THEIR EYES WHERE WATCHING GOD sites

A great radio program on Their Eyes Where Watching God and Zora Neale Hurston's life can be found here

I think you can watch the entire movie (in 11 parts) on youtube. Here is part 1. Note the immediate changes from the novel.




Here's one of the Bessie Smith's song featured in the essay you read for class. The recording is old - so don't judge it on that merit - listen to her voice and lyrics. Apply the lyrics to the novel.

Terms

Signifying: : a good-natured needling or goading especially among urban blacks by means of indirect gibes and clever often preposterous put-downs. (Merriam-Webster Dictionary).

Methusalem is the oldest person in the Bible. He supposedly lived to be 969.

I Love Myself When I'm Laughing and Then Again When I'm Looking Mean and Impressive

Read this article on Their Eyes Were Watching God as performance.

Today we'll read a selection from Mules and Men and research Zora Neale Hurston's life.

A couple of sites to visit: Zora at UCF (University of Central Florida), and Zora Neale Hurston's homepage

This is Just To Say

So now that we're leaving poetry for a time, I want to leave you with something fun. Listen to the following and laugh a little. Note: Sean Cole, the person who reads "This Is Just to Say" is a damn good poet.

This Is Just to Say

by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Zora Neale Hurston

As you read this book you should be aware of a few things:

1) Zora was an Anthropologist who immersed herself in the folklore, music and religion (including Voodoo - or Hoodoo) of Southern African-American Society. You should read "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" as an introduction to her, and look up one of her pieces of forklore - she published two books of folklore during her life. One of them happened to include Voodoo in Haiti and zombies. Her fiction arises from her folklore collecting.
2) Zora grew up in Eatonville - the town in THEIR EYES WHERE WATCHING GOD.
3) She claimed to have written the book in one month after the break-up of a relationship. She claims to have poured all the love and heartache of the relationship into the novel. You might look up Eatonville on the web (NOTE: It's outside of Orlando - I moved to Orlando and worked at Disney because of this novel. I had to see Zora's hometown).
4) Zora lied about her birth. She was ten years older than what she claimed. This would have made her about 45 when she wrote THEIR EYES WHERE WATCHING GOD.
5) She was a member of the Harlem Renaissance - considered the greatest writer of the Renaissance by some, but her books weren't published until after the renaissance was over - and even after some of the members of the Renaissance (poor Wallace Thurman) were dead. She and Langston Hughes wrote a play together and were good friends, but something happened between them and so when she left New York in the 30s her connection with the Renaissance was gone. If you know nothing of the Harlem Renaissance you need to do some brief research.
6) Think about why she uses a Southern African-American vernacular. Think who tells the story. Is there an American Dream here? Mark her imagery, symbolism and metaphors. Think beyond them. What about the title?

Okay - I've read every book Hurston wrote and Their Eyes Were Watching God both as an undergrad and as a graduate, and I helped teach a college course on The Harlem Renaissance. So - you're going to have fun!

You'll need to have the first 60 pages read by the time you return from Thanksgiving Break! Also, post 20 journals.

Note - we'll be focusing on meaning of the title; author's life; structure of book; central symbols and central themes.

POETRY TEST

POETRY TEST: THINGS TO KNOW

Elements: Know both definitions and examples
Imagery, denotation, connotation, irony – verbal, situational, dramatic, sarcasm, metaphor, personification, metonymy, apostrophe, synecdoche, symbol, allegory, paradox, overstatement, understatement, allusion, tone, alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rime, slant rime, end rime, approximate rime, refrain, meter, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, monosyllabic foot, line, stanza, cacophony, caesura, enjambment, onomatopoeia

Forms:
Structure, line breaks, how the poem looks, rhyme and rhythm and how it is created
Blues, Sestina, Villanelle, Pantoum, Sonnet (English, Italian, Spenserian, and hybrid), haiku, quatrain, tercets, couplets, litany, ballad.

