Hello...
This week is a reflection/revision week. But that doesn't mean we won't be working. In addition to memorizing a 14+ line poem for recitation to the class (and please bring a copy of that poem for me to keep), I will be asking you to go back over the readings for the first four weeks and bring in a discussion-starting question about a poem (or bit of poetics) you find there. We will begin with Casabianca and go on to a few pieces that stir you, so please, BE stirred (otherwise I'll choose what and how to discuss the work and you'll lose a valuable opportunity to hush me up and to talk about wk you find compelling or problematic or magnetically repugnant--my fave).
ASSIGNMENT#4
Beyond that, you will need to complete a specific revision/version of one of your first four assignments... Take one of the assignments that you don't know how to revise, or haven't really thought about yet and alter its line-lengths drastically. By this I mean: re-write psalms in three-beat OR two-word lines, OR rewrite ballads as psalms, OR vary line-length in any poem to make it wildly fluctuate, OR re-create a left-justified poem as a field poem, using the page as landscape. As you do this work, language changes will occur to you, or they will demand to happen against your will--so go with that. This assignment is all about altering the line, so the only no-no is to take the same lines and position them differently or to make an 8-line ballad into a 4-line poem--TOO EASY. The name of this game is to actively go against your original instincts. Radically break lines where it seems "wrong." Take out precious line breaks and hide them within a longer line, etc. Find NEW music in your work... who wants to hear a remake that sounds exactly like the original? BORING. On the other hand... DO find new music. Don't get angry about doing a version that isn't what you envisioned... keep a copy of the original. Think of this as letting your poem try on outfits he would never wear in public, but that strangely suit him nonetheless. And always personify your work, it makes it more satisfying to torture...oops... I mean aggressively interrogate.
Speaking of which, we will also be doing an in-class assignment for which you will need a few items.
EVERYONE SHOULD BRING:
1. A pair of scissors. Some of you (and you know who you are) should procure a pair with the blunted-safety end.
2. A medium-length poem (14-25 lines) that you adore for its rhythm or syntax or its use of repetition (this could be the poem that you memorized or another one). In other words--a poem you are drawn to for its FORM (not sound...but structure), although not necessarily that it be an easily replicated or a recognizable one.
3. A page or two of text (prose probably, although it doesn't matter) that contains vocabulary that intrigues you (words you love, hate, that enthrall or disgust or confuse you--just make a passion-driven decision and you'll be fine). You will be cutting this text up so please print out a large-fonted copy of it to make things easier for yourself.
EVERYONE SHD LINE EDIT: Sam's, Olivia's, Hannah's, Amy's, Josh's
EVERYONE NOT MENTIONED ABOVE: please bring in poems for wkshp on 2/20
GLOSSES PASSED BACK AND FORTH AS ALWAYS.
email me any confusions.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Assignment #2
1.) Read: HANDOUT; HOLLANDER 26-30; PAM-- Olson 613-21, Morley 51-3, Guest 62-7, O'Hara 129-30 ("Why I am not a painter"), Eshleman 306-13, Silliman 490-3 (from Tjanting), Gustaf Sobin 320-2 ("11 Rock Poems"), Equi 599 ("A Bouquet of Objects"); PACKET-- pp. 36, 48-55.
2.) Write: Gloss (1-2 single spaced pages) your partner's poem. Line edit the others (thoroughly). Complete the assignment below.
#2- IMAGE... and TRANSLATION THRU the SENSES
This week we will work not on line length or on any overtly formal element, but rather we will elevate the senses and the objects involved in the poem above all else. There are ten thousand ways to do this. We will read a few of them. As WCW wrote: "No ideas but in things." We are moving away this week from syntactic discursivity, from arguments made of logical lines of (commonly) abstract language to arguments woven of juxtaposition of the concrete, of sensory evidence. Image in this instance need not be merely read as visual (that is simply shorthand)-- please do also/or explore the tactile, olfactory, kinesthetic, aural, as well as the bitter-, sweet-, or tartness of the object.
