Download Poetry Crash Course

So, ok.
What is this stuff?
From http://www.interviews-with-poets.com
“Poetry goes back so far into human
history that it is hard to see its clear
beginnings. Poetry is sometimes even
argued to be a fundamental aspect of
language itself….” That is, poetry came into
existence at the very instant when
language did. It is something at the very
heart of language.
—And—
“Poetry may predate literacy
itself…The oldest poem that we
know about is the ‘Epic of
Gilgamesh’ –created in Sumer in the
3rd millennium BC.”
Poetry goes back as far as
humanity itself.
At the same time…
Poetry is completely new. It is the cutting-edge
of language art, always testing what language is
and what language can do. Young poets right
now are inventing poetry—inventing how we
define and read it.
So it’s incredibly, incredibly OLD…and
absolutely NEW, ongoing, being born
right under our feet.
Theorists are always predicting that poetry and
even the written word are dying out.
But isn’t it interesting that thousands of
students flock to graduate creative writing
programs every year, that poetry journals,
conferences, and festivals are thriving, and of
course there’s the advent of the
We’ll talk more about poetry slams later.
Poetry Slam!
Poems About Poems, Poems
about Writing Poems, and
Poems about Being a Poet
What do these poems tell you about reading and writing poetry?
Introduction to Poetry
--Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close at you, close at the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
Strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
or profit, or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
An Introduction to Some
Poems --William Stafford
As for poets
The Earth Poets
who write small poems
need help from no man.
*
The Air Poets
play out the swiftest gales
and sometimes loll in the eddies
poem after poem,
curling back on the same thrust.
*
At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
and propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn at Absolute Zero
Fossil love pumped back up.
*
The first
Water Poet
stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
left millions of tiny
different tracks
criss-crossing through the mud.
As for Poets
--Gary Snyder
*
With the Sun and the Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky -but his poems,
like wild geese,
fly off the edge.
*
A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
and it has no walls.
The poem is seen from all sides,
everywhere
at once.
Ooooooh!
Oooh! Look! A poem!
This one’s
really
teensy!
Oh ick, a
skeeter.
OMG, still ANOTHER kind!
Holy sh*t, MORE!
And yet another kind!
It’s a
Jungle
Out
There!
So.
Let’s make some poems
because that’s what we’re here to do
because creative writing workshops are about writing
Well, and
making stories
and scripts,
and plays and
creative
nonfiction and
memoirs and
anything else
you want to
do.
Sure, we’re going to read, and
blab, and do exercises, and read
some more, and go to public
readings, and perform public
readings, and of course blab and
read and blab some more. . .
but it’s all for the purpose
of
making
poems
You’re going to write at least three
poems for your Governor’s School
experience.
Here’s an exercise which may help
give you a jump-start on Poetry
Project #1.
1.
Your instructor will
give you a raisin.
Follow her
instructions.
2.
Now write a
few paragraphs
in which you
describe the
raisin and/or
your
experience of
the raisin. Be
VERY…
specific,
concrete,
sensory.
NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions
NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities
Hey Dummy! What are you doing?
I said NO abstractions or
generalities!!!!!
Look at what you’ve written. Can
you SEE, FEEL, TASTE, SMELL the
frapping raisin?????
I mean REALLY see, feel, taste and
smell it?
Is your description SPECIFIC?
Give your raisin
some LOVE, baby!
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Ok, how do you describe a SMELL?
Really describe it?
It’s kind of hard, isn’t it?
There’s no way to avoid…
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
The smell is like…
The smell IS…
something else.
something else.
This is just a peculiar feature of language. To describe one thing you
have to compare it to another thing. But making figurative language is A
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BLAST.
So what, again, is figurative language?
Some
believe
How do
you saytheorists
that someone
is drunk?that
language is inherently
How many animal metaphors do we use everyday?
metaphorical. You can’t utter a
sentence
without
in some
way
Where
did most worn-out
metaphors
come
from,
and how
do we
keep the language
alive? Look at
using
figurative
language.
these samples again from Annie Proulx and
Lorrie More (recall that we looked at these in
our fiction unit)…
Worst High School Metaphors
1. Her face
was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides
gently compressed by a Thigh Master.
2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking
alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.
3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from
experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a
solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it
and now goes around the country speaking at high schools
about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of
those boxes with a pinhole in it.
4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was
room-temperature Canadian beef.
5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog
makes just before it throws up.
6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.
7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.
8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had
disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude
shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM
machine.
9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way
a bowling ball wouldn’t.
10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty
bag filled with vegetable soup.
11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene
had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in
another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of
7:30.
12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.
13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when
you fry them in hot grease.
14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the
grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left
Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at
4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.
15. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds
who had also never met.
17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the
East River.
18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one
that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.
19. Shots rang out, as shots are want to do.
20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike
Phil, this plan just might work.
21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not
eating for a while.
22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck,
either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from
stepping on a land mine or something.
23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one
slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.
24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around
with power tools.
