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ResourcesGail Mazur, "Baseball" www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticle ID=526 Hughes, "Mother to Son" www.favoritepoem.org/poems/hughes/
www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15211
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16635
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16020 Elizabeth Bishop, "Sestina" www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/03/ahead/sestina/html
http://www.slate.com/id/2120980/ Week 7: Here's former poet laureate Billy Collins' "American Sonnet": If a writer is the sum of his or her influences, then my own poems are unavoidably the result of my exposure to the sounds and styles of both British and American poetry. I even find myself playing one diction off against another, usually for ironic effect. But more specifically, in thinking about myself as an "American poet," and thus committing the dangerous act of auto-literary criticism, I find that a number of my poems seem determined to establish an American rootedness distinct from European influence. "American Sonnet," for example, is a rejection of the Italian and English sonnet models in favor of the American postcard which, like the sonnet, limits expression to a confined space and, in addition, combines the verbal on one side with the pictorial on the other. Like the traditional love sonnet, the traveler's postcard has acquired its own ritualized conventions. The poem opens with an uncharacteristic "we," as if I were speaking for all American poets. AMERICAN SONNET We do not speak like Petrarch or wear a hat like Spenser but the picture postcard, a poem on vacation, We write on the back of a waterfall or lake, We locate an adjective for weather. and hide the wish that we were where you are, A slice of this faraway place, a width of white beach, and you will toss on the table this reversible display; The ironic literary play of the first part of the poem gives way to a small drama of separation, distance, and longing. The poem tries, but of course fails, to mix irony and emotion with such equality as to achieve a perfectly ambiguous tone.
American sonnets--Here's an example of a series that uses the Petrarchan sonnet structure, but isn't in strict iambic pentameter and doesn't employ end rhyme. I wrote these afte reading Virgil's Georgics, a long four-part poem on farming; crops, animal husbandry, winemaking, and beekeping. It's really about our life on earth. The final section also tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. This is my version of it. --Joyce BROWNFIELD SONNETS
What’s the Latin word for hayfield? Virgil’s mum in his instructive Georgics, though my neighbors talk of nothing but: how weeks of cool rain forced the upright grass— seed ready to burst from fuzzy heads too wet to cut, releasing to the wind goodness that should be stuffed above a stall, or pulled by steers from round bales. In Maine, 2005, a man can lose sleep over the price of gas pitching Canada’s alfalfa out of reach. He can’t walk away from braying cattle; either he feeds or shocks them up the trailer ramp, so many pounds of flesh for here or to go, with golden fries.
Virgil doesn’t mention chickens either. True, they’re lower than goats and maybe there’s nothing to advise but freshen their water and feed. An oven-stuffer roaster’s never sacrificed to Jupiter or Pan; no eggs decorate the altar. Chicks don’t require breeding, herdsmen, or a shepherdess. Left alone with scratch for a week, they’ll thrive; a wash of roost paint smothers hen disease. Yet why not praise the flock whose yield is easier to get than milk or fleece, their preening, companionable gabble funny, the rooster’s brag a brassy sleepers, wake!
I think I know the guy who backpacks up to Patton’s tract, tending his dope. He plants between slash piles on paper company land, the fresh clearcut tilled by a skidder’s chains. Tree limbs, bulldozed like garbage at the dump, baffle a helicopter’s jittery light and lens; and, sprayed with liquid soap, repel Bambi’s hungry muzzle. Mulched by duff, ditched, fertilized—not long before stems topple in dreadlock-headed flower. Like the raccoon who smells ripe corn, husking every ear of Silver Queen the night before my annual Corn Boil, I’ll snap the palm-tree fronds unfurled like parasols, and bag his stash. 4. Mist There’s a place where Shepard River mist crawls up the shady bank and over the road. As you step through its otherworldly chill, the spring-fed stream, rain-flushed, hurries voices of the dead to Biddeford Pool, so many notes colliding in one chord, the pressure hurts your ears. You listen for your mother’s milk-paint recipe, dad’s worst fish story—unsure what the bodiless discuss, or how. Mosquitoes vibrate from the puddle in the palm of every leaf, falsetto mob at your collar crying for blood; you walk a few feet into sun, where fog transpires and mud, gumming your instep, cracks to dust. Poet's Choice By Robert Pinsky Sunday, October 1, 2006; Page BW12 South African poet Ingrid de Kok has written poems about her country's historic transition from apartheid. They include accounts of testimony given to the new South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, childhood memories that reach to the time of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, and images of machinery lifting statues of the old regime's leaders away from their pedestals. A volume of new and selected poems by de Kok, Seasonal Fires , brings together three earlier books, the first published in 1988. This publication introduces an impressive poet to American readers. De Kok offers, among other things, a vision of her country through the lens of poetry. The social problems and political history of South Africa sharpen a general question for art: How does a relatively privileged artist register deprivation or suffering without emphasizing her advantaged viewpoint? How to avoid condescension, exoticism or mere tongue-clicking? With attention, and imagination:
THE HEAD OF THE HOUSEHOLD is a girl of thirteen and her children are many. Left-overs, moulting gulls, wet unweaned sacks she carries them under her arms and on her back though some must walk beside her bearing their own bones and mash when not on the floor in sickness and distress rolled up in rows
facing the open stall. Moon and bone-cold stars navigational spoor for ambulance, hearse, the delivery vans that will fetch and dispatch the homeless, motherless unclean and dead and a girl of thirteen, children in her arms, house balanced on her head. The concluding rhyme of "dead" and "head"; other phrases and sounds, such as "rolled up in rows" and "fetch and dispatch"; the arresting, unconventional images of children as "moulting gulls" and "unweaned sacks"; the heartbreaking yet antic final image of the child with a "house balanced on her head" on a continent where people do carry things balanced on the head: All are part of the poem's imaginative energy. Simple phrases such as "sickness and distress" establish moral, as well as stylistic, balance. At the same time, the poem's inventive movement and sound, its fresh imagery, convey empathy as an active striving, not a settled or complacent state. The engaged kinetic work of de Kok's language, manifesting the distance between poet and child, constitutes respect for that other soul, vivid and distinct. (Ingrid de Kok's poem "The Head of the Household" is from her book "Seasonal Fires: New and Selected Poems." Seven Stories. 2006 by Ingrid de Kok.)
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