Assignment #3

Today I felt like I had snowed you under a bit with the reading, so... this week a bit lighter. I shall flurry you under.

Adam and Emma--send me your poems ASAP so I may disseminate them.

READ:
The scansion pages, the Emily Dickinson and "Amazing Grace"--(everything up to page 7 in your packet, I believe). The "Casabianca" handout. Hollander on the ballad form (check the index). Also the Kerouac and Philip Whalen in PAM. Look at Olsen again if you have a moment--in his statement/manifesto re-read the Middle English ballad "Western wind." Think about any/all of these poems through the mirrored lenses of syllable and line.

WRITE: The assignment below, line edits on Emma's, Adam's, Sarah's and Dawn's poems. Glosses as appropriate.

TURN IN ON 2/6: Group B should turn in 10 copies of a poem for the wkshp on 2/13.

EVERYONE: Please email me the poem you plan to memorize for 2/13. At least 14 lines. Amy--I really think you should (I would like it if you did) recite a Gerard M. Hopkins. They are available on Bartleby.com I believe. I don't have specific rec.'s for the rest of you--but if you are floundering, I can come up with some.

ASSIGNMENT#3

The ballad is a form built out of 4 line stanzas with a recognizable rhythm (most often iambic trimeter, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM or iambic tetrameter da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM, or a mix of the two). Ballads are most often rhymed ABAB (Amazing Grace) or ABCB (The Beatle's “Let it be”). The form is an old folk song invention, still used in much popular music (check out nearly any really singable pop song on the radio... you’ll be surprised, I think... and please bring in some examples). The ballad can carry story and narrative easily, but it also lends itself (perhaps because of its ubiquity in American hymnals) to meditation. Blake’s ballads can seem like children’s poems; yet, as with Grimm's tales, our current conception of that audience belies the sometimes dark and/or revolutionary ideas encoded within literature written with them in mind. Emily Dickinson used unconventional syntax, slant rhyme, and ambiguous punctuation and capitalization to make each of her ballads capable of holding mystery, of reverberating with it--

The ballad form can read like Dr. Seuss, and many of you will find it quite easy to pen a stanza or two of what used to be called doggerel (look it up)—the trick is to see what ELSE this stanza (often called “common verse”) can do. Can you stretch it to make it uncommon? Or at least uncommonly good? Can you present four lines (or any multiple of four) that do not have the reader trotting through your poem as if on a pony (called macaroni)? Get a few lines onto paper, then play with the rhythm and rhyme, trying NOT to let your reader know exactly what is coming next. There’s the rub: how to bend the expectation in the most predictable and familiar poetic form in America. Hmm. Let's say a minimum of two stanzas. Make me cry with shock at your inventiveness. Best of luck, my pretty ones/ soon you'll have me seething/ at how difficulty for me seems/ for you to be as breathing.

See, the doggerel ain't tough... advice: take the time you need.