25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard
bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.
from Annie Proulx’s,
Wyoming Stories
24
What he wanted to know now, tires spanking the tar-filled road cracks and potholes,
funeral homburg sliding on the back-seat, was if Rollo had got the girlfriend away from
the old man, thrown a saddle on her and ridden off into the sunset?...His thoughts
clogged as if a comb working through his mind had stuck against a snarl.
They climbed through the stony landscape, limestone beds eroded by wind into
fantastic furniture, stale gnawed breadcrusts, tumbled bones, stacks of dirty folded
blankets, bleached crab claws and dog teeth. […] The roots of his mind felt withered
and punky.
Looking at her, not just her face, but up and down, eyes moving over her like an iron
over a shirt and the old man in his mailman’s sweater and lopsided hat tasting his
Everclear and not noticing or not caring, getting up every now and then to lurch onto
the porch and water the weeds.
He traveled against curdled sky. In the last sixty miles the snow began again. He
climbed out of Buffalo. Pallid flakes as distant from each other as galaxies flew past,
then more and in ten minutes he was crawling at twenty miles an hour, the windshield
wipers thumping like a stick dragged down the stairs.
The light was falling out of the day when he reached the pass, the blunt mountains lost
in snow, the greasy hairpin turns ahead. He drove slowly and steadily in a low gear; he
had not forgotten how to drive a winter mountain. But the wind was up again, rocking
and slapping the car, blotting out all but whipping snow and he was sweating with the
anxiety of keeping to the road, dizzy with altitude. Twelve more miles, sliding and
buffeted, before he reached Ten Sleep where streetlights glowed in revolving circles
25
like Van Gogh's sun.
from Lorrie Moore
26
Once in a while take evening trips past the old unsold
house you grew up in, that haunted rural crossroads two
hours from where you now live. It is like Halloween: the
raked, moon-lit lawn, the mammoth, tumid trees, arms
and fingers raised into the starless wipe of sky like
burns, cracks, map rivers. . .Look up through the
windshield. In the November sky a wedge of wrens
moves south, the lines of their formation, the very sides
and vertices mysteriously choreographed, shifting,
flowing, crossing like a skater's legs... Walk through
wooded areas; there is a life there you have forgotten.
The smells and sounds seem sudden, unchanged, exact,
the paper crunch of the leaves, the mouldering sachet
of the mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence
posts splintered, trusting and precarious in their solid
grasp of arms, the asters splindly, dry, white,
havishammed (Havishammed!) by frost.
27
• "Her eyebrows will lift like theater curtains."
• "Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a
large Kleenex."
• "Work up a vibrato you could drive a truck though."
• "Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong.
It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the
refrigerator. "
• "You are a zoo of insecurities."
• "The clink of the silverware inside the drawer, piled
like bones in a mass grave."
• "You see a ghost, something like a spinning statue by
a shrub."
• "She ages, rocks in your rocker, noiseless as wind."
• "On public transportation mothers with soft, soapy,
corduroyed seraphs glance at you, their faces
dominoes of compassion.“
28
Ok. Let’s look at a few well-known and
highly regarded poets and see what
they do with SEEING.
That is, what do they do with
description and metaphor?
Links to these writers appear in our Word Press
Creative Writing page.
29
1.
Your instructor will
give you a raisin.
Follow her
instructions.
2.
Now write a
few paragraphs
in which you
describe the
raisin and/or
your
experience of
the raisin. Be
VERY…
3.
Now write a
poem about
specific,
your raisin.
concrete,
sensory.
NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions NO abstractions
NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities
30
Possibilities
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Include yourself in the poem.
Don’t include yourself in the poem. No “I.” Just the raisin.
Focus on just one aspect of the raisin.
Focus on the entire raisin; raisin-as-world.
Be the raisin.
Talk to the raisin.
Look at the raisin from the point of view of an extraterrestrial who has never been to earth before.
• Include your classmates and teacher in the poem as well as
the room.
• Write the poem from the point of view/in the voice of…. a
grape!
• Use interesting kinds of language.
Sometimes it helps to take a really unusual perspective…say,
that of an animal.
Once a student wrote a piece from the point of view of a
deer. It described a hunter’s gun as “a branch that barks.”
Look at Elizabeth Bishop’s “Giant Toad” and “Giant Snail”
poems.
Click here for Bishop’s poems:
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS2014/Bishop.docx
The raisin poem is optional. You may use it for
Poetry Project #1, but it’s fine if you don’t.
33
You complete 3 poems
for Gov School English:
Poetry Project #1: Description, thingness, concreteness
Poetry Project #2: Modes (Surrealism, Confessionalism,
Formalism)
Poetry Project #3: Spoken-Word and Visual
You’ll start work on these items during our Creative
Writing week, continue to work on them in the following
weeks with my feedback, and then finalize them during
the last week for your chapbook.
34
Poetry Project #1
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS
2015/PoetryProject1.htm
This assignment is all about
description, concreteness,
grittiness, vividness,
thingness, and sensuality.
35
…The gooey, chewy, rich and pulpy scratchy drippy
undulating avuncular and underwearish ooh-la-la of
lavender-tinged-with-groaning-and-usually quiteembarrassing REAL LIFE.