Poems:
“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “Home Burial” “Heights of Machu Picchu” “The Flea” “My Last Duchess” “The Wastelands” “To His Coy Mistress”, “The Waste Lands” “Nani” “The Colonel” “One Art” “Fern Hill” “The Waking” “My Mistress’ Eyes” “The Second Coming”

WASTE LAND part 4 and 5

"Death By Water" -

There are relatively no allusions in this section. Why? It is short and straight forward. Why?

"What the Thunder Said"

Refers to a Hindu text: The Upanishad.
Other allusions in this section: Bible - New Testament (Matthew, Mark, John). Holy Grail Legend, Shakespeare and the Roman General Coriolanus.

Return to the Desert. The Falling of Cities. The Drying up of Rivers. The lack of rebirth?

This is a HARD Section and yet it ends the poem. What is going on here. What are the connections to the other sections?

Here are some sites that might help: Modernism and The Waste Land and some general notes on the entire poem

The Fisher-King is an important figure in the Waste Land

Go here for a radio program on the Fisher King

Here is a link to an essay on the Fisher King in "The Waste Land".

The following is from the University of Idaho student research project on the Fisher King:


(IV) THE WASTE LAND: The concept of physical sterility carrying over into other spheres of life was an appealing objective correlative for poets in the wake of the first World War (used most effectively by T.S. Eliot to symbolize social and moral decay). But the intimate relationship existing between a monarch and his provinces probably relates back to a pagan strand from much earlier times. The waste land ultimately springs from an old Celtic belief in which the fertility of the land depended on the potency and virility of the king; the king was in essence espoused to his lands. In his comprehensive study, The Golden Bough, J. G. Fraser identifies a similar ritual in various cultures the world round. "The king's life or spirit is so sympathetically bound up with the prosperity of the whole country," he writes, "that if he fell ill or grew senile the cattle would sicken or cease to multiply, the crops would rot in the fields, and men would perish of widespread disease." Such is the case in the Grail legends as well. The woes of the land are the direct result of the sickness or the maiming of the Fisher King. When his power wanes, the country is laid waste and the soil is rendered sterile: the trees are without fruit, the crops fail to grow, even the women are unable to bear children. To suggest that the waste land functions at the very heart of the problem seems a gross understatement indeed. Once again, Weston takes the matter one step further: "In the Grail King we have a romantic literary version of that strange mysterious figure whose presence hovers in the shadowy background of the history of our Aryan race; the figure of a divine or semidivine ruler, at once god and king, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land and people directly depends."

In the case of the waste land the solution assumes the form of the questing Grail Knight. He is the one who must ask the loaded question that restores fertility to king and land alike. However, as Cavendish notes, the healing of the Fisher King and his lands is never satisfactorily resolved in the medieval romances that have been handed down:

The tradition of the king as the mate of his land lies behind the Waste Land theme in the Grail legends, but the theme in incoherent and amorphous. The pattern ought to be this: a king is crippled or ill; as a result his land is barren; the hero heal s the king and fertility is restored to the land; probably, the hero's feat shows that he is the rightful heir. There is no Grail story in which this simple and satisfactory pattern appears (nor has any Celtic story survived which contains it). In the First Continuation there is a waste land which is restored, but no crippled or ill king and consequently no healing. In Parzival there is a crippled king who is healed by the hero, but there is no waste land. In Perlesvaus there is an ill king and a waste land, but no healing.


Finally you can always check out Wikipedia for general info.

THE FIRE SERMON

The title is suppose to be a reference to Buddha.

There are a lot of links in this section to previous sections. See if you can find them.

Allusions:

To His Coy Mistress (we read yesterday - find)

TIRESIAS - appears in both Oedipus Rex and The Odyssey. He can see the future. Relate him to the fortune teller in section 1.

Tempest - remember there is a ship wreck in the Tempest.

St. Augustine.

WWI

There are also songs in this section and the nightingale chirps with the reinforcement of rape (which is one way of looking at the relationship seen by Tiresias)


NOTES:

Mrs. Porter ran a brothel in Cairo and was well known to Aussie troops (important because Gallipoli was where Eliot lost a good friend).

