Poetry Unit-Fixed Forms-Patrachan Sonnet, Shakesperean Sonnet, Elegy, Ode & Villanelle

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5| Day 6 | Day 7| Day 8 | Day 9 | Day 10| Day 11 | Day 12 |

Enduring Understanding

• Students will see that poetry is an integral part of growing up.
• Students will see how poetry from pre-twentieth century can express our contempary feelings.
• Students will see how poetic forms, like fashions, change from era to era.

Essential questions

• Why do we read poetry from hundreds of years ago?How is it relevant to our life?
• How do fixed poetic forms have their advantages in helping express our feeings?
• Does using a fixed form to write poetry restrict our expressions? Why or why not?

Studentsts will learn-

• famous poets' traits of writing such as William Wordsworth and Shakespeare, John Donn
• the historical backgroud, literary movements and particular styles associated with each poet
• the structure and rhyming schemes of a sonnet

Students will be able to

• Use various reading strategies to analyze classical poetry, such as think aloud, using FIC and TP-CASTT
• write an analytical essay on the porm
• compose their own fixed poems

Informal Assessment

Interpretations of poems, journals, TPCAST responses

Formal Assessment: AP Essay #1 : Comparing Two Poems

Day 1 “The World Is Too Much with Us.”

Objective: Students will become be able to use poetic terminology and use it to discuss and write about poetry in our common classroom.

Aim: How does William Wordworth use literary techniques to describe The World Is Too Much with Us?

Do Now: Make a list of terms we use to discuss poetry sucha s tone and author's attitude.

Agenda-

1. Aqusition: Read the poem

                        The World Is Too Much with Us
                        The world is too much with us; late and soon,
                        Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
                        Little we see in Nature that is ours;
                        We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
                        This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
                        The winds that will be howling at all hours,
                        And are up-gathered now lie sleeping flowers;
                        For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
                        It moves us not.-Great God! I’d rather be
                        A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
                        So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
                        Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
                        Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
                        Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

                        William Wordsworth (1807)

• Turn on the Lazy Machine- In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Umberto Eco has written, “Il testo e una macchina pigra che necessita di essere attivata’: “The text is a lazy machine that needs to be activated” (Eco, 1979) Poems are lazy machines. In order to turn the machine on, you have to do more than simply say, “I don’t get it,” and wait for a teacher to explain. In order to make sense of a poem, a reader needs to set that machine in motion.
• Backgroud Information-
  • On Romantic Period and the genesis of Lyrical Ballads
  • Wordsworth’s love of the Lake District and the criticism he was receiving from the conservative reviewers who called him an enemy of progress.
• Strategies
  • Thinking Aloud
    • The goal is to make visible the thinking that goes on inside a good reader’s head during a first reading.
  
  Good readers commonly do the following:

• Pose questions,
• Identify unfamiliar vocabulary or allusions,
• Make connections to their own experience,
• Rephrase inverted lines, and
• Comment on the poem.
  • Modeling Thinking Aloud: “The World Is Too Much with Us”
    • The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  I like the sound of this reminds me of my cell phone going off when I’m trying to think. I wonder why he says, “late and soon,” instead of sooner or later. Maybe it’s for rhyme.

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Can’t spend money unless you get it. I guess laying waste our powers means something like using up your energy.

As a one works through one’s questions thoughtfully, carefully, with the help of a dictionary and sometimes of other readers, comprehension emerges.

Allusion: references to something from history, religion, mythology, or literature. Examples:

• “something rotund in the state of Denmark,” an article on overeating in Scandinavia
• “Harvard? The horror, the horror!” an article on competition in Harvard Law School
• “ The Crime of Punishment Taints All of America,” an editorial on prison reform 

Meaning Making-

1. In pairs,do "Thinking Aloud" activity to discuss the meaning of the poem.Share with the class one question you may still have.Most difficult line? Imagery?
2. Free Writing
   Read the poem again and take about 10 to 15 minutes to write for 7 to 10 minutes about what you think the poem is about.
                   A word on free writing
   This kind of response to literature has often been misused and misunderstood.  Free writing is a thinking exercise.  You take the ideas that emerge from your conversation with a partner and use writing to sort out your thought. The act of casting ideas into coherent sentences helps shape these ideas and pushes you to develop your thinking without fear of error. Write about the questions you have about the text.  The articulation of a question often leads to tentative, exploratory answers.  “Maybe Wordsworth is thinking…” “I wonder if…”
3. Don't begin to interpret the poem. This is not prewriting for an essay.
4. Unfamiliar Language
   

