Assignment #10

Read: any/all of the poetics statements at the end of PAM. Go to www.manifestos.net and nose around (not all poetry here, much art and politics). Do a ton of nosing around. If these don't appeal, find Shelley's "Defense of Poesie" or Emerson's "The Poet."

ASSIGNMENT#10

Think: about your obsessions. A manifesto is a statement of need--a calling into being of a movement into the world. If you can't manage one--a passionate and bombastic proclamation about how what you believe could and should change the world (through politics, art, work, living, etc.)... then write a defense or an apologia. Whatever you write should be a statement of poetics, by which I mean your philosophy of making/being. You can tie your statements to other passions (birds/comics/etc) but be aware that such statements are intensely public statements of private practices and will be read as such. You should be nailing your soul to the door of city hall, and daring others to refute or join you.


Manifestos often have three sections:

* An Intro which declares its context--a specific place and time. The description should itself be a model of the kind of art/life/work you are calling for. This section should also identify what you are against and why.

* Mission statement for your art in list form (often numbered)

* Conclusion: how this wd change the world--why others shd enter into your utopian/dystopian vision


Make me want to join you people. I'm in need of some life-alteration: please provide.

Assignment #9

READ: in PACKET: 8-14, Hollander's section on sonnets (check the index)... And, to stretch your mind on the form/content issue, in PAM--p279-80 (3 sonnets by Ted Berrigan) 468-9 (3 sonnets by Bernadette Mayer).

TURN-IN: glosses and poems per usual.

ASSIGNMENT#9:

The sonnet, or “little song,” is a 14 line poem stolen from the Italian love-poem tradition (google Petrarch for details). In English, over the past four centuries it has gained a few admirers and a few recognized forms—the most common one is a meter of iambic pentameter (daDum daDum daDum daDum daDum) and a fairly rigid rhyme scheme. Shakespeare wrote his ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, but any formal rhyme scheme over 14 lines will do for your first effort. (ex. ABA BCB CDC EFE FF, ABBA CDDC EFGEFG, ABCD ABCD EFG EFG, ABABAB CDDC EFFE, you get the idea...)

Sonnets have historically been written in the form of arguments, and when I say argument, I mean a text that attempts to persuade. In a love poem, persuasion can be seen in seduction or in a genuine expression of more spiritual and serious affection. When a sonneteer meditates on death or marriage or the decision to beget children, by the end of the poem reasons pro and con have often been discussed and a conclusion reached. You can argue taxes, drum a roommate out with escalating insults, make an impassioned plea for green architecture—anything can be an argument. Sonnets are less often "story" poems, though sonnet cycles (like Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus) can be written around an epic narrative. Yet each single sonnet in the Rilke cycle attempts to deeply address just one idea relevant to this tale of love and pride and loss.

Usually a sonnet contains a “turn” about two thirds of the way through—an AHA! moment, or a shift in logical language (if this and if this and if this THEN this), or a changing of direction (often signalled with diction like “yet well I know” WS 18 or “But” WS 130 or “but just from listening” RI.i. or “Or perhaps he would stay there” RII.xiv. or “but never this /fine specimen” from e.e.c.’s pity this monster...). No matter how it is offered up, a turn is nearly always present in a sonnet, signaling the close of the poem.

So—-meter (all I want of meter is that you do a scan of your poem... and take care with that element of sound... yours needn't be regular), rhyme, argument, a turn in logic: these elements, plus the kitchen sink—that’s all I want to see in your sonnets. Otherwise, surprise me and yourselves.

Oh and I remembered

The director's name is Peter Greenaway... and the composer that does his scores: Michael Nyman... I recommend all his movies... all of them.

Assignment #8

First of all, thank you for sharing your obsessions today--it was more than illuminating. And I hope you will let each others' processes start to seep past the boundaries of self. And Hanna(h?) and Sara(h!)... feel better please.

