Monday 3/3/14 Class

Wild-animal-is-the-final-stanza poem.  Read a few aloud.  Let's talk about the moment when something "outside of the poem" enters it. 

Draft of poet paper.  Couple up.  Switch papers.  Look for how the writer uses Art of Syntax to explain the work of the poet he/she chose. 

Look at the picture you took with your camera phone.  Write down all the words generated from the image.  Use the generated words to write a haiku.

Sylvia Plath on poet.org.  Take a look at "Aerial."  Let's talk about how she gets the poem moving...

Ariel, Sylvia Plath    

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue   

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,   

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to   

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye   

Berries cast dark   

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,   

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.   

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.   

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive   

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Wednesday 2/26/14 Class

Poem mimicking CK Williams' style:  autobiographical, about an important moment in your life that you've never considered before as "important."  Couple up.  Review.  Is there anything you would take out?  What moment(s) do you remember most?  What makes what you did poetic?  What makes it prose?  Is there a difference?

The Art of Syntax, pages 145 through 169.  This is the glossary section of the book.  I want you to choose 2 concepts from here, and then find examples that represent those concepts from the poet you've chosen for your paper. 

Skunk Hour

By Robert Lowell

(For Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchy privacy of Queen Victoria's century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season's ill-- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . . My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, "Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat. . . . I myself am hell; nobody's here-- only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air-- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.                                                   1959

How does this poem rhyme?  How does it work?  What about the specifics?  How do they build into abstraction?  How does meaning happen?  What the hell does the skunk have to do with it? 

Robert Lowell on poets.org

Write a poem in which a wild animal is the final stanza. 

Monday 2/24/14 Class

Do a rondeau, and also "undo" a rondeau.  Couple up, read each other's work, talk about what it takes to create a poem with a set structure involved, and what it takes to dismantle that structure and maintain "poem-ness."   

Art of Syntax, page 79 to 97, "A Varied Pulse."

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose," page 82 to 85 and...

Page 97:  "Bishop had to discover her [rhythm] through trial and error, much tinkering, much listening.  Bishop's attention to small syntactical chunks was crucially enabling to that rhythm, supplying a flexible underlying grid or pulse that allowed delicate syntactical complication.  We can reasonable surmise that the interplay between large-scale and small-scale systems prompted, shaped, recofused, or reinforced the complex hierarchies of the piece as it emerged through slow, patient drafting.  WHAT DIRECTED THAT INTERPLAY IN BISHOP'S MAGNIFICENT POEM WAS SYNTAX."

Choose a poet for upcoming paper... 

Denise Levertov

Anne Sexton

Theodore Roethke

Laurie Anderson

Wallace Stevens

e e cummings

Philip Larkin

Elizabeth Bishop 

Stanley Kunitz

CK Williams on poets.org

Wednesday 2/19/14 Class

We won't start till 4:30 pm...

Bring your draft of your villanelle to class.  Read aloud.  Talk about struggles, triumphs.

Choose one of the 12 you didn't previously from  Oprah's 12-Ways-to-Write-a-Poem.  Write a poem from one of these prompts in 10 minutes.

Let's talk about rondeau:  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5789

Assignment:  do a rondeau, and also "undo" a rondeau. 

Portfolio of poetry (four poems), with a paper examining poem of your choosing due:  March 10. 2014.  Paper should be 5 pages in length, double-spaced, with a title, and should focus on one of the poets we've looked at, as well as use the text from The Art of Syntax as a reference and context.

Elizabeth Bishop on poets.org

Monday 2/17/14 Class

The Art of Syntax, pages 62 - 77, "Off the Grid."

Page 63, Frost again: 

"The surest way to reach the heart of the reader is through the ear.  The visual images thrown up by a poem are important, but it is more important still to choose and arrange words in a sequence so as virtually to control the intonations and pauses of the reader's voice.  By arrangement and choice of words on the part of the poet, the effects of humor, pathos, hysteria, anger, and in fact, all effects, can be indicated or obtained."

Page 65, Philip Larkin's "The Trees"

Page 70, Larkin's "Cut Grass"

Collage into 10 similes and metaphors.  Get into two groups.  Help each other select the top 5 for each.  Then write a five-stanza, four-line poem using the metaphors/similes as the beginning of each stanza.

Poets we've looked into so far:

• Denise Levertov
• Anne Sexton
• Theodore Roethke
• Laurie Anderson
• Wallace Stevens
• e e cummings
• Stanley Kunitz

Choose one of the 12 you didn't previously from  Oprah's 12-Ways-to-Write-a-Poem.

CK Williams on poets.org and Theodore Roethke on poets.org

Villanelle form:  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5796

Wednesday 2/12/14 Class

The Art of Syntax, pages 43 through 61, "Meter and Phrase."

Very important:  Robert Frost:  "A sentence is not interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words.  It must do something more:  it must convey a meaning by sound."  Also Frost:  "The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence."  (43 and 45)

Page 52:  "Relationships among stressed and unstressed syllables can support or resist poetic meter."

Page 54:  Shakespeare's paradigmatic sonnet.  Page 55:  Iambic pentameter. 

Laurie Anderson, "O Superman":  http://youtu.be/-VIqA3i2zQw

What is the sound, and what is the meaning, and how do they interrelate, and how are they relayed both through words and through sound?

Collage into 10 similes and metaphors.  Get into two groups.  Help each other select the top 5 for each.  Then write a five-stanza, four-line poem using the metaphors/similes as the beginning of each stanza.

Theodore Roethke on poets.org

Monday 2/10/14 Class

Read the four-line, three-stanza poem about a current event... 

Let's talk about how the narrative of the event gets translated into language and structure (syntax).  What did you choose to leave in and leave out?  How did the structure (four-lines, etc.) affect the way you told the story within the poem? 

The Art of Syntax, pages 43 through 61, "Meter and Phrase."

Very important:  Robert Frost:  "A sentence is not interesting merely in conveying a meaning of words.  It must do something more:  it must convey a meaning by sound."  Also Frost:  "The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence."  (43 and 45)

Page 52:  "Relationships among stressed and unstressed syllables can support or resist poetic meter."

Page 54:  Shakespeare's paradigmatic sonnet.  Page 55:  Iambic pentameter. 

Laurie Anderson, "O Superman":  http://youtu.be/-VIqA3i2zQw

What is the sound, and what is the meaning, and how do they interrelate, and how are they relayed both through words and through sound?


Anne Sexton on poets.org

The Truth the Dead Know

Anne Sexton

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June.  I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape.  I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch.  In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.  No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes
in the stone boats.  They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Collage exercise:
"nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands"



                               

Wednesday 2/5/2014 Class

The Art of the Syntax, page 23 through 42, "The Sentence and the Line."

Group 1:  Page 24:  "Poetic meter..."  Read that paragraph and discuss how "the poetic line is inherently artificial, imposed by the poet onto the language." 

Group 2:  Read the Stanley Kunitz poem (page 26)...  Talk about paragraph on page 29, "Kunitz has said..."

Group 3:  Page 42:  "You cannot write a poem until you hit upon its rhythm.  That rhythm not only belongs to the subject matter, it belongs to your interior world, and the moment they hook up there's a quantum leap of energy.  You can ride on that rhythm.  It will carry you somewhere strange."  What is Kunitz getting at here, concerning syntax and meter and rhythm?  How do sounds increase meaning?  How does meaning increase sound?


poets.org:  ee cummings

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9Scwhpy9oY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1ypkNLpJGk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA836Ax7scw

Write a poem in paragraph form.

Read the paragraph and then read the poetic restructuring aloud...

Write a four-line, three-stanza poem about a current event...