Smyrna = Izmir (an ancient town in Turkey)


Elizabeth I and Earl of Leicester were thought to have an affair (even through Elizabeth had to deny it because she was suppose to be a virgin and reserve herself for royalty of other nations)

The City (LONDON) in this section is a dump - made so in part by a coal plant.



The Fire Sermon
(Aditta-pariyaya-sutta)

Thus I heard. On one occasion the Blessed One was living at Gaya, at Gayasisa, together with a thousand bhikkhus. There he addressed the bhikkhus.

"Bhikkhus, all is burning. And what is the all that is burning?

"The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

"The ear is burning, sounds are burning...

"The nose is burning, odors are burning...

"The tongue is burning, flavors are burning...

"The body is burning, tangibles are burning...

"The mind is burning, ideas are burning, mind-consciousness is burning, mind-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.

"Bhikkhus, when a noble follower who has heard (the truth) sees thus, he finds estrangement in the eye, finds estrangement in forms, finds estrangement in eye-consciousness, finds estrangement in eye-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful- nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

"He finds estrangement in the ear... in sounds...

"He finds estrangement in the nose... in odors...

"He finds estrangement in the tongue... in flavors...

"He finds estrangement in the body... in tangibles...

"He finds estrangement in the mind, finds estrangement in ideas, finds estrangement in mind-consciousness, finds estrangement in mind-contact, and whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with mind-contact for its indispensable condition, in that too he finds estrangement.

"When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: 'Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond.'"

That is what the Blessed One said. The bhikkhus were glad, and they approved his words.

Now during his utterance, the hearts of those thousand bhikkhus were liberated from taints through clinging no more.

WASTE LAND

Part I: The Burial of the Dead


You should think about breaking this section up into four speakers. Eliot was working with dramatic monologues. You should also think about his allusions in this section:

1) The title to THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER (as for burial services)
2) Allusions to Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Isiah
3) Allusions to WWI
4) Allusions to Dante's Inferno
5) Allusions to Tristan and Isolte
6) Walt Whitman
7) Chaucer
8) Drowning
9) Greek Mythology
10) Tarot Cards - and fate
11) Other religions

Also think about winter, spring and seasons.

PART II: A Game of Chess

The key to Eliot is usually through his allusions. In this section there are allusions to Shakespeare: Anthony and Cleopatra, The Tempest, and Hamlet.
The Aeneid - story of Dido,
Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, and Ovid. Most of these allusions are connected to women.
Example: Cleopatra - a suicide over love. Dido - a suicide over love. Paradise Lost - a seduction by the Devil (or snake). Dante - lustful lovers in Hell. Ovid - a rape of a woman by her brother in-law. Hamlet - Ophelia - a suicide over love.

This section can be read as a contrast of sex and love from the viewpoint of upper and lower classes. The 1st woman, the upper class, has been compared to a female Prufrock.

The title of this section comes from an obscure play that uses chess as a metaphor for stages in seduction.

The following is from a website called, "EXPLORING THE WASTE LAND" :

"From Greek mythology. Philomela and Procne were sisters. Procne married King Tereus. Tereus raped Philomela and cut out her tongue to silence her. Philomela weaved her story into some cloth to tell her sister what happened. Procne fed their son to Tereus as punishment. The sisters fled, with Tereus in pursuit. The gods intervened, changing Philomela into a nightingale, Procne into a swallow, and Tereus into a hawk (some versions of the myth vary this.)"


I hope this helps!

Ballads, Aubades, Elegies.

Ballad: recounts a story, generally a dramatic episode and uses a ballad stanza (a quatrain with abab rhyme scheme that is somewhat sing-songy, though the rhyme could be approximate rhyme rather than perfect rhyme). The ballad usually contains refrains, repetitions of phrases or lines, dialogue, characters, simple and impersonal language. The most famous "literary ballad" is Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (1798) which can be found here.

John Mellencamp's "Jack and Diane" and Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." also contain features of a traditional ballad.



