POEM#5: Point of View Poem

Point: a spatial metaphor.  Imagine the person (poet or narrator of the poem) as a camera placed here or there, recording only the images visible from that spot.  This may mean, besides physical placement, placement in an unfolding story (in time, in a social situation), in a developing argument (in an intellectual context), and (most difficult to distinguish from tone or mood) in a psychic landscape.  Even in the trickiest of abstract circumstances, the essence of point of view is the relationship between a person and a set of circumstances.

Note the change in point of view between these two stanzas, and again in the second:

            How Western Underwear Came to Japan

            When Tokyo’s Shirokiya Drygoods caught fire

            in the thirties, shopgirls tore the shelves’ kimonos

            and knotted them in ropes.  Older women used

            both hands, descending safely from the highest floors

            though their underskirts flew up around their hips.

            The crowded street saw everything beneath—

            ankles, knees, the purple flanges of their sex.

            Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping

            one hand pinned against their skirts, against

            the nothing below and their silk falling.

                                                                        -Lucia Perillo

Or the dream-like shifting of point of view in the following poem:

            After the Attack

            The sick boy.

            Locked in a vision

with tongue stiff as a horn.

He sits with his back towards the painting of a wheatfield.

The bandage around his jaw reminds one of an embalming.

His spectacles are thick as a diver’s.  Nothing has any answer

and is sudden as a telephone ringing in the night.

But the painting there.  It is a landscape that makes one feel peaceful even though the wheat 

            is a golden storm.

Blue, fiery blue sky and driving clouds.  Beneath in the yellow waves

some white shirts are sailing: threshers—they cast no shadow.

At the far end of the field a man seems to be looking this way.  A broad hat leaves his face

            in shadow.

He seems to look at the dark shape in the room here, as though to help.

Gradually the painting begins to stretch and open behind the boy who is sick

and sunk in himself.  It throws sparks and makes noise.  Every wheathead throws off light

            as if to wake him up!

The other man—in the wheat—makes a sign.

He has come nearer.

            

No one notices it.

                                                            -Tomas Tranströmer

ASSIGNMENT POV

1.               Pick an event, or a scene (real or imagined) that interests you with its dramatic possibilities. 

2.               Keep it simple (a child falling off a jungle gym breaks her arm, an old man and old woman sitting in silence on a porch, a body in a morgue stirs).

  

3.               Investigate the event or the scene from different points of view (from inside the characters, from the eye of a fly-on-the-wall, from within the mind of an omniscient narrator, from the vantage point of an uninterested bystander or that of an interested voyeur).

4.               Use at least two different points of view in the composition of your poem.  You can separate them by stanza or numbered section like Perillo, or integrate them within the body of the poem like Tranströmer.

This is an assignment about generation.  Get down on paper too much information, and then winnow it back to what most interests you. How the different points of view play off one another will create energy and tension in your poem. The two (or more) points of view needn’t be oppositional to do so. Slight changes in perspective can be thought-provoking. The Law & Order franchise created decades of successful shows by utilizing just this tool. Not to mention CSI. How does shifting your point of view affect you as the writer? Can you learn more about the event you’ve chosen to illuminate by working in this way? Or do you just elaborate upon what you knew about the scene from the onset? Discovery works differently for different people. After you’ve completed this assignment, reflect on how these limitations did or did not work for you.

POEM#4: Syllabics

NOTE: I chose Making of a Poem and Rhyme's Reason as texts because they are simple and straightforward and will serve you for years and years as you try your hand at different strategies of poem-making. It is clear to me that several of you don't have (or are not looking at) these texts before you try your own poems. STOP THAT. The selections I have given are short--and if you read them they will serve you better than any lecture I could give, thus leaving time for workshopping. To write a poem well... you must be in the habit of reading poems... also an art.

Read: MoP (136-155). RR (17-25). And below.

The first poems many of you ever wrote were haiku—a verse form borrowed from the Japanese in which each line has a prescribed number of syllables: 5,7,5 (this, regardless of the number of stresses). Japanese, as well as other languages which tend to emphasize stressed syllables less (Finnish, modern French) have several forms that organize their poetry by counting syllables rather than stress (in English—the most common type of verse form is that organized along an accentual-syllabic [stress-counting] meter, as in iambic pentameter [Shakespeare and sonnets], iambic trimester and tetrameter [ballads], and the more galloping anapestic and dactylic feet—see Rhyme’s Reason).  However, many poets in English have fallen in love with the more subtle number-pleasure that syllabics offer and have organized their poems accordingly in one of two ways.  