• Sordid boon: A shabby or somehow foul reward.  The choice of these words suggests that Wordsworth views trading our relationship with nature for a lifetime of commerce as a bad bargain.
• Suckled in a creed outworn:  Nurtured in a outdated/obsolete religion.
• Lea: Meadow.
• Proteus: A sea god from Greek mythology.  He is able to change shape at will.  Some students may remember from the Odyssey that Odysseus had to wrestle Proteus for information about getting home to Ithaca.
• Triton:  Another sea god who serves Poseidon from Greek mythology.  His special role is blowing a conch that controls the waves, the “wreathed horn.”           

Transfer: Exit Slip- How does "Thinking aloud" help you understand a poem? Did it work or not?

HW#1 Use TPCASTT strategy to understand the meaning of the “The World Is Too Much with Us”poem.

Day 2 Sonnet

Objective:Students will understand the meaning of the poem using TPCASTT.

Aim: Do you think Wordsworth shows anti-progress sentiment in the poem " The World Is Too Much with Us”? Why or why not?

Acquisition:   The structure of a sonnet

1. A sonnet has

• 14 lines and is usually written in iambic pentameter.
• Italian sonnets (Petrarchan) are divided into two parts, an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet.
• The octave typically presents a problem that sestet resolves.
• The rhyme scheme of the octave is abbaabba.
• The rhyme scheme of the sestet is cdcdcd.

2. Analysis of Wordworth's poem

• In the first eight lines and the first half of line9, the speaker in Wordworth’s sonnet criticizes his times for being too much caught up in the material world. He feel society is “out of tune” with Nature.
• In the middle of line 9, the poem turns on the exclamation,” Great God!” In the remaining lines of the sonnet, the speaker declares with passion his preference for the pagan world, which though primitive compared with the contemporary world, remained in touch with nature and the mysteries of life.

3. Meaning Making- Discussion Questions

• Why would Wordsworth choose such a traditional structure for a poem advocating a return to more primitive times?
  
• Do you find that electronic devices like cell phones cause the world to be too much with you?
• Is a return to more primitive ways a practical solution?
• Do you think it is possible to remain in tune with Nature and yet “get and spend”?

Transfer: Exit Slip- What are the merits of a sonnet? Can you see yourself use it to write a poem to express an idea or emotion? Why or why not?

HW#2 Write an interpretation of the poem "The World is Too Much with Us".

Day 3 The Sonnet As a Doorway to Poetry-a restricted form of 14 lines of iambic pentameter.

Objective: Students will be able to indentify and interpret a sonnet.

Aim: How does understanding the poetic forms help us understand the writer's ideas?

Do Now: Respond to

• “Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.” – Robert Frost
• “Poetry should be like fireworks, packed carefully and artfully, ready to explode with unpredictable effects.” – Lilian Moore
• “Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.” – Denis Diderot

Agenda-

1. Aquisition-

a. Strategy- Writing to Learn: The Thought Piece- you begin with a word, a line, a section, an opinion, an argument, or a question (to which you do not have to know the answer).Use the beginning you have selected to attempt to write your way into an understanding of the piece you are preparing for class discussion.

Directions

• Read the sentences in poem as sentences, with only the slightest pause at the end of enjambed lines. The ends of line do not mean automatic stops. Read with and for understanding.

