POEM#9: Cento

Read David Lehman's explanation HERE

Assignment--A cento taken from the lit mag you picked up from me Wednesday. 8-12 lines. Make no mistake, this assignment is a fantastic assignment to do, period, but also can be used to familiarize yourself with something you want to know more about (there's a poet doing centos taken *only* from Sigmund Freud's texts, another from old history textbooks, etc). I asked you to do one based on contemporary poetry to get you wondering what people are publishing now(-ish)ly and to start thinking about sending your own work out into the soup. I'm tricky that way.

Example of a modern cento here:

Wolf Cento

by Simone Muench

Very quick. Very intense, like a wolf
at a live heart, the sun breaks down.
What is important is to avoid
the time allotted for disavowels
as the livid wound
leaves a trace      leaves an abscess
takes its contraction for those clouds
that dip thunder & vanish
like rose leaves in closed jars.
Age approaches, slowly. But it cannot
crystal bone into thin air.
The small hours open their wounds for me.
This is a woman’s confession:
I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me.

Sources: [Anne Sexton, Dylan Thomas, Larry Levis, Ingeborg Bachmann, Octavio Paz, Henri Michaux, Agnes Nemes Nagy, Joyce Mansour, William Burroughs, Meret Oppenheim, Mary Low, Adrienne Rich, Carl Sandburg]

Homophonic Translation

For those who may want to finish:



nattboksblad

Jag landsteg en majnatt
i ett kyligt månsken
där gräs och blommor var grå
men doften grön.

Jag gled uppför sluttningen
i den färgblinda natten
medan vita stenar
signalerade till månen.

En tidrymd
några minuter lång
femtioåtta år bred.

Och bakom mig
bortom de blyskimrande vattnen
fanns den andra kusten
och de som härskade.

Människor med framtid
i stället för ansikten. 

READING AND REVISION WEEK

Read: THIS ESSAY ON HOW POETRY SHOULD BE MADE ACCORDING TO CHARLES OLSON

Then read: Denise Levertov's essay HERE --4 pages (easier to "get" than Olson's Projective Verse, and also extremely influential)

Then, maybe try this: 


RADICAL REVISION #2: LINEATION

GEOGRAPHY -by Rae Armantout

1

Touch each chakra

in turn and say,

“Nothing shocks me.”

                2

Watching bombs fall

on Syria,

we feel serious,

occupied,

not preoccupied

as we were

previously.

                3

“Makes me end,

where I begun,”

wrote   John Donne,

turning love

into geometry.

A NIGHT SKY  -by Robert Creeley

All the grass
dies
in front of us.

The fire
again
flares out.

The night
such a large
place. Stars

the points,
but like
places no

depth, I see
a flat—
a plain as if the

desert
were showing smaller
places.

So:  

Select a poem that you have written. For the purposes of this assignment, it is best if the poem consists of lines at least ten syllables in length and/or heavily end-stopped lines (meaning that punctuation appears at the end of the line).

After you have selected a poem, arman-trot/creeleyize your poem. In other words, rewrite your poem by breaking your lines at unexpected moments, creating frequent enjambment and short lines.

The purpose of this assignment is to revise the lineation of your poem, exploring ways in which your changes in line breaks and line length open up new meanings and points of emphasis in the poem. It might also suggest possibilities for further revision to imagery and sound.

• Does the change in lineation help reinforce the rhythm of the poem? Or does it seem distracting?
• Is the change in lineation appropriate for the meaning of the poem? In other words, does this new form enhance the content of the poem?
• What words and phrases stand out to you in this revision that did not stand out before? How does this change the poem?
• What additional ways might you revise the poem to explore other possibilities for making meaning, sound or word play?

PORTFOLIO

PORTFOLIO - DUE ON THE LAST DAY OF CLASS - MARCH 14th

PORTFOLIO                                                                                                  

Consider this a presentation of your writing process (not necessarily product).  I want you to choose pieces that are going to reflect the most spectacular (think spectacle) attempts you made at writing this semester.  It should be a record of both victories and failures—and most especially, writing still in the midst of becoming itself.  Your revisions should be drastic in some cases… tweaking words and taking out single lines is just not enough.  Prove to me that you can take chances not just in the initial composition process, but in the messy white-heat-of-revision stage.

Your portfolio should consist of:

            1. At least two drafts of 5-6 pieces written this semester.  It would be helpful to me if your drafts included some line-edited pages by helpful peers.

            2.  A copy of all the glosses and critiques you provided for your writing partners.

            3.  A 1-2 page (single-spaced) close reading and reflection on a poem -- that we read for class -- that affected you AS A POETRY WRITER this term. A close reading = a gloss + an examination of the strategies and formal elements that help the poem do what it wants to do.  A reflection = your response AS A POET to both the how-ness and the about-ness of the poem. Use all the craft concepts relevant (rhyme, meter, POV, mood, diction, voice, syntax, enjambment, stanza, etc.)

            4.  For each of your 5-6 pieces I need a description of your revision process (either a paragraph, or sticky notes with arrows, or a hyper-text link, or a talking puppet who accompanies your portfolio and tap-dances Morse-encoded explanations).

            5.  A three-to-four page introduction to your portfolio that tells me who you are/were/are becoming as a writer and/or as a human being in relation to poetry and the work of this class (reading, writing, thinking, sharing, critiquing, and developing as a citizen and a non-passive participant of the world of this classroom and beyond).  Please include in this text some details about your writing partners’ contributions to your work (do not judge them completely by what they “got” or didn’t “get,” but by sincerity and effort as well). 

Please make the portfolio pleasant to behold, handle, etc. Your writing exists as both process and object.  Personalize the object (with your other talents if you like) while attempting to objectify the process in such a way that frees you to substantially revise.

Cheers.