1. By having all lines of a certain length of syllables:

(7)   In My Craft or Sullen Art   BY DYLAN THOMAS

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

(10)   Lions Are Interesting   BY JOEL BROUWER

Each morning in the little white cabin   

by the river they woke to a raccoon   

clawing under the floorboards or banging   

in the wood stove. They did not discuss this.   

Instead they said it was a perfect day   

to pick blueberries on the hill, or that   

a hike to the old glassworks sounded good.   

They were beginning to speak not in meat   

but in the brown paper the butcher wraps   

around it. Brown paper around dirty   

magazines. Like dirty magazines, they   

only traced the contour of substance: silk   

over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over   

bone. What’s under bone? Marrow? Their forks so   

small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell   

dolls from animals because the latter   

are made of meat. Many eat it, also.   

Lions are interesting. Lions don’t eat   

the flesh of their kills right away, but first   

lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched   

nearly white. White as the little cabin   

by the river they stayed in that summer.   

White as the raccoon covered in ashes, 

his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.

2.  Or by creating stanzas or different syllabic line lengths that then repeat (Marianne Moore [1887-1972] was the high-priestess of this form):

No Swan So Fine   BY MARIANNE MOORE

“No water so still as the

     dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,

with swart blind look askance

and gondoliering legs, so fine

     as the chintz china one with fawn-

brown eyes and toothed gold

collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth

     Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

tinted buttons, dahlias,

sea urchins, and everlastings,

     it perches on the branching foam

of polished sculptured

flowers — at ease and tall. The king is dead.       

Poetry  BY MARIANNE MOORE

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful. When they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand: the bat

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to 

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

      nor is it valid

         to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make

      a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

      result is not poetry,

   nor till the poets among us can be

     "literalists of

      the imagination"--above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness and

      that which is on the other hand

         genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Five Haikus   BY RICHARD WRIGHT

1.

I am nobody:

A red sinking autumn sun

Took my name away.

2.

I give permission

For this slow spring rain to soak

The violet beds.

3.

With a twitching nose

A dog reads a telegram

On a wet tree trunk.

4.

Burning autumn leaves,

I yearn to make the bonfire

Bigger and bigger.

5.

A sleepless spring night:

Yearning for what I never had

And for what never was.

NOW YOU

Your assignment is to create a syllabic form for yourself (all lines 13-syllables long, or a repeating stanza of 2-7-11-5 or 1-1-2-3-5-8, or 9-5-3.) Only caveat: the poem must be a minimum of 12 lines long. Experiment with line length to see what the effects are.  If you are having trouble—write 5 or 6 lines that are 10-12 syllables (a common thought/phrase unit in English) and then start dividing them in a way that heightens your meaning and draws attention to ideas and units that increase the power of the work. Good luck.

POEM#3: Repetitive Forms

These three forms (VILLANELLE, PANTOUM, SESTINA) are described in both Rhyme's Reason and The Making of a Poem. I will not belabor the stringent formats... I trust you to look them up on your own and choose the one that speaks to you. In two of these forms (The Villanelle and Pantoum), whole lines are repeated (and a rhyme-scheme is also in place in the Villanelle)... in the sestina--it is just words, but don't let that fool you: NOT an easy form.  Note how each of these forms has a capping or end gesture that tells you that it is wrapping up.

Forms like these need to be constructed a bit like puzzles... the words and the lines you choose to repeat have exponentially more weight than in a poem where they come up once or twice.  Ask yourself -- under what conditions is such repetition not only useful but necessary?  I will not ask for certain line lengths or rhythms, though you will see I think that these forms create their own sorts of rhythm through their woven structure.

Crafting these poems will teach you much about the importance of word choice, syntactical structure, and - of course - the glory and gore of how we "repeat stuff/repeat stuff/repeat stuff."  The best of these forms can feel playful or urgent or clever (by switching up how lines/words are used) but the trick is to find the reason the form is necessary... to keep it from seeming like ONLY an elaborate exercise.  This is by far the most mathematical week you will have with me.  I wish you sanity in your endeavors.

Two of each below:

SESTINA by Elizabeth Bishop

September rain falls on the house.

In the failing light, the old grandmother

sits in the kitchen with the child

beside the Little Marvel Stove,

reading the jokes from the almanac,

laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears

and the rain that beats on the roof of the house

were both foretold by the almanac,

but only known to a grandmother.

