trees, it’s the day before the last day, before the last day. I’m burning my stem, my shell, my seed.
(Compare this, Millay sonnet, and Shakespeare’s #73) 10/6: The ballad traditionally uses "common meter," or a 4/3/4/3 pattern in each 4 line stanza. But it's better described as accentual rather than metrical. Ballad of Birmingham "Mother dear, may I go downtown "No, baby, no, you may not go, "But, mother, I won't be alone. "No, baby, no, you may not go, She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair, The mother smiled to know that her child For when she heard the explosion, She clawed through bits of glass and brick, Dudley Randall (1914-2000) Ballad of the Landlord Landlord, landlord, Landlord, landlord, Ten Bucks you say I owe you? What? You gonna get eviction orders? Um-huh! You talking high and mighty. Police! Police! Copper’s whistle! Precinct Station. Seamus Heaney on translating Beowulf, with sample passages: <http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/beowulf/introbeowulf.htm>
10/20: Some poems in syllabics: <http://faculty.washington.edu/rmcnamar/383/syllreads.html> (Note that Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish" is a response to Moore's poem). The Thin Man Donald Justice I indulge myself Blues I am lazy, the laziest To think, in childhood I missed only I avoided sleep for years,
10/27: Ezra Pound: <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/pound/retrospect.htm> Denise Levertov: < http://ualr.edu/rmburns/RB/levline.html> Woods Hole Ferry
Crossing briefly this mirrory still Galilean blue water to the heaven of the affluent, the users-up, unconsciously remote from knowing themselves our owners and starvers, occupying as they always have, to no purpose, the mansions and the beauty of the earth for this short while before we all meet and enter at the same door.
Franz Wright Five Points Volume 9, Number 2 Wright uses an irregular free-verse line in many of his poems; here it’s particularly exaggerated, the first line 11 words long with 9 accented syllables, and line 8 containing 1 word, 1 stress. The number of stresses in each line varies without establishing a pattern. The poem creates coherence through its aggressive annotating line, with only one end-stopped before the final period. The reader can’t rest at the end of one line because the poem’s meaning depends on what follows each line ending.
* To Live By Work from the original toward the beautiful, unless the latter comes first in which case reverse your efforts to find a model worthy of such inane desire. Even the mouth's being divided into two lips is not enough to make words equal themselves. Eavesdroppers fear the hermit's soliloquy. Wake up, wound, the knife said. Knott mixes annotating and parsing lines that contain 3 or 2 stresses, creating a pattern that’s rhythmic but not metrical.
* Patience
Patience is wider than one once envisioned, with ribbons of rivers and distant ranges and tasks undertaken and finished with modest relish by natives in their native dress. Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable — a place with its own harvests. Or that in time's fullness the diamonds of patience couldn't be distinguished from the genuine in brilliance or hardness.
Kay Ryan
Patience is wider than one once envisioned, with ribbons of rivers and distant ranges and tasks undertaken and finished with modest relish by natives in their native dress. Who would have guessed it possible that waiting is sustainable — a place with its own harvests. Or that in time's fullness the diamonds of patience couldn't be distinguished from the genuine in brilliance or hardness Which version is Ryan’s?
* Maiden Name My daughter's teacher is named Olenik — my maiden name, and Olenik was the name of a therapist I talked to once about my dread of lightning — I finally bought a lightning rod instead. There's even a Russian poet who spells his name with a c instead of a k but may share my taste for melancholy, my ice blue Slavic eyes. Are we defined by names, or was Adam merely arbitrary, pointing at some wooly creature and legislating: lamb? I was never really a maiden anyway, not the way I like to think of that word — Rapunzel or the milkmaids in Elizabethan lyrics, and I haven't used Olenik in fifty years. But hearing that name spill out again so casually from my daughter's shapely Olenik mouth is like waking up after a too long sleep and having to rub the syllables from my eyes. Volume 18, Number 4 My daughter's teacher is named Olenik — my maiden name, and Olenik was the name of a therapist I talked to once about my dread of lightning —I finally bought a lightning rod instead.
There's even a Russian poet who spells his name with a c instead of a k but may share my taste for melancholy, my ice blue Slavic eyes. Are we defined by names, or was Adam merely arbitrary, pointing at some wooly creature and legislating: lamb? I was never really a maiden anyway, not the way I like to think of that word —Rapunzel or the milkmaids in Elizabethan lyrics, and I haven't used Olenik in fifty years. But hearing that name spill out again so casually from my daughter's shapely Olenik mouth is like waking up after a too long sleep and having to rub the syllables from my eyes. What do Pastan’s line endings add to the prose meaning? Is there a more interesting poem to be made from the prose sentences by ending lines elsewhere, i.e., is the ambiguity created at the end of the enjambed first line fruitful?
* from Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures
From “Listening and Making:” Because rhythm has direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move, it is a power. And power is political (Hass, p. 108)
Sexual pleasure is a merging, a voluntary abandonment of the self; insight is freeing, the central experience of our own originality. We don’t know what death is. The wish behind the human play of artistic form is to know how these three are related: probably it is the hope that they are, or can be, the same thing. (Hass, p. 119)
It should be clear now that free-verse rhythm is not a movement between pattern and absence of pattern, but between phrases based on odd and even numbers of stresses. (Hass, p. 126) * Hass attempts to find a structure, similar to Williams’ “Variable foot,” (each 'foot'--or line-fragment--a held moment or unit of measure within an unfolding apperception) to describe stress patterns in free verse—each line a balance of stresses within phrases separated by one or more caesurae.
TURNing and TURNing in the WIDening GYRE (4) The FALcon CANnot HEAR the FALconer; (4) THINGS FALL aPART; /the CENtre CANnot HOLD; (3/3) MERE ANarchy is LOOSED upon the WORLD, (4) The BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE is LOOSED, /and EVerywhere (4/1) The CERemony of INnocence is DROWNED; (3) The BEST LACK ALL conVICtion, /while the WORST (4/1) Are FULL of PASsionate inTENsity. (3)
If Yeats had written:
The BLOOD-DIMMED TIDE is LOOSED; And EVerywhere the CERemony of Innocence is DROWNED; The BEST LACK ALL conVICtion, While the WORST are FULL of PASsionate inTENsity
the passage would not be less regular, but the sound has gone dead. The extra unstressed syllables in the second and fourth line make them seem to sprawl out, and the pattern of stresses feels leaden, fatal: 4, 4, 4, 4. As it is, Yeats gets the fatality but also a sense of something broken, unbalanced: 4/1, 3; 4/1, 3….[A]t the level of form the difference between the strategies of free and metrical verse is not very great (Hass, “Listening and Making,” p. 122).
Farm Picture
Through the AMPle OPen DOOR/ of the PEACEful COUNTry BARN, (3/3) A SUNlit PASture FIELD /with CATtle and HORSes FEEDing. (3/3) And HAZE and VISTA,/ and the FAR hoRIZon FADing aWAY (2/4)
Walt Whitman
The principle is that for a thing to be complete, it has to change. And the kind of change indicates how you feel about that fact.
#1 And haze, and vista.
#2 And haze, and vista, and the far horizon.
All of these [endings] seem plausible…the first…is balanced…To my ear, the last line is not excessively abrupt, but…throws a terrific weight of disappointment or longing onto what is not present, so…the last line, thunk/thunk, seems an ironic echo of the amplitude of the first lines. The second…is also balanced…too much so. If there is such a thing as sentimental form, this is sentimental form…there is no tension between the solidity of the barnyard and the hazy vista. (Hass, “Listening and Making,” p. 124-5) 11/3--Long line poems and poems in sections: Jane Kenyon, “Having It Out With Melancholy” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15920
Audio of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl,” plus video collage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWqHlcAmBeA Adrienne Rich, “Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law” http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/snapshots-of-a-da Melissa Green, “In Early April” http://www.poems.com/poem.php?date=13851
11/17--Three shaped poems: Easter Wings George Herbert
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee Oh let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne: And still with sicknesses and shame Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine And feel this day thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
To see the poems as it appears in the original 1633 edition, go to <http://www.ccel.org/h/herbert/temple/Easterwings.html>
John Hollander - Swan And Shadow Dusk Above the water hang the loud flies Here O so gray then What A pale signal will appear When Soon before its shadow fades Where Here in this pool of opened eye In us No Upon us As at the very edges of where we take shape in the dark air this object bares its image awakening ripples of recognition that will brush darkness up into light even after this bird this hour both drift by atop the perfect sad instant now already passing out of sight toward yet-untroubled reflection this image bears its object darkening into memorial shades Scattered bits of light No of water Or something across water Breaking up No Being regathered soon Yet by then a swan will have gone Yes out of mind into what vast pale hush of a place past sudden dark as if a swan sang
EGG-CANDLING Joyce Peseroff
Shadow=life in its thin citadel porous to light and air, the only place on earth able to produce a feather. A penlight’s probe determines whether the settlement will be vacant forever or hides hackles that might one morning, rising, crow.
Prose poems: Claudia Rankine, from “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely” http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19005
Prose poems by Russell Edson: http://www.poemhunter.com/russell-edson/
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