Aubade: a lyrical/love poem delivered at dawn generally involving lovers who must part. Examples include the following:

The Sun Rising

by John Donne



Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows and through curtains call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys, and sour ’prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the King will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long :
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late tell me,
Whether both the Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday
And thou shalt hear, ‘All here in one bed lay.’

She’s all States, and all Princes I ;
Nothing else is.
Princes do play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic ; all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy sphere.


Elegy: Typically a poem that laments the loss of something or someone.

Example: Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London"

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.


If you're having trouble with these definitions you can go to THE GLOSSARY OF POETIC TERMS for help.

Due Dates:

POETRY FINAL: Tuesday 11/22.

HOMEWORK

I'll post definitions and examples of a Ballad, Aubade, and Elegy later today. Homework for tonight:


POETRY TEST: THINGS TO KNOW

Elements: Know both definitions and examples
Imagery, denotation, connotation, irony – verbal, situational, dramatic, sarcasm, metaphor, personification, metonymy, apostrophe, synecdoche, symbol, allegory, paradox, overstatement, understatement, allusion, tone, alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rime, slant rime, end rime, approximate rime, refrain, meter, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, monosyllabic foot, line, stanza, cacophony, caesura, enjambment, onomatopoeia

Forms:
Structure, line breaks, how the poem looks, rhyme and rhythm and how it is created
Blues, Sestina, Villanelle, Pantoum, Sonnet (English, Italian, Spenserian, and hybrid), haiku, quatrain, tercets, couplets, litany, ballad.

Poems:
“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “Home Burial” “Heights of Machu Picchu” “The Flea” “My Last Duchess” “The Wastelands” “To His Coy Mistress”, “The Waste Lands” “Nani” “The Colonel” “One Art” “Fern Hill” “The Waking” “My Mistress’ Eyes” “The Second Coming”

Fern Hill

Fern Hill

THEME(S): Childhood, Loss of Innocence.

Things to look for: repetition of words (you should circle all the words that repeat).

Stanza and line structures. There is a parallel structure set up stanza by stanza: example line one in stanza one parallels line one of every following stanza; Line two in stanza one parallels line two in every following stanza; line three parallels line three in every following stanza and so on. This parallelism reflects not just line length but also the ordering and repetition of words and grammar [think syntax] as well as the thoughts, ideas contained within each line. You might think about how this parallelism reinforces theme? Also think about what the long lines do (example: the stretch of time and energy, versus the short lines which could reinforce youth or something young and small).

Personification - TIME is personified in this poem. Why? What are some of the things time does?

Allusions: Adam and Eve - the fall of grace, Paradise, Eden (there are apples around though not directly mentioned in the poem). Fern Hill is an actual place. This could be important. Is Fern Hill the name of a farm? Does it symbolize anything beyond this place?

Alliteration, Assonance, Internal Rhyme, Slant Rhymes: There are a lot of sounds going on in this poem. What do this sounds do? What ideas do they reinforce? You can connect these internal sounds to the sounds of the things on the farm and the sounds of youth. Also, Dylan Thomas believed poetry should be heard. This poem is meant to be read aloud.

Colors: What colors show up? Symbolically what do these colors represent?

Animals - what animals appear? Do they represent anything?

Punctuation - you can tell the turn of the poem by playing attention to the punctuation (and the tone shift) of each stanza. The turn comes at the end of stanza five (if you didn't catch it).

Tone: What is the tone of the poem. Note there is a tone shift in stanza four (on the line "So it must have been after the birth of the simple light") and at the end of the poem (end of stanza 5 and stanza 6).

It's argued that this poem is influenced by a Welsh form called the cynghanedd. Dylan Thomas should also remind you of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

PARALLELISM (a definition): a rhetorical figure used in written and oral compositions since ancient times to accentate or emphasize ideas or images by using grammatically similar constructions. Words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, and even larger structural units may be consciously organized into parallel constructions, thereby creating a sense of balance that can be meaningful and revealing. Authors or speakers implicitly invite their readers or audiences to compare and contrast the parallel elements.

An example from Charles Dickens A TALE OF TWO CITIES

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."