The iron kettle sings on the stove.

She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child

is watching the teakettle's small hard tears

dance like mad on the hot black stove,

the way the rain must dance on the house.

Tidying up, the old grandmother

hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac

hovers half open above the child,

hovers above the old grandmother

and her teacup full of dark brown tears.

She shivers and says she thinks the house

feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.

I know what I know, says the almanac.

With crayons the child draws a rigid house

and a winding pathway. Then the child

puts in a man with buttons like tears

and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother

busies herself about the stove,

the little moons fall down like tears

from between the pages of the almanac

into the flower bed the child

has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

SESTINA SESTINA by Adam LeFevre

The sestina is a difficult form

to master because of the excessive repetition

which usually seems gratuitous or else

makes the speaking voice sound downright mad.

Psychologists say madness characterizes our time.

That may be. For some reason the sestina

is an obsession of mine. My first sestina

was a complete failure. The form

tangled me in a net. By the time

I reached stanza two, the repetition

blabbed like an obnoxious drunk. I got so mad

I swore, and swore I’d write a good sestina or else.

I worked at nothing else,

only the sestina. Day and night, one insipid sestina

after another. Every one I made made me mad.

I should never have strayed from the open forms.

They seem like a fairyland now. Repetition

enchants the mind until time

itself seems to be a sestina. In no time

my universe was bound to six words and nothing else

mattered. That’s the danger or repetition.

It creates an illusion of eternity. The sestina

appears to be it’s own heaven. The form,

fulfilled, has the appeal. So does mad-

ness, psychologists say. But the mad

are their own poems. Their time

is malleable-no need to conform

to architecture designed by someone else.

The maker of sestinas

sulks under the weight of repetition,

flails in a snarl of repetition,

repeating himself like a nervous zodiac for his nomad

mind. So stay away from sestinas.

There are better ways to spend your time.

Write a novel. Take up the guitar. Or else

stifle your creative impulses altogether. Chloroform

the Muse! This form is a hungry monster.

Repetition wants something else every time. Six

mad kings and you, locked in a cell-that’s a sestina.

            

PANTOUM OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION by Donald Justice

Our lives avoided tragedy

Simply by going on and on,

Without end and with little apparent meaning.

Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and on

We managed. No need for the heroic.

Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

I don't remember all the particulars.

We managed. No need for the heroic.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.

I don't remember all the particulars.

Across the fence, the neighbors were our chorus.

There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows

Thank god no one said anything in verse.

The neighbors were our only chorus,

And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

At no time did anyone say anything in verse.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us,

And if we suffered we kept quiet about it.

No audience would ever know our story.

It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed us.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.

What audience would ever know our story?

Beyond our windows shone the actual world.

We gathered on porches; the moon rose; we were poor.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.

Somewhere beyond our windows shone the world.

The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

And time went by, drawn by slow horses.

We did not ourselves know what the end was.

The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.

We had our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues.

But we did not ourselves know what the end was.

People like us simply go on.

We have our flaws, perhaps a few private virtues,

But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.

And there is no plot in that; it is devoid of poetry.

PARENT'S PANTOUM  by Carolyn Kizer

                                    

Where did these enormous children come from,

More ladylike than we have ever been?

Some of ours look older than we feel.

How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?

But they moan about their aging more than we do,

In their fragile heels and long black dresses.

They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,

A somber group--why don't they brighten up?

Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity

They beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.  

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention

Then we won't try to be dignified like them

Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.

Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?

Instead they are so gently patronizing.

It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.

The famous flowers glowing in the garden,

So now we pout like children. Second-childish?

Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,

Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,

Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,

Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,

We'd rather excavate old memories,

Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.

Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories

They don't believe our stories have an end.

They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.

They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.

DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

                                                            by Dylan Thomas

        Do not go gentle into that good night,

        Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

        Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

        Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

        Because their words had forked no lightning they

        Do not go gentle into that good night.

        Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

        Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

        Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

        Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

        And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

        Do not go gentle into that good night.

        Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

        Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

        Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

        And you, my father, there on the sad height,

        Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

        Do not go gentle into that good night.

        Rage, rage against the dying of the light. 

VILLANELLE FOR D.G.B.  by Marilyn Hacker

Every day our bodies separate,

exploded torn and dazed.

