Introducti

on to

POETRY

So, ok.

What is this stuff?

From http://www.interviews-with-poets.com

—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 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.

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

Poetry Slam!We’ll talk more about poetry slams later.

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.

An Introduction to Some Poems --William Stafford

Look: no one ever promised for surethat we would sing. We have decidedto moan. In a strange dance thatwe don't understand till we do it, wehave to carry on.

Just as in sleep you have to dreamthe exact dream to round out your life,so we have to live that dream into storiesand hold them close at you, close at theedge we share, to be right.

We find it an awful thing to meet people,serious or not, who have turned into vacanteffective people, so far lost that theywon't believe their own feelingsenough to follow them out.

The authentic is a line from one thingalong to the next; it interests us.Strangely, it relates to what works,but is not quite the same. It neverswerves for revenge,

or profit, or fame: it holdstogether something more than the world,this line. And we are your waveryefforts at following it. Are you coming?Good: now it is time.

As for Poets--Gary Snyder

As for poetsThe Earth Poetswho write small poemsneed help from no man.

*The Air Poetsplay out the swiftest galesand sometimes loll in the eddiespoem after poem,curling back on the same thrust.

*At fifty belowFuel oil won't flowand propane stays in the tank.Fire PoetsBurn at Absolute ZeroFossil love pumped back up.

*The firstWater Poetstayed down six years.He was covered with seaweed.The life in his poemleft millions of tinydifferent trackscriss-crossing through the mud.

*With the Sun and the MoonIn his belly,The Space PoetSleeps.No end to the sky --but his poems,like wild geese,fly off the edge.

*A Mind PoetStays in the house.The house is emptyand it has no walls.The poem is seen from all sides,everywhereat once.

There’s no one way to classify this stuff! There

are many possible taxonomies. Different classifications yield different ways of seeing,

different kinds of appreciation.We don’t make classifications for their own

sake, and no taxonomy is carved in rock.You will encounter a VARIETY of schemes in

different classes, different handbooks, and

different scholarly traditions.

Interesting—a poem that defines

types of poets!

It’s aJungleOutThere!

Oooh! Look! A poem!

And yet another kind!

OMG, still ANOTHER kind!

Holy sh*t, MORE!

Ooooooh!

This one’s really teensy!

teensyOh ick, a skeeter.

So.

Let’s make some poemsbecause that’s what we’re here to do

because creative writing workshops are about writing

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. . .

Well, and making stories and scripts, and plays and creative nonfiction and memoirs and anything else you want to do.

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 abstractionsNO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities

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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… something else.

The smell IS… 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 BLAST.

So what, again, is figurative language?

How do you say that someone is drunk?

How many animal metaphors do we use everyday?

Where did most worn-out metaphors come from, and how do we keep the language alive? Look at these samples again from Annie Proulx and Lorrie More (recall that we looked at these in our fiction unit)…

Some theorists believe that language is inherently

metaphorical. You can’t utter a sentence without in some way

using figurative language.

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. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. 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.

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from Annie Proulx’s, Wyoming Stories

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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 like Van Gogh's sun.

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from Lorrie Moore

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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.

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• "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.“

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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.

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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 abstractionsNO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities NO generalities

3.Now write a poem about your raisin.

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 extra-

terrestrial 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

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Poetry Project #1

www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS2014/PoetryProject1.htm

This assignment is all about description, concreteness, grittiness, vividness,

thingness, and sensuality.

…The gooey, chewy, rich and pulpy scratchy drippy undulating avuncular and underwearish ooh-la-la of lavender-tinged-with-groaning-and-usually quite-embarrassing REAL LIFE.

I.e., you want to get a lot of the SPECIFIC, REAL, CONCRETE, TOUCHABLE, STRANGE PARTICULARITY OF YOUR MOMENT-BY-MOMENT

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

Fear.Excitement.Parents.Anger. Father

Fear.Excitement.Kitchen.Booze.Mother.

Remembering

I remember my father drinking.I felt so much sadness.

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!

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.W

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Poetry Project #2

www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS2014/PoetryProject2.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 Poem2. The Formalist or “Gold-Enameled” Poem3. The Visionary Poem

You may select any one of the above options.

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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.

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

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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.

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MODE 1

Gregg OrrLisa Lewis

Sylvia PlathEtc.

The Moaner Tradition

Let’s take a peak at

• The expressive impulse• The personal & intimate,

sometimes confessional impulse• “I”-centered

The Moaner

… 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.”

This mode of poetry goes by different names.

The Confessional ModeThis 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.