An brief interpretation of "Fern HIll" from bachelorandmaster.com follows:

Fern Hill is an autobiographical poem in which Dylan Thomas uses the memories of childhood days in order to explore the theme of journey from innocence to experience. The theme is based on William Blake’s division the world of experience and it is reinforced through the use of Wordsworthian double consciousness. The poem can be divided into two parts: at the first three stanza re related to the poets experience as a child when he uses to spend his summer holidays at his uncle’s farm (Fern Hill, it is in Wan sea in Wales) but the last three stanzas are about an awakening in the child which signifies the loss of the world of innocence. At the center of this loss of the innocence are the myths of fall of the first human beings (Adam and Eve).
The world of innocence (child) as described in the first three stanzas is like the Garden of Eden. This is a world in which the child is in complete union with the nature. This world of fantasy offers the child an Edenic bliss. The way Thomas describes this world; it appears to be timeless world without sense of loss and decay.
In the third stanza the poet slowly moves towards the transition between the world of innocence and the world of experience. In the forth stanza the speaker’s sleeping is a symbolic sleeping which ends a flashing into the dark. This flashing is a kind of awakening as hinted by the first line of the fourth stanza. In this awakening the child (speaker) initiates into the world of maturity. “Sleeping” in the poem is symbolic that refers to the loss of innocence that equates the Adam and Eve who had slept after fall form the Grace of God. This initiation of the world of maturity entails the loss of Edenic bliss, innocence, grace and freedom. Moreover poet loses creative imagination and fantasies in which a union with nature was possible.
In the last stanza the poet once again contemplates on the memoirs of his childhood but this time the awareness, becomes dominant. In the last line the poet refers to his chained situation in the world of experience. Now he is in chain, green color is withered now.
So, this poem is the journey from childhood to manhood when the manhood comes, the man suffers form an agony. Now I am not what I was in the past. The use of verb “song” hints that the losses can be captured through art in the last line stanza.

This performance by actor Richard Burton should help you pick out the tone changes - and make the poem come alive for you.

The Second Coming

The key to this poem is in the symbols (and there are many many many).

The falcon and the falconer are symbols, as is the widening and widening gyre. The blood-dimmed tide is a symbol. The lion man is a symbol. The desert birds circling is a symbol. The Spiritus Mundi is a symbol.

Note: You need to know some allusions here: The Book of Revelations (you might read this quickly to get the depth of what Yeats is referring to; an explanation/interpretation of Revelations can be found here and the book itself can be found here); the lion-man is an allusion to the sphinx (not the sphinx in the desert but the mythological being that the sphinx in the desert is based on - you might note that the word Sphinx comes from a Greek word meaning strangle and and that the Greek Sphinx was a demon while the Egyptian Sphinx was a representation of the Sun God. Ah, is Yeats choosing an image that represents two things?) It might also be helpful to know a little about World War I and its aftermath. Also Bethlehem.

Note: Yeats believed that history ran through cycles (circular cycles - think of spinning wider and wider) and these cycles (happening every 2000 years or so) moved from ORDER to CHAOS and then CHAOS to ORDER.

Spiritus Mundi is just an idea that we all have a supernatural connection to one another and to the past (the collective unconscious). The idea that each of us and all our thoughts, emotions, and things that happen to all of humanity is stored somewhere and we can, during moments of heighten sensitivity, tap into it.

The poem is written in Blank Verse. Why? What does it reinforce?

The Suborbitals have a song that uses one of Yeats' lines - you can find the recording here. Listen to it and let me know your thoughts.

NOTES

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Definition of LITANY

1 a prayer consisting of a series of invocations and supplications by the leader with alternate responses by the congregation
2 a : a resonant or repetitive chant
b : a usually lengthy recitation or enumeration: example litany of formal complaints

NOTE: The litany has been used by poets for Political Poems, Poems of Complaints, Poems of Empowerment. Remember the handout: "Song No. 2" - "i say. all you sisters waiting to live" (you can listen to this poem on NPR - here)

Here is a link to a litany by Billy Collins.

Blank Verse: Broadly defined, any unrhymed verse but usually referring to unrhymed iambic pentameter (NOTE: HAMLET is blank verse). Most critics agree that blank verse, as it is commonly defined, first appeared in English when the Earl of Surrey used it in his translation of books 2 and 4 of Virgil's THE AENEID. It appeared for the first time in Thomas Sackville and Thomas Northon's GORBODUC. Over the centuries, blank verse has become the most common English verse form, especially for extended poems, as it is considered the closest form to natural patterns of English speech. Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and especially John Milton (particularly in his epic PARADISE LOST) are generally credited with establishing blank verse as the preferred English verse form.

An example from Robert Frost's "Birches"

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter dark trees
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do....

Free Verse : Poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not rhyme, and uses irregular (and sometimes very short) line lengths. Writers of free verse disregard traditional poetic conventions of rhyme and meter, relying instead on parallelism, repetition, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday discourse. In English the form was made important by Walt Whitman.

Example:


poetry readings

by Charles Bukowski

poetry readings have to be some of the saddest
damned things ever,
the gathering of the clansmen and clanladies,
week after week, month after month, year
after year,
getting old together,
reading on to tiny gatherings,
still hoping their genius will be
discovered,
making tapes together, discs together,
sweating for applause
they read basically to and for
each other,
they can't find a New York publisher
or one
within miles,
but they read on and on
in the poetry holes of America,
never daunted,
never considering the possibility that
their talent might be
thin, almost invisible,
they read on and on
before their mothers, their sisters, their husbands,
their wives, their friends, the other poets
and the handful of idiots who have wandered
in
from nowhere.

I am ashamed for them,
I am ashamed that they have to bolster each other,
I am ashamed for their lisping egos,
their lack of guts.

if these are our creators,
please, please give me something else:

a drunken plumber at a bowling alley,
a prelim boy in a four rounder,
a jock guiding his horse through along the
rail,
a bartender on last call,
a waitress pouring me a coffee,
a drunk sleeping in a deserted doorway,
a dog munching a dry bone,
an elephant's fart in a circus tent,
a 6 p.m. freeway crush,
the mailman telling a dirty joke

anything
anything
but
these.

"poetry readings," by Charles Bukowski from Bone Palace Ballet © Ecco, 2002.

Here are two Litanies:

Prose Poetry

So can a prose be poetry? If so, how? This is a question for your test.

What is a prose poem? How is it different, or is it different, than Flash Fiction?

Is it the used of metaphor, the conciseness of the writing, the attention to language?

Go here for more.

For a good example of a prose poem by Charles Simic go here

Volleyball Trip

Make sure on the trip you read and as a group discuss the following poems:

FERN HILL by Dylan Thomas
THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats
NANI by Alberto RIos
MY MISTRESS EYES by William Shakespeare
TO HIS COY MISTRESS by Andrew Marvell
HOME BURIAL by Robert Frost
HEIGHTS OF MACHU PICCHU by Pablo Neruda
THE COLONEL by Carolyn Forche

Each person will be required to write an explication on a different poem, post it and be able to present their findings to class. Everyone is responsible for understanding each poem.

BLUES

GO HERE

Here is a list of items you should begin to know for your final on the POETRY UNIT:

Things you should start studying for the POETRY test:
Elements: Know both definitions and examples
Imagery, denotation, connotation, irony – verbal, situational, dramatic, sarcasm, metaphor, personification, metonymy, apostrophe, synecdoche, symbol, allegory, paradox, overstatement, understatement, allusion, tone, alliteration, assonance, consonance, internal rime, slant rime, end rime, approximate rime, refrain, meter, iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee, monosyllabic foot, line, stanza

Forms:
Structure, line breaks, how the poem looks, rhyme and rhythm and how it is created
Blues, Sestina, Villanelle, Pantoum, Sonnet (English, Italian, Spenserian, and others?), haiku, quatrain, tercets, couplets, litany, ballad, aubade, elegy, etc.

Poems:
“Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “Home Burial” “Death of the Hired Man” “The Flea” “My Last Duchess” “The Wastelands” “To His Coy Mistress” and others as we discuss this week and next week.

Robert Johnson and the BLUES

Robert Johnson - according to legend - sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads. AP students are sometimes tempted to do this in order to pass the poetry section, but don't go to extremes (yet!).

Sonnets

SONNETS: Are almost always written in iambic pentameter (if you don’t know what this is please check your notes). The sonnet is usually used for the serious treatment of love, but has also been used to address questions of death, God (or religion), political situation and other related subjects. A sonnet almost always contains a turn, also known as a volta.

Italian or Petrarchan Sonnet – rhyme scheme: ABBAABBACDCDCD or ABBAABBACDECDE. It is usually divided into eight lines called an octave and six lines called a sestet. Usually between the octave and the sestet there is a division of thought: the turn coming in line nine. The octave presents a situation and the sestet a comment, or the octave presents an idea and the sestet an example, or the octave presents a question and the sestet an answer. Thus form reinforces idea.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide;
"
Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?"
I fondly ask; but Patience to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed

And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

John Milton

English or Shakespearian Sonnet – rhyme scheme: ABABCDCDEFEFGG

The English sonnet is composed of three quatrains and a couplet. There is often a correspondence between the units marked by the rhyme and the development of thought. The three quatrains may present three examples of an idea and the couplet a conclusion, or the quatrains may present three metaphorical statements of one idea and the couplet an application of the idea. Thus, again, form reinforces idea. The turn usually comes in line 13 or during the final couplet.

Sonnet #130

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go, --
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.


Spenserian Sonnet – rhyme scheme: ABABBCBCCDCDEE

Like the Shakespearian sonnet you have 3 quatrains that seem to overlap with the rhyme, yet it develops up three distinct yet closely related ideas. The turn appears in the couplet. The couplet is used as commentary to the three quatrains or a conclusion to an argument formulated in the three quatrains.

The Spenserian Sonnet is based on a fusion of elements of both the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. It is similar to the Shakespearan sonnet in the sense that its set up is based more on the 3 quatrains and a couplet,a system set up by Shakespeare; however it is more like the Petrarchan tradition in the fact that the conclusion follows from the argument or issue set up in the earlier quatrains.

Spenser usually used a parody of the blazon. A blazon was the idealization or praise of a mistress (usually by singling out different parts of the woman’s body and finding appropriate corresponding metaphors, or by using Metonymy, a part of the woman, or her body to stand for the whole – SEE “My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun”).

"Sonnet LIV"
Of this World's theatre in which we stay,
My love like the Spectator idly sits,
Beholding me, that all the pageants play,
Disguising diversely my troubled wits.
Sometimes I joy when glad occasion fits,
And mask in mirth like to a Comedy;
Soon after when my joy to sorrow flits,
I wail and make my woes a Tragedy.
Yet she, beholding me with constant eye,
Delights not in my mirth nor rues my smart;
But when I laugh, she mocks: and when I cry
She laughs and hardens evermore her heart.
What then can move her? If nor mirth nor moan,
She is no woman, but a senseless stone.
Hybrid or Modern Sonnet:

A hybrid or modern sonnet can take on any variety of sonnet forms (combing them or ignoring them altogether). Some modern sonnets have rhyme scheme (though not all use true rhyme) and others do not. Usually the all have a turn, though the turn can come anywhere from line 9 to line 13. Just note that if the poem has fourteen lines it is probably some form of sonnet. Look for the turn.

e.e. cummings

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

Sonnet Help!

Listen to the following link IN OUR TIME which contains a special episode on sonnets (do you hear quiz).

You should also check out the following: sonnets.org

And read chapter fourteen: "PATTERN" in your textbook, STRUCTURE, SOUND, AND SENSE.

The hybrid sonnet form will cause you the most trouble.

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

The Sheep Child

The following is according to James Dickey, the author. The full text can be found here at the University of Illinois website.


"The Sheep Child" comes out of the most horrible thing anybody ever told me in my childhood. A boy named Dick Harris once gave me to understand that a man and a sheep can conceive progeny. I asked him if that was really true and he said, "Oh sure, everybody knows that! Way down on the south side of Atlanta there’s this museum, and way back in the corner where nobody would ever look, there’s this little thing like a woolly baby in a bottle of alcohol, because those things can’t live. I could probably find out where it is, and take you down there and show it to you." He never did, thank God! To this day I’m afraid to run into him again, because he might still take me down there and show it to me! But one day I thought this was a possibility for a poem, and so I wrote it. I took the situation seriously and tried to discover some of the implications of what such beings might be like.

I believe that farm boys develop a kind of private mythology that has the effect of preventing too much of this sort of thing from going on. It doesn’t prevent all of it, you understand, but it keeps it within reasonable bounds—whatever they might be. The first part of the poem is a recounting of the farm boys’ legend of the sheep child in the museum. But the second part of the poem is supposed to be spoken by the sheep child himself from his bottle of formaldehyde in the museum. I don’t know what other defects or virtues this poem might have, but I think it can hardly be faulted from the standpoint of originality of viewpoint, at least in the latter section!

I intended no blasphemy or obscenity by this poem at all. I tried to the best of my ability to write a poem about the universal need for contact between living creatures that runs through all of sentient nature and recognizes no boundaries of species or anything else. Really the heroine of the poem is the female sheep who accepts the monstrous conjunction and bears the monstrous child, because in some animal way she recognizes the need that it is born from. I tried to give the sheep child himself a double vision of the destiny of man and animal.

Friday 11/04/11

Today we will look one more time at sestinas and then move on to reviewing last year's AP Poetry Question and sample responses. This should give you an idea of types of poetry prompts.

Your homework for the weekend is to define and find examples of the following types of sonnets: Italian, English, Spencerian, and Hybrid. Note: Think about how each sonnet form works and where the TURN comes. How does form = idea? What types of themes does a sonnet form invoke?

John Ashberry

Go here for an critical essay on Ashberry's sestina

Also here is some help HERE

Pantoum or Villanelle

Remember your assignment for tonight is to write a pantoum or a villanelle poem.

SESTINA

A French syllabic poem of 39 lines with repeating end words. The thirty-nine lines are divided into six sestets and one tercet. The tercet is called the envoi. The six end words are picked and reused in a particular order. Lines can be of any single length; the length is determined by the poet. The end words shift according to the following pattern:

1
2
3
4
5
6

6
1
5
2
4
3

3
6
4
1
2
5

5
3
2
6
1
4

4
5
1
3
6
2

2
4
6
5
3
1


TERCET:
1 2
3 4
5 6

The Sestina

One of the most complex forms. Here is an overview of the form from poets.org

The sestina is a complex form that achieves its often spectacular effects through intricate repetition. The thirty-nine-line form is attributed to Arnaut Daniel, the Provencal troubadour of the twelfth century. The name "troubadour" likely comes from trobar, which means "to invent or compose verse." The troubadours sang their verses accompanied by music and were quite competitive, each trying to top the next in wit, as well as complexity and difficulty of style.

Courtly love often was the theme of the troubadours, and this emphasis continued as the sestina migrated to Italy, where Dante and Petrarch practiced the form with great reverence for Daniel, who, as Petrarch said, was "the first among all others, great master of love."

The sestina follows a strict pattern of the repetition of the initial six end-words of the first stanza through the remaining five six-line stanzas, culminating in a three-line envoi. The lines may be of any length, though in its initial incarnation, the sestina followed a syllabic restriction. The form is as follows, where each numeral indicates the stanza position and the letters represent end-words:

1. ABCDEF
2. FAEBDC
3. CFDABE
4. ECBFAD
5. DEACFB
6. BDFECA
7. (envoi) ECA or ACE

The envoi, sometimes known as the tornada, must also include the remaining three end-words, BDF, in the course of the three lines so that all six recurring words appear in the final three lines. In place of a rhyme scheme, the sestina relies on end-word repetition to effect a sort of rhyme.