What should such a poem look like? It can look like a haiku or a series of haiku (Wallace Stevens "13 Ways..." Sobin's "11 Rock Poems"), a "field" poem (Hollander 29/Sobin here too), it could even look like a psalm (although many of the poets who choose to write thing poems also favor concision, it is not a prerequisite). This type of poem exploded into American writing with Pound's "Cathay"--and his cribbing of Fenellosa's notes toward translation brought with it the romantic notion of "Oriental minimalism." Deep image poets of the sixties and seventies (Bly, Eshleman, Wakoski, etc.) admired the impact of the image, but tended to combine it with the influence of surrealism and symbolism and romantic excess. Deep attention to observation/experience is what we are after, but whether the experience of the object is scientific, meditative, ecstatic, impressionistic, or workmanlike is all about you. Or, correction: all about your particular conception and representation of your object/s. Like Olson, we are attempting to avoid so much/too much self (think excessive patchouli use).
Directions: For this simple limitation exercise there are two rules only: 1.)Choose one concrete object to write about (no poems about multiple objects or about abstract concepts like love, war, or fly-fishing). Many of the poems I've assigned for you to read for next class address several objects and even meditate on process (Silliman) or event/place (Hopkins, Eshelman) rather than on discrete things... but our assignment is to choose ONE THING. 2.) NO SIMILES NO METAPHORS (I know the examples use them but I need to impose severe obstacles--my objects of choice--and the removal of figurative language will no doubt cripple some of you to the point that you must grow wings or learn to crawl interestingly)... such as pleases my devious heart.
TURN IN NEXT TIME:
1. Group A (who was workshopped today--new sets of poems)
2. Everyone-- Line edits from the poems wkshopped today and for 1/30 shd be handed to the poets themselves.
3. Everyone shd turn in a gloss of their writing partner's work as they receive the pieces.
*Note: you will not always present your gloss in class but you and your partner shd be passing back and forth poems/glosses of the non-wkshopped assignments informally.
email my hotmail acct with inevitable confusions.
2.) Write: Gloss (1-2 single spaced pages) your partner's poem. Line edit the others (thoroughly). Complete the assignment below.
#2- IMAGE... and TRANSLATION THRU the SENSES
This week we will work not on line length or on any overtly formal element, but rather we will elevate the senses and the objects involved in the poem above all else. There are ten thousand ways to do this. We will read a few of them. As WCW wrote: "No ideas but in things." We are moving away this week from syntactic discursivity, from arguments made of logical lines of (commonly) abstract language to arguments woven of juxtaposition of the concrete, of sensory evidence. Image in this instance need not be merely read as visual (that is simply shorthand)-- please do also/or explore the tactile, olfactory, kinesthetic, aural, as well as the bitter-, sweet-, or tartness of the object.
What should such a poem look like? It can look like a haiku or a series of haiku (Wallace Stevens "13 Ways..." Sobin's "11 Rock Poems"), a "field" poem (Hollander 29/Sobin here too), it could even look like a psalm (although many of the poets who choose to write thing poems also favor concision, it is not a prerequisite). This type of poem exploded into American writing with Pound's "Cathay"--and his cribbing of Fenellosa's notes toward translation brought with it the romantic notion of "Oriental minimalism." Deep image poets of the sixties and seventies (Bly, Eshleman, Wakoski, etc.) admired the impact of the image, but tended to combine it with the influence of surrealism and symbolism and romantic excess. Deep attention to observation/experience is what we are after, but whether the experience of the object is scientific, meditative, ecstatic, impressionistic, or workmanlike is all about you. Or, correction: all about your particular conception and representation of your object/s. Like Olson, we are attempting to avoid so much/too much self (think excessive patchouli use).
Directions: For this simple limitation exercise there are two rules only: 1.)Choose one concrete object to write about (no poems about multiple objects or about abstract concepts like love, war, or fly-fishing). Many of the poems I've assigned for you to read for next class address several objects and even meditate on process (Silliman) or event/place (Hopkins, Eshelman) rather than on discrete things... but our assignment is to choose ONE THING. 2.) NO SIMILES NO METAPHORS (I know the examples use them but I need to impose severe obstacles--my objects of choice--and the removal of figurative language will no doubt cripple some of you to the point that you must grow wings or learn to crawl interestingly)... such as pleases my devious heart.