Read “Holy Sonnet #9”

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,
Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,
If lecherous goats, if serpents envious
Cannot be damned, alas, why should I be?
Why should intent or reason, born in me,
Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?
And mercy being easy and glorious
To God, in His stern wrath why threatens He?
But who am I, that dare dispute with Thee,
O God? Oh, of Thine only worthy blood
And my tears make it a heavenly Lethean flood,
And drown in it my sins’ black memory;
That Thou remember them, some claim as debt;
I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget.
John Donne (1618)

b. Building a Literary Vocabulary
Vocabulary Reference/Review List
Allegory                               meter (iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic)
Alliteration                        paradox
Allusions                             personification
Assonance                          purpose
Audience                            scan
Central idea or theme                   sestina
Consonance                                       similes
Free verse                                          situation and setting
Hyperbole (overstatement)       sonnet
Iambic pentameter                         speaker
Litotes (understatement)            symbol
Metaphors                                          tone
Meter (iambic, trochaic, dactylic, anapestic)

4. This is a Shakespearean or English sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet), though the rhyme scheme (abba,etc.) is more like a Petrarchan sonnet. What we need to think about is how the form serves the function.

• The first quatrain poses a question. the last four words, he monosyllabic series, “why should I be?” sets up the tone of questioning, challenging, even baffled anger.
• The second quatrain continues with two more questions, almost as if the speaker is building a case against god. But in line 9 (beginning with what I call a “flag” word-a word waving at you and signaling a change), the tones changes, and the speaker retreats from challenge and anger into a humble plea for mercy from God.
• The couplet, with its neat summation, again returns to a kind of negotiation. The speaker is actually telling God (“I think it mercy”) what he ought to consider!

Meaning Making- discuss the following questions in small groups and write down the answers. Your homework will be the basis for the class discussion next day.

• Who is the speaker in this poem? What kind of person is he or she?
• To whom is he or she speaking? In other words, describe the speaker’s audience.
• What is the situation and setting in time (era) and place?
• What is the purpose of the poem?
• State the poem’s central idea or theme in a single sentence.
• Indicate and explain (if you can) any allusions. Do the allusions share a common idea?
• Describe the structure of the poem. What is the meter and form? (Scan it.)
• How do the structure of the poem and its content relate?
• What is the tone of the poem? How is it achieved?
• Notice the poem’s diction. Discuss any words that seem especially well chosen.
• Are there any predominant images in the poem?
• Note metaphors, similes, and personification, and discuss their effect.
• Recognize and discuss examples of paradox, overstatement, and understatement.
• Explain any symbols. In this poem allegorical?
• Explain the significance of any sound repetition (alliteration, etc.).
• Discuss whether or not you think the poem is successful.

Transfer- Exit Slip: How does the form serve the function based on the sonnet we read today?

HW#3 Knowing enough of the bible and classical mythology to pick up allusions is part of the AP curriculum.No matter what your background may be, you need to recognize biblical allusions. Look up the following and tell the bible stories brielfly for each allusion-

• Genesis and Exodus
• Gospels (Matthew or Luke)
• Creation,
• Cain and Abel,
• Noah,
• Abraham and Sarah,
• the sacrifice of Isaac,
• Jacob and Esau,
• Joseph and his brothers

Day 4 Part II: A Different Kind of Sonnet: “If We Must Die”

Objective: Students will understand that the multiplicity of readings.

Aim: Who owns the literature once it is published?

Do Now: Describe a reading experience in which the knowledge of the author and historical backgroud of the book changed your understanding of the text.

Agenda-

Acquisition:

1. Read aloud the poem meaningfully and respond: In a couple of sentences, explain what the poem is about?

If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
-by Claude McKay (1919)

2. Notes:

• “precious blood” allusion to the Bible.
• Using the restricted sonnet form also mimics the restrictions the speaker feels and articulates so passionately.
• McKay wrote “If We Must Die” as a response to the Harlem and Chicago race riots of 1919 and 1920.
• Without the knowledge of its historical context or of the race of its author, some of us read it as a political manifesto of whatever struggle is in the news at the moment, while others see it as an emblem of the Holocaust or of besieged peoples in a war. What do you think?
• The multiplicity of readings raises an interesting question about interpretation but confronting the poem without knowing its historical context makes one think about the importance of the context from which a work springs. Interpreting the poem in the light of contemporary events is not wrong; in fact, it enables us to discuss the richness of literature that manages to speak across decades and centuries and contexts. You can find more information about Claude McKay, especially excerpts from his meditations on his own poetry at www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r_mckay/mckay.htm.

Meaning-making

In pairs, discuss how the sonnet speaks to the Harlem and Chicago race riots of 1919 and 1920.

