What is this thing called poetry?Lecture Two: The love poem

“Love is so short, forgetting is so long”Pablo Neruda

“This we were, this is how we tried to love”Adrienne Rich

A lyric poem is a comparatively short, non-narrative poem in which a single speaker presents a state of mind or an emotional state. Lyric poetry retains some of the elements of song which is said to be its origin. For Greek writers the lyric was a song accompanied by the lyre.

“Someone is Writing a Poem” (1993) by Adrienne Richhttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/poetics-essay/239326

What poetry is made of is so old, so familiar, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not just the words, but polyrhythmic sounds, speech in its first endeavors (every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome) …. And all this has to travel from the nervous system of the poet, preverbal, to the nervous system of the one who listens, who reads, the active participant without whom the poem is never finished. Someone writing a poem believes in a reader, in readers, of that poem…. most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. …..Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field .… The theater of any poem is a collection of decisions about space and time—how are these words to lie on the page, with what pauses, what headlong motion, what phrasing, how can they meet the breath of the someone who comes along to read them?

You (the reader) are the one who listens, who reads, the active participant without whom the poem is

never finished

1. What does the poem seek to do?

How does it hope to affect you, the reader?

2. How does the poem do what it does?

When you write about the poem, examine the poet’s decisions/choices in communicating with you

Form What Genre of poem is it? What Metre, Rhyme

scheme & Stanza

structure is used?

(various forms in English

poetry.) In the absence of rhyme, is

it blank verse or free

verse?

Diction Close attention

to the poet’s word choice, imagery and

metaphor

Design The movement of thought in

the poem. Where does it

begin and where does it end?

Tone How is

emotion conveyed or

implied?

How does the poem do what it does?

Discuss the POET’S CHOICES

Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1609)

A sonnet sequence: 154 sonnets1-126 – “fair youth” 127-152 – “dark lady”

Joseph Fiennes as Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Joseph Fiennes as Will in Shakespeare in Love (1998)

Vocabulary: M.H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms• Italian or Petrachan (abbaabba cdecde) (Octave and Sestet)• English or Shakespearean (ababcdcdefefgg) (3 quatrains and a couplet)

Sonnet – one of the oldest verse forms. 14 lines of verse.

Stanza – a grouping of verse lines in a poem

Quatrain – 4 lines of verse or a four line stanza form

Octave – (in a Petrachan sonnet) 8 lines of verse

Sestet – (in a Petrachan sonnet) 6 lines of verse

Couplet – (in a Shakespearean sonnet) a pair of rhymed lines

Shakespearean or English Sonnet• A lyric poem in iambic pentameter (5 stresses per line)• Rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg• 3 quatrains (4 lines of verse) and a concluding couplet

Useful websites“Types of Poetry”: http://www2.anglistik.unifreiburg.de/intranet/englishbasics/PoetryTypes01.htm#dramatic“Learning the Sonnet: A history and how-to guide to the famous form” by Rachel Richardson: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/246410Information about the sonnet form in the “Learning Lab” Glossary at the Poetry Foundation website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/sonnet“Intro to Poetry”:http://www.starve.org/teaching/intro-poetry/welcome.html

“Sonnet 29” WilliamShakespeare

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, a I all alone beweep my outcast state, bAnd trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, aAnd look upon myself, and curse my fate, bWishing me like to one more rich in hope, cFeatur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd, dDesiring this man's art and that man's scope, cWith what I most enjoy contented least; d?Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, eHaply I think on thee, and then my state, fLike to the lark at break of day arising e From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; fFor thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings gThat then I scorn to change my state with kings. g

Rufus Wainwright’s performance of Sonnet 29 from the album When Love Speaks (2002)http://youtu.be/ngk4sRQ2C-Y

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (Viente poemas de amor y una cancion desesperada) is a collection of romantic poems by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, first published in 1924, when Neruda was 19. It was Neruda's second published work, and made his name as a poet. Neruda won the NobelPrize for Literature in 1971 and is regarded by many of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/pablo-neruda

“Tonight I Can Write” – Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is shatteredand the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my armsI kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, and sometimes I loved her too.How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to bring her closer.My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my armsmy soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me sufferand these the last verses that I write for her.

http://youtu.be/yN3v3WoaR_Y

“Poem to My First Lover” Sharon Olds

Now that I understand, I like toThink of your terror – handed a girlMad with love, her long, freshRaw body thin as paredSoap, breasts round and high andOpalescent as bubbles of soap,Laid across your legs, 18,Untouched. I like to understand yourTerror, now, the way you took herDeflowering her as you’d gut a fish,Leaving in the morning with talk of a wife.Now that IKnow about the fear of loveI like to think of her white-hot bodyGreenish as a fish just landed, quivering andSlapping on a rock – fallen into yourLap, man, shuddering like your cock,A woman crazed with love, hot off thepress, sharp as a tool never used,Blazing across your thighs and all you couldDo in your fear was firk out her cherry like anEscargot from its dark shell and thenToss her away. I am in awe of the terror that willWaste so much, I am in love with the girl who wentOffering, came to you andLaid it out like a feast on a platter, theDelicate flesh – yes, yes,I accept the gift.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/sharon-olds

“XVII” from the sequence “Twenty-One Love Poems”(1976) Adrienne Rich

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,women at least should know the differencebetween love and death. No poison cup,no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recordershould have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recordernot merely played but should have listened to us,and could instruct those after us:this we were, this is how we tried to love,and these are the forces they had ranged against us,and theses are the forces we had ranged within us,within us and against us, against us and within us.

http://genius.com/Adrienne-rich-twenty-one-love-poems-annotated

http://www.metopera.org/metopera/history/stories/synopsis.aspx?customid=86

http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/05/21/claiming-an-education-adrienne-rich-1977-commencement/