READING: A bit this week. The first is the first 25 pages of the Jabes' The Book of Margins--please treat it as if you are reading someone's personal notebook. In a very real sense you are, and much of what you find there may not be of use to you, or may seem opaque. Please please push through (even if you feel it washing over you without sense). We will be discussing his writing, and while I don't expect you to get all or even many of his references or to grasp his philosophy--I think it is necessary to plow through a substantial portion of his work to understand both his passion and the passion many people (yes including me) have for this type of philoso-poetry... in the PACKET, please read 37-45 and 90-2.

FOR WKSHOP: 3/20 Please gloss Amy's, Sarah's, Dawn's, Olivia's and Sam's (Sam please send me yours so I may disseminate it). Everyone else: bring one to hand out for wkshop for the following week. (I know that will change the schedule up a bit, but I think it will work this way.)

ASSIGNMENT#8

APHORISM ASSIGNMENT (cliches, axioms, personal remembrances, and spin-ner-esque language also welcome)

The best way to explain what an aphorism is to offer examples, and as I am becoming lazy and was away this week making girls cry, I'll offer a few off of the Wikipedia entry:

"Usually an aphorism is a very concise statement expressing a general truth or wise observation often in a clever way. Sometimes aphorisms rhyme, sometimes they have repeated words or phrases, and sometimes they have two parts that are of the same grammatical structure. Some examples include:

* Science is organized knowledge. — Herbert Spencer
* Lost time is never found again. — Benjamin Franklin
* Greed is a permanent slavery. — Ali
* Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
* Death with dignity is better than life with humiliation. — Husayn ibn Ali
* That which does not destroy us makes us stronger. — Nietzsche
* If you see the teeth of the lion, do not think that the lion is smiling to you. — Al-Mutanabbi
* When your legs get weaker time starts running faster. — Mikhail Turovsky
* Many of those who tried to enlighten were hanged from the lampposts. — Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
* The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs. — Celia Green
* Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see. — Mark Twain
* It is better to be hated for what one is, than loved for what one is not. — André Gide
* A lie told often enough becomes the truth. — Vladimir Lenin
* Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind. The race is long. And in the end, it's only with yourself. — Mary Schmich
* Like a road in Autumn: Hardly is it swept clean before it is covered again with dead leaves. — Franz Kafka
* Hate the Sin; Love the Sinner. — Mahatma Gandhi"

Many famous quotes are aphorisms, and many philosophical conclusions as well. Also, any line of song or text that stands complete on its own can be an aphorism (or personal accounting). Examples:

We are the bees of the invisible. -Rilke
For interruptions there shall always be. -Virginia Woolf
I think I've lost a buttonhole. -Steven Wright
All the lonely people, where do they all belong? -John Lennon
Mother please be proud, father be forgiving... -Decemberists
Uncorrected personality traits, though whimsical in a child, prove to be ugly in a fully grown adult. -Robyn Hitchcock
I would prefer not to. -Bartleby the Scrivener
I am not a liar. -Richard Nixon
You were the only man to call me Queen I didn't kill.

Also: Most metaphors are aphoristic--especially the less obvious ones.

This week's assignment is to gather and/or create 21 aphoristic statements, and then mix and match them to create your own 3-aphorism poems (seven of them). The work that you read this week is filled with aphoristic language. Feel free to follow Jack Spicer of Bill Knott (aka Saint Geraud) as stylistic models... or Hart Crane or Edmund Jabes. Each 3 aphorism poem should follow a different strategy of combination. (You can add language beyond the aphorisms if necessary, but try to keep it spare... you can also deform the aphorisms--they needn't be recognizable always as full statements, for example) Feel free, if 7 poems is too fragmented for you, to link them up to make a series poem. Please email me with doubts, concerns, soup recipes...


ALSO: I am reading Wednesday the 18th at 7pm in Seeger (yes Seeger, not the other one). Please feel invited to come and heckle the poet.

Assignment #7

Hello.