Transfer: How does the knowledge of historical background of a text affect a reader's reading of a text? Why so?

HW#4 Interpret and informally analyze the poem " If We Must Die".

Day 5 Seamus Heaney “Sonnet # 5 “from Clearances

Objective: Students will understand sonnets are augumentative and hortatory.

Aim: How are sonnets argumentative or hortatory(advisory)? .

Readind Material: Sonnet # 5 from Clearances
The cool that came off the sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.
Seamus Heaney (1987)

Agenda-

Aquisition-

1. Who is Heaney ? Why did he write the sonnet?

a. Do you think he wrote about his mother in the sonnet? Why?,

b. If the poem is about his mother, then why that tenderness and choreography and sexuality present in the intimacy of mundane tasks?

c. Who owns the literature? Once an author publishes something, does she or he retain control over how people read it? Even if an author announces the meaning, does that necessarily keep us from seeing other meanings?

The Heaney sonnet has enormous power because of the intense and easy intimacy it conveys. Some see this as sexual intimacy, and perhaps it is. But approaching intimacy through folding sheets made out of flour sacks on which the xs and os are still visible is enormously poignant. Reading this as the third of the sequence of sonnets shows the enormous elasticity of this most rigid of forms.

2. Meaning making-

In your small group, discuss how in Heaney’s poem, the fluid quality, the gentle rhythm of coming close and going apart, almost belies the rigidity of the sonnet form?

Transfer-Compose your own sonnet using the very same list of questions we used for the sonnets of the authors with whom we are already familiar.

HW#5 Complete the sonnet following either the Petrachan sonnet or English sonnet.

Day 6 “Sir, what is poetry?””Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is.”-Samuel

Objective: Students will attempt to define poetry.

Aim: What signifies poetry?

Acquisition What's poetry?
a. Johnson; April 1776 (from Boswell’s Life of Johnson) Like United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart when he provided his famous non-definition of obscenity (“…I know it when I see it”), Samuel Johnson dodges the challenge of describing poetry and acknowledges the inherent subjectivity of any attempt at definition. However, he implies that we must know it when we see it. Perhaps that is so, but perhaps-and more likely- we have widely differing ideas about what the word poetry means, given its various denotations and connotations-and even what a poem is meant to look like, sound like, accomplish, and/or be.

b. the value of knowing poetry-not just as an academic enterprise (or to perform well on a test of skills), but also as a lifelong engagement.

• nineteenth-century British poets or early American writers
• poems linked by theme, form, or ethnic origins.

c. Grappling with the Distinctions between Prose and Poetry(Distinguishing Between Poetry and Prose)

Respond -

•     “It may be safely affirmed that there neither is, nor can be, and essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.  We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting, and, accordingly, we call them Sisters but where shall we find bonds of connection sufficiently strict to typify the affinity betwixt metrical and prose composition? They both speak by and to the same organs; the bodies in which both of them are clothed may be said to be of the same substance…the same human blood circulates through the veins of them both.”
  -- William Wordsworth, Preface, Lyrical Ballads (1800)
• “[Poetry] has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback , if you do not give it your full attention, of deeming to say half as much in twice the time.”
  -- Christopher Fry, Time, (April 3, 1950)’
• patterns of rhyme and meter, concentrated language, intensity, density, fresh imagery, and rich diction. 
• prose and poetry are often difficult to distinguish—that poetry can be prosaic and prose poetical—

Sample Text
1. (a) Walt Whitman in original prose:

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mother of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body….”
-from Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

(b) Walt Whitman arranged in lines as if poetry:

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to every one
            who asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labor to others,
Hate tyrants,
Argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the
            people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown
Or to any man or number of men.
Go freely with powerful uneducated
            persons
And with the young
And with the mothers of families.
Read these leaves in the open air
Every season
Of every year of your life.
Re-examine all you have been told
At school or church or in any book.
Dismiss whatever insults your own,
And your very flesh shall be
a great poem.
                        -from Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass

Meaning-Making : Read the following quotations and list the characteristics that you consider self-identifying as poetry or prose so as to explain your judgment.

Turn Whiteman's poetry into prose.