I.e., you want to get a lot of the SPECIFIC, REAL, CONCRETE,
TOUCHABLE, STRANGE PARTICULARITY OF YOUR MOMENT-BYMOMENT
life
into your poem.
--lots of really vivid, breath-stopping
descriptive details…
Because here’s the thing.
Young writers are often very, very bad at using
detail.
I.e., they DON’T.
Use detail.
At all.
Beginning writers often rely on large, general, abstract language which attempts
to explain feeling and experience.
This almost never works. You can’t explain away your feelings and experiences.
They are too complex, too mysterious, too difficult.
You have to ENACT OR DEMONSTRATE rather than EXPLAIN your experience. You
have to SHOW rather than TELL how you feel.
You have to enter or re-enter a scene and dramatically recall or live it right there
on the page, in real-time. This is why poetry can be such a gas for the writer (as
well as for the reader): you have an experience on the page which can’t happen
any other way. It’s addictive. And fun. And scary.
So: just describe your experience—scenes from the past, the moment right in
front of you, whatever—concretely and honestly. You’d be surprised how much
feeling and complexity can be conveyed this way. Layers of feeling. Layers of
complexity.
Remembering
Remembering
Fear.
Excitement.
Parents.
Anger.
I remember my father drinking.
I felt so much sadness.
Father
Fear.
Excitement.
Kitchen.
Booze.
Mother.
Remembering My Father
My father drank heavily.
I remember his crazy antics and violence in the kitchen.
My mother disapproved, but just stood by, watching.
I felt so much fear and need.
Here are some sample poems. They all suck.
The language is boring. The language is
abstract and nonspecific. The experience
being described is generic and the people
are generic. There’s no poetry here!
Wack wack thunk thunk CRASH we are right here with the
kid, ear against his dad’s belt buckle, feeling sick, scared,
thrilled, enamored.
My Papa's Waltz
--Theodore Roethke
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
This one does
not suck.
Notice that the speaker never
explains how the child or the father or
the mother feels.
All he does is re-enact the memory in
vivid details, precisely as he recalls it.
The details say more about how
everyone feels than any explanation
could.
The details evoke a whole range of
feelings, even contradictory ones.
That’s good. That’s how human
experience and feeling really are.
Poetry Project #2
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS2015/PoetryProj
ect2.htm
This project is all about exploring particular
modes and genres (recall the “It’s a Jungle Out
There” slide above). We’ll look at several:
1. The Personal or Confessional Poem
2. The Formalist or “Gold-Enameled” Poem
3. The Visionary Poem
You may select any one of the above options.
41
One way of “coming at” poetry is to consider the
several distinct types of poets that have evolved over
millennia. These types are not always mutually
exclusive (one poet may write in several modes and be
both a “moaner” and a “mad seer,” for instance), but
it’s useful to break them down this way in order to
understand the many distinct impulses which give rise
to poetry.
42
The Moaner: the inward, suffering lyricist;
poems may be private, even confessional,
sometimes cryptic, non-linear, musical,
emotional
The Maker: the crafter of beautiful, skilled
objects made of words; formalist
The Community Bard: the village singer and
story-teller; oral poet; wandering troubadour
The Mad Seer: the crazed visionary, one who
sees what ordinary people cannot; poems may
be dark, prophetic, surrealist, even zany
Poetic categories are broken down in
different ways and with different
terminology, depending on what handbook
or scholarly tradition you consult. The
above terms represent some of the most
important types of poets and are
convenient terms we will use for the sake
of this course.
44
MODE 1
45
Let’s take a peak at
The Moaner
Tradition
Gregg Orr
Lisa Lewis
Sylvia Plath
Etc.
• The expressive impulse
• The personal & intimate,
sometimes confessional impulse
• “I”-centered
The Moaner
This mode of poetry goes by
different names.
… writes in the personal or expressivist mode.
The focal
point is the “I” and the feelings and experiences of the
“I.”
A sub-set of the personal mode is the confessional mode. The
“confessional poem” was inaugurated by such poets as Sylvia
Plath, Ann Sexton, and Robert Lowell in the late 1950s and early
1960s. This type of poem can broach some very private subjects
and may reveal taboo secrets about the self or society which are
not normally discussed out loud.
Young poets writing in this mode today are sometimes referred
to as the “post-confessional poets.”
The Confessional Mode
This kind of poem, with roots in the Romantic period of English
literature as well as (to some extent) in antiquity, tends to do
the following:
 Reveals something normally hidden or unspoken.
 Explores subject matter that isn’t usually discussed openly;
challenges the line between acceptable and not
acceptable, private and public.
 Focuses on personal life: family, personal relationships,
childhood.
 Focuses on personal neuroses, personal “issues,” illness,
fears, conflicts, loneliness.
What are the
dangers of this
sort of art?
•
•
•
•
•
Self-absorption
Solipsism
Narrow interest
Alienation of reader
Embarrassment.
You know, the feeling
that makes you want to
say….
How does this poet
avoid the hazards of
the confessional
mode?
What are his strategies
for handling deeply “I”centered poems?
How does he
encounter and shape
the expressive
impulse?
Poems by
Greg Orr
Litany
I remember him falling beside me,
the dark stain already seeping across his parka hood.
I remember screaming and running the half mile to our house.
I remember hiding in my room.
I remember that it was hard to breathe
and that I kept the door shut in terror that someone would enter.
I remember pressing my knuckles into my eyes.
I remember looking out the window once
at where an ambulance had backed up
over the lawn to the front door.
I remember someone hung from a tree near the barn
the deer we'd killed just before I shot my brother.
I remember toward evening someone came with soup.
I slurped it down, unable to look up.
In the bowl, among the vegetable chunks,
pale shapes of the alphabet bobbed at random
or lay in the shallow spoon.
Now look at:
“Gathering the Bones Together”
http://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/2015/
OrrGreg.docx
Or find the poem on our Creative Writing page
in WordPress.
53
Lisa Lewis
• Thinks long and hard about her subject
matter—but not to explain it away. Uses
poem as a vehicle for inquiry into her
experience as it is linked to LARGER issues.
• Always provides ultra-specific, gritty details
which balance, support, illustrate, and
refresh the abstraction.
• Works hard toward—earns—the conclusions
she draws at the end.
MODE 2
55
Let’s take a peak at
The Visionary (Mad
Seer) Tradition
". . . I do not believe that poetry is simply an
ability. . .Ancient medicine – and ancient
philosophy, too, beginning with Plato –
attributed the poetic faculty to a psychic
disorder. A mania, in other words, a sacred
fury, an enthusiasm, a transport.”
– Octavio Paz
The visionary impulse produces work which…
• concerns itself with the unknown as opposed to
the known;
• may be prophetic;
• may access or stimulate ways of knowing which
are not rational;
• articulates the ineffable (or attempts to);
• springs from the unconscious;
• reveals what ordinary sight or understanding
cannot grasp;
• tests the boundaries of language.
One of the “Mad
Seer” SubTraditions:
Surrealism
Surrealism
1924: Andre Breton:
The Surrealist Manifesto
“I believe in the future resolution of these two
states, dream and reality, which are seemingly
so contradictory, into a kind of absolute
reality, a sur-reality.”
“The idea of surrealism aims quite simply at
the total recovery of our psychic force by a
means which is nothing other than the
dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic
illumination of hidden places and the
progressive darkening of other places, the
perpetual excursion into the midst of
forbidden territory” (Breton).
Between WWI and WWII
Surrealism:
the principles, ideals, or practice of producing
fantastic or incongruous imagery or effects in art,
literature, film, or theater by means of unnatural
juxtapositions and combinations. An attempt,
through these random, irrational juxtapositions and
combinations, to make make a new reality or a new
whole.
Instead of:
I saw the rabbit, as soft as cotton, his eyes bright, munching the
grass.
you get:
I saw the rabbit, ripe as a hammer, his eyes boiled, baptizing
the grass.
(random words from carpentry, religion, cooking)
or:
I saw the rabbit, as Monday as Van Gogh’s ear, eyes in search of
Harvard, document the grass.
(random words from stuff on my desk)
Early Surrealists Valued:
• random CHANCE and the
The names of Aztec gods were on one page,
seizing
ofuptake
accident;
serotonin
inhibitors on the other.
• “convulsive
beauty,” the marvelous, the uncanny, the
Here, you said: another baby avocado tree.
disruptive,
and
the
unexpected;
You threw
your
shoe.
I broke
I love
you. This remarkable statement
Here's your fire
•
the refrigerator andhas
the appeared
fossil fish.on earth to substantiate
the clams.
extinguisher,
I broke my shoulder blade.
welcome to the glacier.
strange
and
unexpected
I tried
to make
jambalaya.juxtapositions;
To relax the organism, the cookbook said,
pound with a mallet on the head or shell.
• defamiliarizing the everyday so that it once again appears
strange and new;
• liberation of mind from bourgeois modes of thinking;
• the
Don't think I wasn't shocked when
you were a traffic signal
I can't make it any clearer than that
a woodpecker.
oblivion
silly brain and Ibrillo
stain
and stay ha-ha
drunk.
A surrealist poem is another one of your
options for Poetry Project #2.
You can find a “surrealist sampler” on our
Creative Writing page in WordPress.
65
MODE 3
66
Let’s take a peak at
The Maker (Crafter of
Words)
All poets are actually crafters of language, but
you might say that some poets have a proclivity
for focusing on form, beauty, skill, and difficulty
above other values. Their work may tend to be
in traditional forms as opposed to free verse.
One of your options for Poetry Project #2 is to
write in a traditional form: a sonnet, villanelle,
sestina, pantoum, rhymed couplet, blank verse,
litany, heroic verse, and so on.
68
Form in Poetry
Goatfoot
Bonk baby Bonk baby…Bonk-Bonk!
Rhythm!
Milktongue
Sound and ORAL satisfaction, Yumm
Twinbird
The satisfying CLICK at the end when opposites are resolved; total form.
What makes poetry different from prose,
in the most rudimentary sense?
It’s in LINES!
Well, usually.
Ok, so how do you know where to break those
lines? What principles govern line length?
Accentual Verse
Line lengths determined by a consistent number of beats per line.
In a summer season
when soft was the sun
I shaped me in shrouds
In habit as a hermit
as a shepherd I were
unholy of works
caesura or pause
Went wide in this world
wonders to hear
Accentual verse, as in the Old English, can be a
bit wooden:
BONK-BONK (pause) BONK-BONK (pause)
But its simplicity and even courseness has its
own beauty.
So, line lengths in poetry can be determined by a set number of beats or stresses. When
you follow this principle, you’re writing accentual verse. Line lengths, though, can also
be determined by other principles, such as a set number of
Syllables
When you do this, you’re writing syllabic verse.
A famous Asian syllabic form of course is the
Tanka is Japanese poetry with five unrhymed
_______________.
HAIKU
lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven
syllables. (5, 7, 5, 7, 7)
5 syllables
Distant siren screams
Dumb-ass Verne’s been playing with
Gasoline again.
5 syllables
7 syllables
See our class library for more white trash haiku:
REMORSE
A painful sadness
Can't fit big screen TV through
Double-wide's front door
DEPRIVED
In WalMart toy aisle
Wailing boy wants Barbie doll
Mama whups his ass
DESIRE
Damn, in that tube-top
You make me almost forget
You are my cousin
Oh yeah—don’t forget all the other resources in our class online library!
Syllabics aren’t really native to English,
however, because ...
English is a Germanic language and heavily
stressed. Syllable count in and of itself isn’t
important to meaning.
Stresses, on the other hand, can be FELT and
are INTEGRAL to meaning:
Hey look at the white house.
Hey look at the White House.
And yet another way of determining line
length is:
by counting BOTH stresses and syllables.
This is called accentual-syllabic verse.
A unit comprised of a stressed syllable and its
accompanying unstressed syllables is called a
FOOT.
iamb =
trochee =
anapest =
dactyl =
pentameter
A line with 5 feet = ______________
trimeter
A line with 3 feet = ______________
hexameter
A line with six feet = _____________
And so on.
There are many patterns possible in
accentual-syllabic lines:
Iambic pentameter
A line with 5 iambic feet = ______________
dactylic trimeter
A line with 3 dactylic feet = _____________
trochaic tetrameter
A line with 4 trochaic feet = ____________
And so on.
Why do you
suppose the IAMB
is so important a
foot in English
poetry?
Der!
that’s…
Goatfoot,honey!
Rhythm
the DRUM in your
own body
Pattern
Thrumming
Throbbing
YOUR OWN
PULSE
Traditional or fixed forms
with particular meters as well as set
stanza lengths
• The sonnet
• The sestina
• The villanelle
And so on.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
One Art
--Elizabeth Bishop
Time flies, and a year can go by in a day.
Look at your watch. Do your eyes say 2:45 or 9:15?
The more you have, the more you can give away.
You know the feeling, having no money, having to stay
With relatives when you travel, unable to say what you mean:
Time lies, and a year can go by in a day.
When my father turned into my son, as in a play,
All the fun took place offstage. What about the missing queen?
The more you have, the more you can give away.
The less you believe. The more you wish you could pray.
Like a clock without hands, the truth of a face remains unseen.
Time lies, and a year can go by in a day.
With an elbow on the counter, and no passions left to sway,
The all-night waitress smokes butt after butt, coughing in-between:
The more you have, the more you can throw away.
Ocean, what is on the other side of all that blue and gray?
What does the grass know of yesterday's vanished green?
Time lies, and a year can go by in a day.
The more you have, the more you can give away.
The More You Have
to Lose
–David Lehman
I'm sorry, officer, I didn't see the sign
Because, in fact, there wasn't any. I tell you
The light was green. How much is the fine?
Will the tumor turn out malignant or benign?
Will the doctor tell us? He said he knew.
I'm sorry, officer, I didn't see the sign.
Not every madman is an agent of the divine.
Not all who pass are allowed to come through.
The light was green. How much is the fine?
Which is worse, the rush or the wait? The line
Interminable, or fear of coming fate? His anxiety grew.
I'm sorry, officer. I didn't see the sign.
I'm cold sober. All I had was one glass of wine.
Was anyone hurt? Is there anything I can do?
The light was green. How much is the fine?
Will we make our excuses like so many clever lines,
Awkwardly delivered? Never to win, always to woo?
I'm sorry, officer. I didn't see the sign.
The light was green. How much is the fine?
First Offense
—David Lehman
The sestina is a fun one…
The sestina is a poem in iambic pentameter, with thirty-nine
lines, divided into six stanzas of six lines each, plus a
terminal envoy of three lines.
The same six words conclude the lines of each stanza, but
their order is varied in each stanza according to a strict
pattern.
The final envoy also uses the six words, but three appear at
the ends of the lines and three appear in the middle of the
lines. In the graph below, each number represents a specific
word.
Stanza I
Stanza II
Stanza III
1--Angel
2--Sandwich
3--Hope
4--Below
5--Crave
6—Time
1--Angel
5--Crave
2--Sandwich
6--Time
4--Below
3--Hope
3--Hope
6 Time
4 Below
1 Angel
2 Sandwich
5 Crave
Stanza IV
5—Crave
3--Hope
2
6
1
4
Stanza V
4
5
1
3
6
2
Stanza VI
2
4
6
5
3
1
BTW, most people
don’t write the
sestina in
pentameter; it’s
already hard
enough!
Envoy
2---5
4---3
6---1
See sestina collection on our Creative Writing
page on WordPress!
Pantoums are also a kick…
•
•
•
•
•
•
Lines are grouped into quatrains (4-line stanzas).
The final line of the Pantoum must be the same as its first line.
A Pantoum has any number of quatrains.
Lines may be of any length.
The Pantoum has a rhyme scheme of abab in each quatrain. Thus, the lines rhyme
alternately.
The Pantoum says everything twice:
For all quatrains except the first, the first line of the current quatrain repeats the second line in the
preceeding quatrain; and the third line of the current quatrain repeats the fourth line of the
preceeding quatrain.
In addition, for the final quatrain, its second line repeats the (so-far unrepeated) third line in the
first quatrain; and its last line repeats the (so-far unrepeated) first line of the first quatrain.
Thus the pattern of line-repetition is as follows, where the lines of the first quatrain are
represented by the numbers "1 2 3 4":
1234
2546
5768
7 9 8 10
9 3 10 1
Lines in first quatrain
Lines in second quatrain
Lines in third quatrain
Lines in fourth quatrain
Lines in fifth and final quatrain
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 actual world.
The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
Pantoum Of The Great
Depression
--Donald Justice
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 had 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.
Blank Verse
from "Birches"
Unrhymed iambic
pentameter with no set
number of lines.
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
--Robert Frost
Let’s analyze some lines on the board…
• Does form affect content?
• Does the sonnet or the sestina or the villanelle
lead to a certain pattern of thinking?
Also, listen, NOT JUST for BEATS or
metrics, but for
SSSSSSSounds…
SENSUAL SOUNDS AND TEXTURES
Along with rhythm,
they make up the
sensual body of the
poem.
Look at that Frost passage again…
Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal
shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
ice sunny soon sun's shed shells
shattering snow SSSSSSSSnake
sunny enamel nnnn & mmmm & nunderful!
click colored KickKluckKlack
breeze rises crazes ZZZZZZZuzu’s petals
stir cracks crust ERRRRRiotous!
and sssssssssssssssssssssssssssss
Root Cellar
Nothing would sleep in that cellar, dank as a ditch,
Bulbs broke out of boxes hunting for chinks in the dark,
Shoots dangled and drooped,
Lolling obscenely from mildewed crates,
Hung down long yellow evil necks, like tropical snakes.
And what a congress of stinks!
Roots ripe as old bait,
Pulpy stems, rank, silo-rich,
Leaf-mold, manure, lime, piled against slippery planks.
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
dank ditch dark dangled drooped dirt
dank broke chinks dark necks snakes
ripe silo lime piled life
alliteration
consonance
assonance
sleep cellar bulbs dangled lolling obscenely mildewed long yellow evil planks
like piled tropical sleep
roots ripe rank rich manure slippery dirt breathing breath
tropical ripe pulpy piled slippery planks
mildewed stems mold manure lime small
Language that sounds like
what it means; evokes
feeling utterly in synch with
meaning.
long I-sounds plus L’s plus P’s and B’s and M’s =
LOTS OF LONG TROPICAL LOOPY SNAKY LIVES LOLLING IN BREATHY DANK AND
MOLDY DARK!
Any form of sound pattern in poetry, really, is a form of
RHYME
•
True or exact rhyme = the first or middle vowel and the final consonant of two words are
exactly the same, but the final consonant, if there is one, differs:
hat/cat
•
Slant or partial rhyme = the first consonant (if any) in two words is the same; the middle
vowel is different; and the final consonant is the same:
hat/heat
•
ear/beer.
ear/are.
Assonance = two or more words have the same vowel sounds:
the pink breeze we need is free.
•
Alliteration = two or more words have the same initial consonant:
huge hairy hungry hunk.
•
Consonance = two or more words have the same end consonant sounds:
munch the batch of patched and crouching bitches.
And, finally…
Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.
Feel the CLICK at the end of Roethke’s
poem?
That’s
FORM !
That’s…
& the satisfying
resolution or suspension
of opposites, of tension.
Ok,
so what’s “free verse”?
Poetry with no form?
Poetry with no constraints of any
kind?
Lines can be broken randomly, no
patterns of sound or stress?
NOT!
Free verse poems (good ones) always have TONS of
rhythm and gorgeous sound patterns. These features
simply aren’t prescribed in advanced of the poem,
but are rather discovered in the writing of the poem.
They are used more or less UNCON-SCIOUSLY and
intuitively. And they will of course tend to be less
regular than in fixed forms. T.S. Eliot said that good
free verse always had the ghost of meter behind it.
Free verse lines are typically broken
according to the following principles:
 Desire for a particular effect, ethos, feeling
 Smoothness and elegance, for example, with a spoken quality, whole sentences or
complete phrases
= end-stopped
He was completely and outrageously without a stitch of clothing.
 Or maybe roughness, a poem that “fights itself,” is less “spoken,” stuttery, broken
against the syntax of the sentence, of the phrase
= enjambed
He was
Completely and
Outrageously without
A
Stitch of
Clothing.
He
Was completely and
Outrageously
Without a stitch of
Clothing.
 Rhetorical emphasis and desire to stress particular words:
He was completely and outrageously without
A stitch
Of clothing.
 Breath units He was completely and outrageously without
a stitch of clothing.
 Visual emphasis
For a
great poet
who really jams
with enjambs
a lot…
see poet Robert
Creeley
What determines stanza breaks in free
verse?
• Each stanza is a verse paragraph,
focused on a single topic or idea.
• Each stanza and its accompanying break
is a unit of rhythm.
• Each stanza is a rhetorical gesture.
Free Verse Lineation Exercise
The Mirror
Watching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like
to be so beautiful and why you do not love but
cut yourself, shaving like a blind man. I think you
let me stare so you can turn against yourself with
greater violence, needing to show me how you
scrape the flesh away scornfully and without
hesitation until I see you correctly, as a man
bleeding, not the reflection I desire.
The Mirror
Watching you in the mirror
I wonder what it is like
to be so beautiful
Lines all end-stopped
and why you do not love
(complete sentences or
but cut yourself,
phrases)
shaving like a blind man.
I think you let me stare
so you can turn against yourself
with greater violence,
needing to show me
how you scrape the flesh away scornfully
and without hesitation
until I see you correctly,
as a man bleeding,
not the reflection I desire.
The Mirror
Watching you in the
mirror I
wonder what it is
like to be so
beautiful and why you do not
love
but cut yourself,
shaving like a
blind
man.
I think you let
me stare
so you can turn against
yourself with greater
violence, needing to
show
me how you scrape the
flesh away scornfully and
without hesitation until
I see
you correctly, as a
man bleeding, not the reflection I
desire.
Lines all enjambed
(broken against the syntax of the
sentence, cutting into the
sentence and the phrase)
The Mirror
Glück’s version
Watching you in the mirror I wonder
what it is like to be so beautiful
and why you do not love
but cut yourself, shaving
like a blind man. I think you let me stare
so you can turn against yourself
with greater violence,
needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away
scornfully and without hesitation
until I see you correctly,
as a man bleeding, not
the reflection I desire.
NOTE!
Line breaks in a poem, regardless of its form,
mode, or style, always matter. they are like a
musical score. This is important to remember
when copy-pasting poems or transferring your
work from one application to another.
WATCH OUT THAT YOU LINE BREAKS REMAIN
INTACT; LINES SHOULD NOT “WRAP AROUND”
AS THEY DO IN PROSE.
117
Here’s a version of that Glück poem again. This time I squeezed the margins so that there’s less
space for the lines. Notice how some of the lines subsequently “wrap around.” When I read the
poem now, I can’t tell for sure which lines are which, or where some of them actually end and
begin.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Watching you in the mirror I
wonder
what it is like to be so beautiful
and why you do not love
but cut yourself, shaving
like a blind man. I think you let me
stare
so you can turn against yourself
with greater violence,
needing to show me how you
scrape
the flesh away
scornfully and without hesitation
until I see you correctly,
as a man bleeding, not
the reflection I desire.
Are the words
“wonder,” “stare”
and “scrape”
supposed to be on
their own lines, or
are they actually
part of the previous
lines and just
wrapped around
because they
wouldn’t fit the
margins? Because of
this confusion, I
don’t know exactly
how to read the
lines and this affects
the whole poem.
Here’s a
fix
118
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
Watching you in the mirror I
wonder
what it is like to be so beautiful
and why you do not love
but cut yourself, shaving
like a blind man. I think you let me
stare
so you can turn against yourself
with greater violence,
needing to show me how you
scrape
the flesh away
scornfully and without hesitation
until I see you correctly,
as a man bleeding, not
the reflection I desire.
Ok, see how I NOW INDENTED any line
that “wrapped around”? This is the
convention for showing that the
indented words are part of the previous
lines.
So #1 would read like this:
Watching you in the mirror I wonder
what it is like to be so beautiful
And #6 would read like this:
like a blind man. I think you let me stare
so you can turn against yourself
and #10 would read like this:
needing to show me how you scrape
the flesh away
119
When you create chapbooks, copy-paste poems, re-save poems to different
applications, etc....
BE SURE YOUR LINE BREAKS DON’T GET MANGLED.
YOUR READER SHOULD BE ABLE TO TELL WHERE LINE BREAKS ARE ACTUALLY
SUPPOSED TO OCCUR.
BTW: poems copy-pasted on web sites are often mangled this way. It’s very
irresponsible, because if I, say, want to paste some Elizabeth Bishop poems online and
if I don’t pay attention to whether or not the integrity of the lines is being maintained,
I MISREPRESENT HER POEMS.
It’s just like if I willy-nilly changed the spelling or whole words in her work.
People posting poems on the web are often very careless this way. Here’s a poem by
Jorie Graham which someone posted irresponsibly. The line breaks do not show up
correctly and this drastically affects how the poem gets read:
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/orpheus-and-eurydice/
120
OK?
Ok.
121
Poetry Project #3
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS
2014/PoetryProject3.htm
This assignment is all about the
ancient/brand new spoken-word
and visual modes. Go gazonkers!
122
Option #1: Spoken Word Poetry
The Oral Tradition
(the oral mode)
This stuff is really old…
•
•
•
•
•
Hey, Daddy-o
Homer 800 BC
Old English poetry 400 AD
Native American 8000 BC to present
The Beats 1950s
Slam Poetry 1980s to present
The Beats (1950s,60s)
• Getting poetry
out of the
classroom
• Poetry read to
jazz
accompaniment
Jack Kerouac (strongly recommended for general flavor of beat reading):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MjPtem6ZbE
Ferlinghetti:
http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MiscPoemsF
erlinghetti.htm
Ginsberg:
http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MiscpoemsGins
bergHowl.htm
Rap and Hip Hop
• Came of age
alongside the poetry
slam phenom.
• Hyperbolic,
gymnastic, inventive
• Heavily end-rhyme
based; rhymes often
funny, clever, silly
• Distinct prosody
The Poetry Slam
and Open-Mike Coffee House Reading
• Harks back to the Beats
• Again, desire to get poetry out of
the classroom
• Emphasis on anyone can write
poetry
• Tends to be political
• Theatrical, sometimes mixed-media
How do slams work?
check
these
out!
www.nuyorican.org/
AND
www.poetryslam.com/
Listen to Spoken Word selections
from Spoken Word Revolution and
You Tube pieces:
You Tube performances to check out:
Tom Hanks doing a slam piece about Full House:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfWIuymme50
Katie Makkai doing a piece called “Pretty”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0
Interesting, very visual slam piece by Gayle Danley:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9f8VcV8v2LE
A nation slam champion named Hostage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlWmwrzquGc
136
• Blurring the line between poetry and theater; performances are like
one-person, one-act plays.
• Aggressive, clever, sometimes funny rhyme, not in any strict pattern
(triple rhymes, internal rhymes, slant rhymes, repeated words, etc. In
video, “Lazarus, Lazie, Lazy”).
• Projection! Loud broadcast.
•
•
•
So,
what
do
you
notice?
Number of unstressed syllables don’t matter, maybe. Success
depends on how cleverly you get the four stresses in (rap).
What makes one of these
Getting into a groove.
poems
successful
or
not?
Memorizing the material adds interest.
• Mixing genres: insert singing, use accompanying sound, etc.
• Ritual presence of performer.
138
Option #2 of Poetry Project #3
139
And the visual tradition.
You probably remember
…the pleasure you took as a kid, when you were just
learning to “make your letters.”
Most of us don’t pay much attention to the visual
aspect of language anymore, but, for concretists
and new media writers, it’s vital.
“Concrete poetry’s most conspicuous feature is its attention to the visual
appearance of the text on the page” (Drucker 110).
Like oral poetry, it returns us to the
roots of meaning-making with
language?
“In its most generic
application, the term
‘concrete
poetry’ is used to designate all manner of
shaped, typographically complex, visually selfconscious poetic works. The term ‘visual
poetry’ is more general and thus more aptly
used to describe a
history which is as old as writing itself”
(Drucker).
Go to this address:
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeW
riting/323/NewMediaPresentation.htm
(view this page up to New Media:
Concrete/Visual Writing for the
21st Century)
New Media Poetry
What makes electronic writing
S p e c i a
l?
Some of the first characteristics
we noticed about “computer
writing”:
• Very easily manipulated text.
• Utilitarian functions: storage, annotation, word
processing
• Reader interaction.
• Circumvention of commercial control.
• The LINKED NODE.
Suddenly….
written text was no longer
LINEAR!
Thus we have
Far distant
reaches
of the Web
Dictionary
Related
Website
Link
Link
Link
HOMEPAGE
Link
Link
Link
Official
Organization
Site
The 80s saw some great experiments with
hypertext, in particular…
Michael Joyce’s electronic novel, Afternoon, A
Story and other Eastgate work.
(View portions of Joyce’s novel.)
This was, and still is,
resisted.
But, then, so was the
printed word itself, which
some ancient Greeks
thought was an innovation
that signaled the death of
civilization (loss of
memory skills…)!
Every big paradigm shift has
been resisted and considered a
degrading of what came before.
It’s apparent now that
new media allow for a whole wealth of
Let’s return now to New Media Presentation,
(BEGINNING WITH SEGMENT TITLED, New Media:
Concrete/Visual Writing for the 21st Century)
www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/N
ewMediaPresentation.htm
Explore the many links at that site! There are heaps to
look at.
The Visual Dimension
As We Come to The End of Our Poetry
Segment…
• Remember that our WordPress page has quite a few
resources and links. Feel free to browse there for ideas. Even
after we’ve started the Fiction segment, you’re still free to
write poems.
• And don’t forget the most important fact about the Surrealist
mode: fish
Write, my children.
Write.