Hope you are had a wonderful break. Since I introduced the assignment in class--let me simply reiterate:

TO READ: The handout with sestinas, pantoums, and villanelles. Also (for clarification or further explication--the section on repetitive forms in Hollander)

TO WRITE: Either a sestina or a villanelle or a pantoum. Or all three if you are compulsive or bored or masochistic.

TO TURN IN: Line edits (as always). Gloss your new partner's work if it is up for workshop. Next group turn in work (anyone who did not turn in work this past workshop).

ALSO: I have decided this next class should be a SHARE-THE-WEALTH class. Prepare a 5 minute long INTERACTIVE presentation on something you do that informs your writing or your humanity... give us the information needed that it might in some small way start to inform our work (or our humanity--which should be our work). In other words, limit yourself to a single aspect of your singing, dancing, painting, guitar playing, bird watching, bike riding, obsession with dolls, horses, rainbows, corpses, or fractals that we could adapt to use as some sort of tool of thought/feeling/form. You will of course be graded on clarity, concision, complexity, use-of-time, relevance, and humanity. ;)

Assignment #6

Now... THE DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE

READ: Packet 18-34 and "The River Merchant's Wife" p. 49-50 (and yes, I am asking you to read poems over again for different issues... Berryman for example you read last week... but reading him this week and understanding that "Henry" is usually understood to be a persona that talks about himself sometimes in the third and sometimes in the first person ((often in the same poem)) should help illuminate him for you a bit methinks... and Pound's Cathay deserves multiple multiple readings--"twice twice" is growing on me). If you want extra work or liked this past week's assignments--feel free to do transliterations of the Symborska (either before or after you've read the English translations). Below, read the father of this poetic form--Robert Browning. And Adam--there is a mystery in this poem unsolved since its writing that you might find the answer to. And please, if you discover the man's purpose below--do share. Further reading: Billy S. of course--Hamlet gives a fair monologue, even Romeo, and Lady MacBeth and Portia, also Iago and as for comedies (for my honey) Benedick in Much Ado and his "The world must be peopled..." speech. Milton too but NOT HIS SYNTAX (please spare me diagramming and a darksubject rearing its horn-ed head only after four clauses).

TURN-IN: Group B--poems... EVERYONE--a stapled collection of your glosses thus far.



PORPHYRIA'S LOVER -Browning

THE rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its worst to vex the lake:
I listen'd with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneel'd and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up, and all the cottage warm;
Which done, she rose, and from her form
Withdrew the dripping cloak and shawl,
And laid her soil'd gloves by, untied
Her hat and let the damp hair fall,
And, last, she sat down by my side
And call'd me. When no voice replied,
She put my arm about her waist,
And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
And all her yellow hair displaced,
And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
And spread, o'er all, her yellow hair,
Murmuring how she loved me—she
Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
To set its struggling passion free
From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
And give herself to me for ever.
But passion sometimes would prevail,
Nor could to-night's gay feast restrain
A sudden thought of one so pale
For love of her, and all in vain:
So, she was come through wind and rain.
Be sure I look'd up at her eyes
Happy and proud; at last I knew
Porphyria worshipp'd me; surprise
Made my heart swell, and still it grew
While I debated what to do.
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laugh'd the blue eyes without a stain.
And I untighten'd next the tress
About her neck; her cheek once more
Blush'd bright beneath my burning kiss:
I propp'd her head up as before,
Only, this time my shoulder bore
Her head, which droops upon it still:
The smiling rosy little head,
So glad it has its utmost will,
That all it scorn'd at once is fled,
And I, its love, am gain'd instead!
Porphyria's love: she guess'd not how
Her darling one wish would be heard.
And thus we sit together now,
And all night long we have not stirr'd,
And yet God has not said a word!

ASSIGNMENT #6: 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?