Not understanding what we celebrate

we grope through languages and hesitate

and touch each other, speechless and amazed;

and every day our bodies separate

us farther from our planned, deliberate

ironic lives. I am afraid, disphased,

not understanding what we celebrate

when our fused limbs and lips communicate

the unlettered power we have raised.

Every day our bodies' separate

routines are harder to perpetuate.

In wordless darkness we learn wordless praise,

not understanding what we celebrate;

wake to ourselves, exhausted, in the late

morning as the wind tears off the haze,

not understanding how we celebrate

our bodies. Every day we separate.

POEM#2: The Ballad

The ballad is a form built out of 4 line stanzas with a recognizable rhythm (most often iambic trimeter, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM or iambic tetrameter da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM). Ballads are most often rhymed ABAB (Amazing Grace) or ABCB (The Beatles’ “Let it be”) or many many blues songs. The form is an old folk song invention, still used in much popular music (check out nearly any really singable pop song on the radio... you’ll be surprised, I think). The ballad can carry story and narrative easily, but it also lends itself (perhaps because of its ubiquity in American hymnals) to meditation. William Blake’s ballads seem like children’s poems, but that belies the sometimes dark and/or revolutionary ideas encoded within them. Emily Dickinson uses odd syntax, slant rhyme, and ambiguous punctuation and capitalization to make each of her ballads capable of holding mystery, reverberating with it even.

The ballad form can read like Dr. Seuss, and many of you will find it quite easy to pen a stanza or two of what used to be called doggerel (look it up)—the trick is to see what ELSE this stanza (often called “common verse”) can do. Can you stretch it to make it uncommon? Or at least uncommonly good? Can you present four lines (or any multiple of four, let’s say 12 lines minimum… though that can be one poem or 3) that do not have the reader trotting through your poem as if on a pony (called macaroni)? Get a few lines onto paper, then play with the rhythm and rhyme, trying NOT to let your reader know exactly what is coming next. There’s the rub: how to bend the expectation in the most predictable and familiar poetic form in America. Hmn... Good luck.

ED (340)

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading – treading – till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through –  

And when they all were seated,

A Service, like a Drum –  

Kept beating – beating – till I thought

My Mind was going numb –  

And then I heard them lift a Box

And creak across my Soul

With those same Boots of Lead, again,

Then Space – began to toll,

As all the Heavens were a Bell,

And Being, but an Ear,

And I, and Silence, some strange Race

Wrecked, solitary, here – 

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,

And I dropped down, and down –  

And hit a World, at every plunge,

And Finished knowing – then – 

  

ED (905)

Split the Lark—and you'll find the Music—

Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled—

Scantily dealt to the Summer Morning

Saved for your Ear when Lutes be old.

Loose the Flood—you shall find it patent—

Gush after Gush, reserved for you—

Scarlet Experiment! Sceptic Thomas!

Now, do you doubt that your Bird was true?

The Sick Rose by William Blake

O Rose thou art sick. 

The invisible worm, 

That flies in the night 

In the howling storm: 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

POEM#1: The Psalmic

The psalm is a form with religious and prophetic resonances.  The long line seems to test the limits of breath.  The form is able to incorporate shorter units of thought (by using punctuation within the line) and longer, more complex syntactical structures that give it sometimes the feeling of accretion (meaning building through lists of evidence) and sometimes a meandering, rambling, even unstable sense of its own construction.  Does this line approach a point of ranting?  And if it does: are not the mad part prophet?

from HOWL (Part I)                           by Allen Ginsberg

For Carl Solomon

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the  machinery of night,

who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,

who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,

who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull…

1955.                                              - See more HERE

After reading through the handouts given to you in class (and the examples of ANAPHORA in MoP--on handout) and hitting the link to read the first section of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (first few lines above), write a 30+ line poem incorporating some or all the strategies of the psalm form: its long lines, its anaphora (repeated beginning words or phrases), its rolling, wave-like loose rhythm, its incorporation of lists, its penchant for holding content that is mythic.  Even Smart’s cat becomes a totemic creature in this form. 

Be big.  This form should empower you to speak of and to the world in sweeping gestures.  Step outside your smallness and become Whitmanesque.  Do not fear talking to God, or your cat, or the universe—of pleading, ranting, or proclaiming in grandiose language your ideas for what the world is, should, or could be—they are part and heart of this tradition. Let it flow, editing is for later. As Ginsberg famously insisted: First thought, best thought. This is the place to open the floodgates of the soul.

Or, as Dear Uncle Walt said, “Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Psalm on.