Writing a confessional poem is one of

your options for Poetry Project #2

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….

That was more information

than we really needed, Billy Bob!

It’s fine to write about very

personal experiences, but it’s

important to also plant a deep

taproot; that is, the writer

must also find the universal in

the particular; the small

isolated self and its wee

experiences connected to

something larger. Otherwise,

it just becomes diary writing.

Poems by Greg OrrHow 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?

Accidentally shot and killed

his own brother when he

was 12 years old. Wrote

about this event almost

exclusively in his first book

or two. Is now something

of a spokesman for the

“post-confessional”

movement.

How does a poet write about such horrific

material?? Should he write about it at all?

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 breatheand 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 onceat where an ambulance had backed upover the lawn to the front door.I remember someone hung from a tree near the barnthe 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 randomor lay in the shallow spoon.

In this poem his strategy is to simply describe, simply and with great clarity and concreteness, one of the central and most horrific events of his life. He doesn’t explain his feelings, he doesn’t reflect on the experience; he simply describes it, exactly as he remembers it.

“Gathering the Bones Together”This Orr poem is much more metaphoric than “Litany.” Uses what has sometimes been called the deep image—a type of image which springs from the unconscious, is sometimes dream-like & associational. (Some images in the poem may be from actual dreams.)

Groups of 4

Each group take one assigned, numbered segment of this poem and discuss briefly:

1. What kind of language appears in that segment? How is the speaker talking at that point?

2. How does that segment advance or contribute to the poem--the impressions, sensations, themes, or meanings that are building as you read it?

Each group will share with class, and then we’ll consider:

• What did you experience as you tried to answer the questions? • How do we talk about something as evocative and resonant and sometimes odd as a

poem?

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.

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MODE 2

– Octavio Paz

". . . 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.”

The Visionary (Mad Seer) Tradition

Let’s take a peak at

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” Sub-Traditions:

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 seizing of accident;

• “convulsive beauty,” the marvelous, the uncanny, the disruptive, and the unexpected;

• strange and unexpected juxtapositions;

• defamiliarizing the everyday so that it once again appears strange and new;

• liberation of mind from bourgeois modes of thinking;

• the oblivion ha-ha silly brain brillo stain

Here's your fire extinguisher,welcome to the glacier.

The names of Aztec gods were on one page,serotonin uptake inhibitors on the other.

Here, you said: another baby avocado tree.You threw your shoe. I brokethe refrigerator and the fossil fish.I broke my shoulder blade.I tried to make jambalaya.To relax the organism, the cookbook said,pound with a mallet on the head or shell.

Don't think I wasn't shocked whenyou were a traffic signaland I a woodpecker.

I can't make it any clearer than thatand stay drunk.

I love you. This remarkable statementhas appeared on earth to substantiate the clams.

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A surrealist poem is another one of your options for Poetry Project #2

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MODE 3

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.

The Maker (Crafter of Words)

Let’s take a peak at

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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.

Poetry and For

m

A Crash Course

Form in PoetryGoatfoot

Milktongue

Twinbird

Bonk baby Bonk baby…Bonk-Bonk!Rhythm!

Sound and ORAL satisfaction, Yumm

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

In a summer season when soft was the sun

I shaped me in shrouds as a shepherd I were

In habit as a hermit unholy of works

Went wide in this world wonders to hear

Line lengths determined by a consistent number of beats per line.

caesura or pause

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

SyllablesWhen you do this, you’re writing syllabic verse.

A famous Asian syllabic form of course is the _______________.

Distant siren screamsDumb-ass Verne’s been playing withGasoline again.

5 syllables

7 syllables

5 syllables

HAIKU Tanka is Japanese poetry with five unrhymed lines of five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables. (5, 7, 5, 7, 7)

See our class library for more white trash haiku:

REMORSE

A painful sadnessCan't fit big screen TV throughDouble-wide's front door

DEPRIVED

In WalMart toy aisleWailing boy wants Barbie dollMama whups his ass

DESIRE

Damn, in that tube-topYou make me almost forgetYou 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 =

A line with 5 feet = ______________

A line with 3 feet = ______________

A line with six feet = _____________

And so on.

pentameter

trimeter

hexameter

A line with 5 iambic feet = ______________

A line with 3 dactylic feet = _____________

A line with 4 trochaic feet = ____________

Iambic pentameter

dactylic trimeter

trochaic tetrameter

There are many patterns possible in accentual-syllabic lines:

And so on.

Why do you suppose the IAMB is so important a foot in English poetry?

Der!

that’s… Goatfoot,honey!