1. A. Whitman’s poetry:

WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet
            and hands,
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,
            troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me,
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work,
            farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.
                        -from Walt Whitman, “To You” (1860)

B. Arrange the above lines as prose.

2. (a)Is the poem below originally a poem? Why or why not?

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, Stuttering and stammering, Hissed and hooted,
Stand and strive,
Until, at last, rage draw out of thee
That dream-power which every night shows Thee is thine own; a power
Transcending all limit and privacy,
And by virtue of which a man is
The conductor of the whole river
 Of electricity.
Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists,
Which must not in turn arise and walk before him
As exponent of his meaning.
Comes he to that power,
His genius is no longer exhaustible.
All the creatures
By pairs and by tribes
Pour into his mind
As into a Noah's ark
To come forth again to people a new world.
--From Emerson, “The Poet” (1841-42)

Original Prose:
“Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world.”
- From Emerson, “The Poet” (1841-42)

"He stood naked and alone in darkness,
Far from the lost world of the streets and faces;
He stood upon the ramparts of his soul,
Before the lost land of himself;
Heard inland murmurs of lost seas,
The far interior music of the horns.
The last voyage, the longest, the best.
"O sudden and impalpable faun,
Lost in the thickets of myself,
 I will hunt you down until
 You cease to haunt my eyes with hunger.
 I heard your foot-falls in the desert,
 I saw your shadow in our buried cities,
 I heard your laughter running down
 a million streets, but I did not find you there.
 And no leaf hangs for me in the forest;
 I shall find no door in any city.
 But in the city of myself,
 Upon the continent of my soul,
O shall find the forgotten language
The lost world, a door where I may enter,
And music strange as any ever sounded;
--Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, angel (1929)

Original prose:
"He stood naked and alone in darkness, far from the lost world of the streets and faces; he stood upon the ramparts of his soul, the far interior music of the horns. The last voyage, the longest, the best.
"O sudden and impalpable faun, lost in the thickets of myself, I will hunt you down until you cease to haunt my eyes with hunger. I heard your foot-falls in the desert, I saw your shadow in our buried cities, I heard your laughter running down a million streets, but I did not find you there. And no leaf hangs for me in the forest; I shall [?lift] no stone upon the hills; I shall find no door in any city. But in the city of myself, upon the continent of my soul, I may enter, and music strange as any ever sounded;

HW#6 Find a prose or poem ann turn it into the opposite form. Try to stump their classmates. Suggestions of authors-Virginia Woolf, Herman Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Mark Twain and a host of modern and contemporary novelists (as well as “prose” dramatists from Beckett to Williams) are lyrical; many contemporary poems are prosaic (if not pedestrian).

Day 7 Meta-Poetry: Poems About the Process of Reading and Writing Poetry

Objective: Students will gain better understanding what make a poem and apoet.

Aim: What make a poem and poet?

Do Now: Read each poem below and describe the central idea in one to two sentences. Identify at least three poetic devices that help the poet deliver his ideas. Use F.I.C.(facts, intepretations , central ideas).

Materials: Gentle Reader
Late in the night when I should be asleep
under the city stars in a small room
I read a poet. A poet: not
a versifier. Not a hot–shot
ethic–monger, laying about
him; not a diary of lying
about in cruel cruel beds, crying.
A poet, dangerous and steep.
O God, it peels me, juices me like a press;
this poetry drinks me, eats me, gut and marrow
until I exist in its jester's sorrow,
until my juices feed a savage sight
that runs along the lines, bright
as beasts' eyes. The rubble splays to dust:
city, book, bed, leaving my ear's lust
saying like Molly, yes, yes, yes O yes.
—Josephine Jacobsen, from The Shade-Seller (Doubleday 1974)

How I Discovered Poetry
It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne
by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day
she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,
said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing
darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished
my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.
—Marilyn Nelson, from The Fields of Praise (LSU University Press 1997)

Prosody 101
When they taught me that what mattered most
was not the strict iambic line goose-stepping
over the page but the variations
in that line and the tension produced
on the ear by the surprise of difference,
I understood yet didn't understand
exactly, until just now, years later
in spring, with the trees already lacy
and camellias blowsy with middle age,
I looked out and saw what a cold front had done
to the garden, sweeping in like common language,
unexpected in the sensuous
extravagance of a Maryland spring.
There was a dark edge around each flower
as if it had been outlined in ink
instead of frost, and the tension I felt
between the expected and actual
was like that time I came to you, ready
to say goodbye for good, for you had been
a cold front yourself lately, and as I walked in
you laughed and lifted me up in your arms
as if I too were lacy with spring
instead of middle aged like the camellias,
and I thought: so this is Poetry!
—Linda Pastan, from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems (Norton 1998)

Acquisition: What makes these three poems poems? Make a list of characteristcs of poetry.