POEM#8

Links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WLazG0bQPI (another version of the one we saw) from Pina Bausch's Cafe Mueller

Jesse Krimes http://www.jessekrimes.com  His work is in the gallery now: http://drexel.edu/westphal/resources/LeonardPearlsteinGallery/current/

Please go there and respond. There are no rules for ekphrasis in my class other than to go... take in the work and write (preferably in front of the work itself, in witness).

I am linking a few ekphrastic poems as things to ponder but you need not imitate any of these in style or substance. The guide should be the work itself.

Read first WH Auden writing about the same painting (The Fall of Icarus) ...early 20th c.

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats, 1795 - 1821

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, 
  Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express 
  A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 
  Of deities or mortals, or of both,
    In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
  What men or gods are these? what maidens loth? 
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
   What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
 
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard 
  Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, 
  Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave 
  Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
    Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 
Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve;
  She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed 
  Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
  For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love! 
  For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
    For ever panting, and for ever young; 
All breathing human passion far above,
  That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, 
    A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice? 
  To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, 
  And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore, 
  Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
    Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn? 
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
  Will silent be; and not a soul to tell 
    Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 
  Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed; 
  Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
  When old age shall this generation waste, 
    Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
  ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’--that is all 
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

WHY I AM NOT A PAINTER 

by Frank O'Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is 
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a 
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Ozymandias





Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792 - 1822







I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

POEM#7: Other People's Poems

After the remarkable work you all did Monday in class... I  thought we'd keep that valve open (writing about things close to the bone), while giving you a little distance (putting yourself inside someone else's consciousness). After meeting with Sarah C.  -- I think this is a good plan for this week.

ALSO--BRING ME A POEM YOU WANT TO MEMORIZE--14 LINES MINIMUM

So... THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

A poetic dramatic monologue (also known as a persona poem), is similar to its counterpart--the theatrical monologue--in several ways:  an audience is implied (even if the poet seems to be talking to herself, she IS talking and this is important because a way of formulating thought which is uttered has qualities that differ from a stream of consciousness which is perhaps less located, less logically ordered, etc); there is no dialogue (only one character please--though she may speak of others); and the poet speaks through an assumed voice--a character, a fictional identity, or a persona (this mask can be as close or as far away from the poet as she chooses, as historical or fictional, as found or created). Because a dramatic monologue is by definition one person’s speech, it is offered without analysis or commentary, so the drama of this type of language comes when there is a gap between how the speaker describes the situation and how the audience perceives that rendering.  In other words: how does this particular persona see/experience her world? What is particular or peculiar about that seeing? ("The Monologue of the Girl in the Refrigerator" by Adam LeFevre that I handed out on your diction sheet is an example as well).

Best O Luck, my Valentines.

Read HERE

And HERE

And Hamlet--

I have of late, (but wherefore I know not) lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition; that this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterrill promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this Majesticall roofe, fretted with golden fire: why, it appeares no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 'What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!' And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so...

And finally

one of my favorites, for how close to bone and how without answers-- 

"The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.
You remember the children you got that you did not get,
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,
The singers and workers that never handled the air.
You will never neglect or beat
Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.
You will never wind up the sucking-thumb
Or scuttle off ghosts that come.
You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,
Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed
children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.
Though why should I whine,
Whine that the crime was other than mine?--
Since anyhow you are dead.
Or rather, or instead,
You were never made.
But that too, I am afraid,
Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?
You were born, you had body, you died.
It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.

LINK to gifs

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4743620/bill-domonokos-interview

POEM#6: Mood

Emotion is crucial to mood.  However, mood is not simply a crayola construction.  There is more to mood than happy and sad, angry and confused.  What about a pious mood?  A contemplative one?  A mood of foreboding?  

Mood also involves history, religion, thought, physiology, the planets, you name it.  It isn’t less complex than tone or voice, but it can be less highly articulated… arising as it does from one sensibility, rather than from the communication between different characters.  A scene may involve several characters and their moods, but the mood of the scene takes everything together as a whole. Mood is the feeling of shared ground… a sense of place (and the emotion inhabiting that place) in a poem.

Consider the two different (but linked) moods of the following poems by the same Japanese woman, writing between 974-1034:

            What is the use                                                 In this world

            of cherishing life in spring?                                     love has no color—

            Its flowers                                                        yet how deeply

            only shackle us                                                 my body

            to this world.                                                    is stained by yours.

                                                                                                                        -Izumi Shikibu

How does the following poem create mood?  What is that mood?

            Circle

            

            Each scar on each tree

            without light, without water.

            The day is over.

            Against the floor,

            a chair scrapes hard.

            Into bowls,

            an avalanche of cereal.

            Someone slams the door.

            Abruptly into their cabinets,

            dishes are stacked.

            No one must speak.

            Hearts circle like dogs,

            afraid of air, of what it carries

            from greater distances.

            No one must open windows

            diligently, methodically closed.

                                                            -Dzvinia Orlowsky

Mood Assigment

Two choices.  

Either: 

1.                        

Write an object poem—a poem, as Robert Bly says, where the poet’s attention “remains near the object all the way through the poem.”  Do not bring yourself or any other character into the poem.  Write only about meditation/observation/rendering space of the object.

Go here for thing poems by Francis Ponge (more than one page... hit arrow on left)

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/80/6#!/20591882/0

Or

2.                        

Write a poem that works almost entirely on the direct presentation of sensory experience.  
Avoid abstract language and explanations to concentrate on details that are clearly seen, 
smelled, touched, tasted, and felt.  Use as many of your senses as possible.  Think of your poem 
as a painting for all the senses; to make this easier, I am asking you to stop time the way a camera 
or a painting does.  At least limit yourself to three to four seconds in time.  No similes.  No metaphors.  
Clear, grammatical English only.