RhythmPatternThrummingThrobbing

YOUR OWN PULSE

the DRUM in your own body

Traditional or fixed formswith particular meters as well as set stanza lengths

• The sonnet• The sestina

• The villanelle

And so on.

One ArtThe 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.

--Elizabeth Bishop

The More You Have to Lose

–David Lehman

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.

First Offense 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?

—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.

1--Angel2--Sandwich 3--Hope 4--Below 5--Crave6—Time

1--Angel5--Crave2--Sandwich 6--Time 4--Below 3--Hope

3--Hope 6 Time 4 Below 1 Angel2 Sandwich 5 Crave 2---5

4---3 6---1

Stanza I

Stanza II

Stanza III

Stanza IV

Stanza V

Stanza VI Envoy

5—Crave3--Hope 2 6 1 4

4 51 3 6 2

24 6 5 3 1

…and so onBTW, most people don’t write the sestina in pentameter; it’s already hard enough!

See this sestina collection:www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS2012/SestinaCollection.htm

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":

1 2 3 4 Lines in first quatrain2 5 4 6 Lines in second quatrain5 7 6 8 Lines in third quatrain7 9 8 10 Lines in fourth quatrain9 3 10 1 Lines in fifth and final quatrain

Pantoum Of The Great Depression

Our lives avoided tragedySimply by going on and on,Without end and with little apparent meaning.Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.

Simply by going on and onWe 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. 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.

--Donald Justice

Blank Versefrom "Birches"

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

Unrhymed iambic pentameter with no set number of lines.

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…

Along with rhythm, they make up the sensual body of the poem.

SENSUAL SOUNDS AND TEXTURES

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 CellarNothing 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

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 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!

alliteration

consonance

assonance

Language that sounds like what it means; evokes feeling utterly in synch with meaning.

Any form of sound pattern in poetry, really, is a form of

• 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 ear/beer.

• 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/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.

RHYME

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?

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.

NOT!

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

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

Rhetorical emphasis and desire to stress particular words:

Breath units He was completely and outrageously without a stitch of clothing.

Visual emphasis

He Was completely andOutrageously Without a stitch ofClothing.

He wasCompletely andOutrageously without AStitch of Clothing.

He was completely and outrageously without A stitch Of clothing.

= end-stopped

= enjambed

For a great poet who really jams with enjambs a lot… see Robert

Creeley

in our Brief Anthology of Poetry

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 hesitationuntil I see you correctly, as a man bleeding, not the reflection I desire.

The MirrorWatching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautifuland why you do not lovebut cut yourself, shaving like a blind man. I think you let me stareso you can turn against yourselfwith greater violence,needing to show me how you scrape the flesh away scornfully and without hesitationuntil I see you correctly,as a man bleeding, not the reflection I desire.

Lines all end-stopped (complete sentences or phrases)

The MirrorWatching you in the mirror I wonder what it is like to be so beautiful and why you do not lovebut cut yourself, shaving like a blind man. I think you let me stareso 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

Watching you in the mirror I wonderwhat it is like to be so beautifuland why you do not lovebut cut yourself, shavinglike a blind man. I think you let me stareso you can turn against yourselfwith greater violence,needing to show me how you scrape the flesh awayscornfully and without hesitationuntil I see you correctly,as a man bleeding, notthe reflection I desire.

Glück’s version

115

Poetry Project #3

www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/GS2014/PoetryProject3.htm

This assignment is all about the ancient/brand new spoken-word

and visual modes. Go gazonkers!

Option #1: Spoken Word PoetryThe 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/MiscPoemsFerlinghetti.htm

Ginsberg:

http://www.ndsu.edu/instruct/cinichol/CreativeWriting/323/MiscpoemsGinsbergHowl.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 Slamand 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/

www.poetryslam.com/

AND

Listen to Spoken Word selections from Spoken Word Revolution and

You Tube pieces:

129

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

• 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.

• Number of unstressed syllables don’t matter, maybe. Success depends on how cleverly you get the four stresses in (rap).

• Getting into a groove.

• Memorizing the material adds interest.

• Mixing genres: insert singing, use accompanying sound, etc.

• Ritual presence of performer.

So, what do you notice? What makes one of these poems successful or not?

131

132

Option #2 of Poetry Project #3

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 self-conscious 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/CreativeWriting/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

HOMEPAGE

Link

Link

Link

Link

Link

Link

Far distant reaches

of the WebDictionary

RelatedWebsite

OfficialOrganization

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 thatnew 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/NewMediaPresentation.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.