Do the following-

1. Arrange them as prose. How do lines function as a unit in poems compared to the sentence in prose?
2. about syntax (the grammatical structure of the lines) and the way it is countered by meter?
3. How important does the word “poet” become in Jacobsen’s poem? Consider the description of good poetry that the speaker in Jacobsen’s poem provides-and reprise those definitions with which these lessons began.
4. Which of the poets’ definitions of poetry might be dismissed by her stated preferences (Poe with the versifying; Emerson with his form-directing ideas or themes)? You’ll no doubt have to gloss the reference to confessional poetry-and Molly Bloom’s famous line from Joyce’s Ulysses (the sexual innuendo that expresses the speaker’s passion-or, even stronger, “lust”- for what she defines as good poetry). splay (to cause to spread outward )
5. Discuss the loaded language of “ethic-monger”-particularly in conjunction with the smart-aleck( an obnoxiously conceited and self-assertive person with pretensions to smartness or cleverness ) “hot-shot”
6. Comment on the emphatic syncopation( temporary displacement of the regular metrical accent in music caused typically by stressing the weak beat ) effected by the rhymes: not, hot, shot. How can a poet be “dangerous” and “steep”?
7. Discuss the energy of the second stanza with its graphic images of consumption, its turbulent syntax, and its strong verbs.
8. Define prosody. Work together to show how Pastan moves from a technical definition of prosody to of prosody to an experiential definition of poetry. How dies “common language” conflict with poetry?
9. How does the poems conveys a sense of the speaker’s working through the process of making connections between the poetry class of her youth and her adult “epiphany.” Is this a function of syntax? Of meter? Of the shifts in time and place? Sort through the other contrasts that the poem sets: regular iambic and variations, spring (warmth) and the cold front, youth and middle age.
10. Explore images, both literal and figurative-the “goose-stepping” iambic line, the lacy tress (and the “lacy speaker)’ the camellias. (Its helps to bring a camellia in for view: students seem to be flower-challenge-at least with respect to knowing them by name.) How does the mention of “ink” bring us back to the idea of language and the question of poetry?

Notes: All three poems depends on iambic pentameter-but with lots of emphatic and effective variations.

• Jacobsen’s lines often open with stressed syllables, creating trochees that underscore emotions.
• The “goose-stepping” lines in Pastan’s poem is particularly amusing, but of course the first part of that poem is splendid in spelling out the basic “101” principle of prosody: the importance of the variation on the sonnet (without regular rhyme and highly irregular meter); the poem is prosaic-the retrospective recollection of an adult, but in language that re-creates the childhood experience.

Discuss the allusions in the Wordworth poem, "wandered lonely as clouds.”Why does the poem invoke romantic principles ?

• Discuss how these references and the noun “soul kissing” conveys the child’s response to the poem the teacher is reading.
• we’re seeing images of words”fil[ing] my mouth”; compare with the speaker’s reaction in Jacobsen’s poem.
• Reflect on the diction of the poem within the Poe: ‘pickaninnies,””darkies,””disses and dats.”.
• How do the pejorative terms become instrumental in conveying theme?
• How the speaker in Nelson’s poem is betrayed by the poem that the teacher gives her? What recognition is achieved by the final “We”?
• All three poems are by women.How does this affect the perspective from which the poems are conceived-or experienced? How does race factor in Nelson’s poem?

Meaning-Making -Read poems by Archibald MacLeish’s “ Ars Poetica,” Seamus Heaney’s “ Digging,” Mark Strand’s “ Eating Poetry,” and D.C. Berry’s “On the Reading Poems to a Senior Class at south High. How does each poet describe poetry and its purpose?