TURN IN NEXT TIME:
1. Group A (who was workshopped today--new sets of poems)
2. Everyone-- Line edits from the poems wkshopped today and for 1/30 shd be handed to the poets themselves.
3. Everyone shd turn in a gloss of their writing partner's work as they receive the pieces.
*Note: you will not always present your gloss in class but you and your partner shd be passing back and forth poems/glosses of the non-wkshopped assignments informally.
email my hotmail acct with inevitable confusions.
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Assignment #1
GO GET BOOKS.
READ:
1. handout
2. from PAM--Ginsberg 130-143 and 635-7, Berssenbrugge 517-524
3. Walt Whitman's 1891 version of "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass, sections 1-6 (find here: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html)
4. your partner's psalm or in-class exercise--GLOSS and MAKE LINE EDITS
WRITE:
(The following assignment--or the revision of the in-class assignment--is to be sent to your writing partner/s' email/s no later than Tuesday the 20th.)
The psalm is a form with religious and prophetic resonances. The long line seems to test the limits of breath. The form is able to incorporate shorter units of thought (by using punctuation within the line) and longer, more complex syntactical structures that give it sometimes the feeling of accretion (meaning building through lists of evidence) and sometimes a meandering, rambling, even unstable sense of its own construction. Does this line approach a point of ranting? And if it does: are not the mad part prophet?
After reading through the handouts given to you as well as the Whitman, Ginsberg, and Berssenbrugge, write a 25+ line poem incorporating some or all the strategies of the psalm form: its long lines, its anaphora (repeated beginning words or phrases), its rolling, wave-like loose rhythm, its incorporation of lists, its penchant for holding content that is mythic. Even Smart’s cat becomes a totemic creature in this form.
Be big. This form should empower you to speak of and to the world in sweeping gestures. Step outside your smallness and become Whitmanesque. Do not fear making grandiose statements of what the world is, should, or could be—-they are part and heart of this tradition.
As Dear Uncle Walt said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Psalm on.
TURN-IN on FRIDAY the 23rd:
1. EVERYONE-- 2 copies of the gloss/es (one to your partner/s, one to me)
2. GROUP A --shd bring enough copies of a poem (in-class intro or psalm) for the whole class to be workshopped on the 23rd.
2. GROUP B --shd bring enough copies of a poem (in-class intro or psalm) for the whole class to be workshopped on the 30th.
READ:
1. handout
2. from PAM--Ginsberg 130-143 and 635-7, Berssenbrugge 517-524
3. Walt Whitman's 1891 version of "Song of Myself" from Leaves of Grass, sections 1-6 (find here: http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.html)
4. your partner's psalm or in-class exercise--GLOSS and MAKE LINE EDITS
WRITE:
(The following assignment--or the revision of the in-class assignment--is to be sent to your writing partner/s' email/s no later than Tuesday the 20th.)
The psalm is a form with religious and prophetic resonances. The long line seems to test the limits of breath. The form is able to incorporate shorter units of thought (by using punctuation within the line) and longer, more complex syntactical structures that give it sometimes the feeling of accretion (meaning building through lists of evidence) and sometimes a meandering, rambling, even unstable sense of its own construction. Does this line approach a point of ranting? And if it does: are not the mad part prophet?
After reading through the handouts given to you as well as the Whitman, Ginsberg, and Berssenbrugge, write a 25+ line poem incorporating some or all the strategies of the psalm form: its long lines, its anaphora (repeated beginning words or phrases), its rolling, wave-like loose rhythm, its incorporation of lists, its penchant for holding content that is mythic. Even Smart’s cat becomes a totemic creature in this form.
Be big. This form should empower you to speak of and to the world in sweeping gestures. Step outside your smallness and become Whitmanesque. Do not fear making grandiose statements of what the world is, should, or could be—-they are part and heart of this tradition.
As Dear Uncle Walt said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Psalm on.
TURN-IN on FRIDAY the 23rd:
1. EVERYONE-- 2 copies of the gloss/es (one to your partner/s, one to me)
2. GROUP A --shd bring enough copies of a poem (in-class intro or psalm) for the whole class to be workshopped on the 23rd.
2. GROUP B --shd bring enough copies of a poem (in-class intro or psalm) for the whole class to be workshopped on the 30th.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)