Voice here is essential. Maybe the easiest way to think of the distinction between voice and tone/point-of-view is to think of the way you recognize a person speaking over the phone. To recognize the voice is to recognize the whole person; to recognize any or some of the other elements is partial recognition. Voice is the character revealed by the use of language. The poet uses voice to create a fiction. Beyond the dramatic monologue this is true as well: poets like Ginsberg can make an elaborate stage business of presenting the poet-as-character. Some, ex. Elizabeth Bishop, seem equally insistent on having the poet’s character be that of an Everyperson in the circumstances at hand. However controlled or free a writer is with voice in a poem, the paradox remains: voice is the most intimate revelation of the poet herself (even when wearing a mask the poet reveals herself, perhaps even more so BECAUSE of the mask), the most unlikely contraption for lies about who she wishes, fears or believes herself to be. Utterance, even of someone else’s words, is changed utterly by the voice of the utterer. (Now say that five times fast.) Now--forget I said that and have fun with this.

For those of you who crave structure (Adam and Amy or not... or anyone else)--feel free to write in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter--the metric most commonly found whole in prosaic English speech--at least back when people spoke in full sentences). Otherwise--any form will do. Caveat: to guarantee a full portait of your speaker, a minimum of 50 lines.

Best O Luck, my little leprechauns.

Assignment #5

Diction is word choice: vocabulary working with the distinct logic and flavor given it by particulars of phrasing and syntax. We say that there are levels of diction—from low to high: street, slang, colloquial, vernacular, plain-style, literate, eloquent, lofty. Terms toward either extreme may be negative, depending partly on the social situation of the person using them. Our diction reflects a stratified society, but it also reflects specialization. Every profession has its own vocabulary: think computer programmer, personal trainer, lit critic, ballet dancer, molecular geneticist, opera singer, policy wonk. Diction is an identifying characteristic, but not simply of class. To many poets, the boundaries between levels and types of diction are laws made to be broken—not disregarded, but intelligently transcended. Much of the energy in poetry comes from combining language from different sources, especially in English where Latinate and Germanic words smack of such divergent culture.

Consider how the diction in this poem plays against the reality of the situation… to what end?

Monologue of the Girl in the Refrigerator

To be last.
To find the best place
and stay, like God,
till the end;
reveal oneself only
when everyone confessed
the perfection of the absence.
We all agreed to that
intention.

But I went farther than anyone
away from the counting—
thousand one, thousand two—
nearer the county dump than parents
would permit,
rushing through pin oak, sumac, and speargrass,
till I came to this bin,
this dried up sinkhole, low in a weedfield,
and its crèche of abandoned appliances,
toppled washer, rusted mangle,
and an old refrigerator,
plump and empty as a grandmother,
and I climbed out of the air
into this indulging obscurity.

Now I know where heaven is.

My old places,
the crawlspace beneath the porches,
the leafpiles, and the dreamy midst
of Mrs. Romano’s unkempt lilac,
I leave for you, my playmates,
to learn and forget,
as for the sad-eyed bloodhounds I left
the scent of my Sunday pumps.
And for the one who will find me,
these directions to heaven—
it’s close,
close and dark,
and the door opens
just from your side.
-Adam Lefevre


READ: In the packet read the following pages with an eye to diction (LOOK UP WDS YOU DON'T KNOW...THERE WILL BE A QUIZ): 15,16,18,19,35,36,40,55,65-69 and in PAM: Levertov only 86-92

ASSIGNMENT#5

Translate the following without recourse to a translating dictionary or computer. In other words--make it up (feel free to take advantage of cognates that suggest meaning to you). Also, read aloud what you can make out from the syntax, punctuation, line-break and sound (as you interpret it). Feel responsible to the original poem (which is wonderful...), also feel responsible to your own poem. Note how this exercise moves you to consider the roots of language and to use words you might not normally (to what end?)--and if it doesn't... try it again. If you can read this as is, send me an email and I will find you a substitute. If this pains you--you are doing it right.

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.

TURN IN: New poems if you are up. Glosses to each other.