• Archibald MacLeish "Ars Poetica" (1926) A poem should be palpable and mute As a globed fruit, Dumb As old medallions to the thumb, Silent as the sleeve-worn stone Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -- A poem should be wordless As the flight of birds.                     * A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs, Leaving, as the moon releases Twig by twig the night-entangled trees, Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves, Memory by memory the mind -- A poem should be motionless in time As the moon climbs.                     * A poem should be equal to Not true. For all the history of grief An empty doorway and a maple leaf. For love The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -- A poem should not mean But be

  Seamus Heaney  (1939-) Digging Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun. Under my window a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade, Just like his old man. My grandfather could cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, digging down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. - from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

Meaning Making-

How is poetry about shaping thoughts and feelings into a poetic form?

How is Jorie Graham’s “Vertigo” (from The End of Beauty, Ecco Press, 1987) a sophisticated poem that can be interpreted to be about shaping thoughts and feelings into the forms of poetry- or, as she says, “story,” even as it is more comprehensively about the tension between aspiration and realization, reach and limits?

Transfer: What'is your new definition of poetry?

HW#7

1. Complete the "Do Now" for Day 7
2. Respond to the bolded statements and questions.
3. What'is your new definition of poetry?

Resources:

• http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essagard.htm
• http://www.english.sbc.edu/Journal/Figueriedo.htm

Day 8 Writing Poems to Understand the Poems of Other Poets
Fundamental to the study of poetry should be the opportunity for students to explore the work of particular poets and their poetics be writing themselves. Following is a short list of exercises that have worked well for me.

Analyze Jorie Graham’s “Vertigo” (from The End of Beauty, Ecco Press, 1987) poem and explain how it is about shaping thoughts and feelings into the forms of poetry.

Acquisition-

the idiosyncratic aspects of the poet’s style and shift. Whitman's “There Was a Child Went Forth.” The speaker in that poem collects all the images of his youth that he feels made him who he is; the poem uses both the day and the year- working through early springto the “Fifth- month” and moving from morning images to the images of evening. The child absorbs the flowers and fauna about him, is affected by his teachers and friends, is influenced by his parents (his father’s portrait is not flattering!).

Meaning-Making-

1. Compose similarly autobiographical poem by collecting significant images from your own early lives.

• use Whitman’s measure,
• employing his prosaic free verse,
• repetition of words and rhythms
• carefully observed images.

2. Reply to a poem that expresses a position with which you might argue- or suggest that you write both parts of the argument as Wordsworth does in “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned.”

Resources:

• Poems by Mount Parnassus
• www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1978/1/78.01.04.x.html
• Can Poetry Matter?
• The Cortland Review Web site. www.cortlandreview.com. (online literary magazine that features the works of such poets as Billie Collins, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Nelson, and Molly Peacock. Articles, interviews, and poets reading their work.)
• The Academy of American Poets Web Site. www.poets.org.

Day 9 Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop & Epitaph

An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatic Poet W. Shakespeare
by John Donn

What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones
The labor of an age in piled stones?
Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid
Under a star-ypointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,
What need'st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou in our wonder and astonishment
Hast built thy self a livelong monument.
For whilst, to th' shame of slow-endeavoring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath from the leaves of thy unvalued book
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took,
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble with too much conceiving,
And so sepulchred in such pomp dost lie
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Day 10 One Art -- Elizabeth Bishop ( villanelle )

The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem's two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as:

A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.

Strange as it may seem for a poem with such a rigid rhyme scheme, the villanelle did not start off as a fixed form. During the Renaissance, the villanella and villancico (from the Italian villano, or peasant) were Italian and Spanish dance-songs. French poets who called their poems "villanelle" did not follow any specific schemes, rhymes, or refrains. Rather, the title implied that, like the Italian and Spanish dance-songs, their poems spoke of simple, often pastoral or rustic themes.

Day 11 Robert Bridges Elegy and Ode by John Keats

Day 12 Rondeau by Leigh Hunt 1784-1859 (page 873) & Shakespereane Sonnet "Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds" 1609

Limerick aabba five asapestic lines

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved