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Resourceshughes, "Mother to Son" The Academy of American Poets - In the Waiting Room, Elizabeth Bishop Donald Hall: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/264 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16269 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16635 Jane Kenyon: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/361 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15916 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16087 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16088 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15920 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16019 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16020 sestina, Elizabeth Bishop Katha Pollitt's retelling assumes you know the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah from the Bible (you must cut & paste this into your browser): http://www.slate.com/id/2120980/ Poems by readers this semester: The Elimination of First Thoughtsby Robin BeckerI can imagine a composure that has nothing Last Poem in May After the late spring storm, Nervous mourning doves circle The loam turns black and gold, For each of us, there is a place we dare not enter This is why the dead never come back:
Age of Vanya by Jeffrey Harrison Three months after my brother’s death,
A few years earlier, over Christmas, Andy and I
Approaching forty-seven myself now, I can say
11/8--Here 's the poem I mentioned in class. "Aubade" means "morning song," usually a poem spoken by a lover at daybreak, when the lovers must part. Philip Larkin uses the term ironically to title a poem about insomnia and death. Larkin was a British poet who died about 10 years ago; he cultivated an image as a misanthrope and anti-Modernist. He was a "mouldy fig" who loved American jazz before it was influenced by musicians like Charlie Parker. This is a special way of being afraid And so it stays just on the edge of vision, Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. Philip Larkin Excerpts from a review of Miller WillIams' Making A Poem from The Arkansas Gazette (Williams was a professor at he Univ. of Arkansas): Q. To ask the usual last question first, what question would you like asked about Making a Poem ? And would you please answer that question ? A. The question: What’s the most important thing the book says about a poem ? The answer: It discusses, among other matters, the two most important things about writing and reading a poem: How does a poem begin and how does it end. It’s essential that a poem begin as clearly the poet’s reporting an event or state of mind recognizably out of the poet’s own day. It is equally important that the poem as it ends belongs to the reader, so that the reader is inclined to say, “This poem was written about me !” A great deal of what the poet does through the lines of the poem are aimed at this transition. It’s important to recognize that it can’t take place unless the reader knows how to help a poem happen.... In the opening lines of the book’s initial and key essay, “Nobody Plays the Piano but We Like to Keep It in the House,” Williams offers us an insight into the way the poet sees: “We live in a haunted world. We are surrounded by ghosts. Reminders of past and nearly forgotten days are all about us, things neither alive nor dead from an old world. We see them, but we may not notice. We may not recognize them as ghosts, relics of a nearly forgotten past. The buttons on a man’s coat sleeve, which once held his lace cuff out of his soup; the touching of glasses in a toast, which is what we have left from the days when two royal friends would mix a bit of their drinks together to assure each other that no poisoning was going on; the shaking of hands, which was once a way of showing a person we met that we carried no weapon.” What poets do — what Williams does — is case this shadowland beneath the surface and report back to us on what is really going on. And he does this with words, which are themselves haunted, which resonate differently in every head. (No one reads the same poem. ) Words are mutable, associations attach to them, over time they may get chewed so much they lose flavor or they might acquire an interesting patina....
Williams is arguing, in this first essay, that there is a human need for art — for considering the very real world that can only be perceived indirectly, that “will not be looked at straight,” that can be “seen only out of the corner of the eye.” We all have this need for spiritual refreshment, for a completing “meaning” of our existence, a thirst for communion with “whatever gods may be,” whether we can ascribe to them personalities or not. One of the secrets of poetry is that it means more than it says, it instructs by indirection, by reminding of us of what we already understand about the world. Poetry confirms what we didn’t know we knew. “A great deal of the experience of poetry lies in this indirection,” Williams writes. “When we turn our eyes to the denotation of a poem, it has a way of slipping from our field of vision, but we come to the experience of the poem, not by paraphrase, to an insight, an awareness about people that we didn’t have before.” While Williams doesn’t believe that just anyone can be a poet — he believes talents are real and distributed, that we all have different proclivities and gifts — he does believe there is a universal appetite for the poetic, and that it’s often stunted by “adult” literal-mindedness. Just as the wonderfully messy and vibrant finger paintings of young children inevitably give way to pained and crimped drawings as they begin to learn rules and color within the lines, so the “natural poetic impulse” of children is attenuated before “they ever begin school, as when a child runs into the house saying, ‘There’s a lion in the yard !’ and we say ‘Don’t be silly, that’s a dog. You know the difference between a dog and a lion. ’”.... Because, Williams writes, “to the child, the thing in the yard was not a dog, it was a lion, because looking at it the child felt ‘ lion’, not ‘dog.’ The child senses that the dimensions of a thing are not the essence of a thing, that what something does to us is part of its essential nature, and so a child describes a thing in terms of its effects. So does a poem. The poet and the child are interested not in how many feet there are in a mile but how many steps there are.”....
From Robert Pinsky's "Poet's Choice," Washington Post, 11/12/06: We take for granted that rhyme is a traditional element of English poetry, but it didn't become one until Shakespeare's time. Here Pinsky discusses a poem by Ben Jonson bemoaning this new development. "Not a poet in an age worth crowning. All good poetry . . . flown." So say some readers about modern poetry, and so, too, says Ben Jonson (1572-1637) about his own time, in his poem "A Fit of Rime Against Rime." Jonson blames rhyme, that vulgar invention that has ruined true poetry. The ancient Greeks and Romans, as he points out, did not use rhyme, except for a rare comic effect of deliberate, silly jangling. (Milton in "Paradise Lost," like Shakespeare in his tragedies, chose unrhymed verse.) Jonson calls rhyme "lazy thou" -- and relishing the paradox, he denounces the despised device in rhyming lines: A FIT OF RIME AGAINST RIME Rime the rack of finest wits, That expresseth but by fits, True Conceipt. Spoyling Senses of their Treasure, Cosening Judgement with a measure, But false weight. Wresting words, from their true calling; Propping Verse, for feare of falling To the ground. Joynting Syllabes, drowning Letters, Fastning Vowells, as with fetters They were bound! Soone as lazie thou wert knowne, All good Poetrie hence was flowne, And Art banish'd. Jonson's rhyme for that last phrase is, "And wit vanish'd." He adds, "Not a worke deserving Baies" -- that is, the honor of laurel -- and "Not a lyne deserving praise." It is amusing to find Shakespeare's great contemporary denouncing the poetry of their time as newfangled, and in particular for using rhyme, a technique that in our own time, for some readers, may seem like tradition itself. That comedy of historical perspective is enriched and complicated by Jonson's ability to rhyme so cleverly, and fluently, in his denunciation. He closes his poem by cursing whoever invented " Tyrant Rime": He that first invented thee, May his joynts tormented bee,
Cramp'd for ever; Still may Syllabes jarre with time, Still may reason warre with rime, Resting never. May his Sense when it would meet The cold tumor in his feet, Grow unsounder, And his Title be long foole, That in rearing such a Schoole, Was the founder. Jonson clearly enjoys pointing out how cramping rhyme is, how it conflicts with reason, to the point of war. He also clearly enjoys contradicting that point by using the hated jingle-jangle with apparent ease and athletic grace. His phrase "the cold tumor in his feet" associates actual, physical stumbling with ineffective metrical feet. The poem is a reminder that poetry is physical and must be heard. To detect the difference between Robert Frost and a rhyming hack -- or between William Carlos Williams and a free-verse hack -- we need to listen. (Ben Jonson's poem "A Fit of Rime Against Rime" is available in collections of his poetry.)
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