Topic

Four levels of poetry:

• The sensory level
• The sonic level
• The typographical level
• The ideational level

Assignment:

• Commonplace book or notebook
• Descriptive poems (We're discussing them today, not writing about them)
• The Image and Imagery in Poetry
• exercises
• Voice
• mood: Indicative, Subjunctive, Imperative

Reading for today: Descriptive poems, list poems

• Online: "In a station of the Metro,""At the Fishhouses*"; "By the Road to the Contagious Hospital*,""The Beautiful Changes,", "Lying in a Hammock," "Above Pate Valley*"
• Poetry reading sheet (due Wednesday)

topic

• Four levels of poetry;
• sonic level, ideational level (myth)

Reading for today: sonic level

• Graceful Repetition and enjambment (sestinas)
• Vocabulary and sounds:
  • Poems translated from Spanish
  • Anglo-saxon sounds
• Online: sound: Heaney, Follower*; Bishop, The Bight*; Hopkins, Windhover; The Seafarer; Lux, Time*; Fulton, About Face

Activity:

• With a partner, write a poem in the form of a list (Eight sentences in the subjunctive mood, Eight things to tell your future self, eight notes to your dog, etc.)
• Your poem should use at least five words from each of the following:
• Where to find sounds:
  • Specialized manuals (example: sailing manual)
  • Cool sounding words
  • Weak verbs and strong verbs
• For a title, pick one of these titles of Paintings by Dali (get the title after you finish the poem):
  • Fried Egg on the Plate without the Plate; The Artist's Father at Lane Beach; Man with Unhealthy Complexion listening to the Sound of the Sea; The Invisble Harp; West Side of the Isle of the Dead; A Couple with their Heads Full of Clouds; Cathedral of Thumbs; Soft Monster

Reminder: Reading sheet 1 due

Homework

• Bring a specialized how-to book or web site (printed out) to class with you on baking, boating, skiing, lassoing horses, acting, spelunking, skydiving, etc. )

Activity

• Discuss Reading Sheets (aka "Spending a lot of Time with a Good Poem")
  • Example graded reading sheet (interpreting my comments)
  • Example reading sheet by a former student (a good example)
  • Example sheet is based on this poem

Discussion of First Poem Assignment (due online by 1/31 and (for three volunteers) in-class on 2/3). We need three volunteers for workshop. You should respond two three poems online (use this prompt) and bring your responses to the workshop poems to class to discuss them. Bring two copies of each poem with your response (one for me and one for the writers).

• Write a poem describing a collections of old objects, a old photograph you have some connection to but don't know well, or a landscape, a list on things on your desk (or some other list), a poem using specialized vocabulary (like quilting), or an object (like an old boat) described as your parents
• Or write a poem in which you retell a myth (we'll look at some examples on Wednesday)

Poem topics from Poets and Writers

• Read pages 1-21 of Be With by Forrest Gander. Fill out  Poetry Book Analysis Worksheet.
  • Interview with Gander about Be With
  • Review 1
  • Review 2
  • Review 3
  • Review 4
  • What is Ecopoetics?
  • An article about Ecopoetics
• Online, myth (all these*): Collier "Argos", Tennyson, "Ulysses"; Yeats "Leda"; Wright, "Saint Judas"; Atwood "Siren's song", Stevens, "The World as Meditation", Sexton, Her Kind*, Gluck, Gretel in Darkness (or here); Pinksy, Childhood of Jesus; Adams, Cerberus at the SPCA
• Look up the Myths:
  • Encyclopedia Mythica
  • Mythweb searchable encyclopedia
  • Perseus project
  • Greek Mythology Link
  • SurLaLune Annotated Fairy Tales site
  • Grimm's Fairy Tales
  • Folk and Fairy Tales resource page
  • Infancy Gospel of Thomas (for Pinsky poem)

Workshop (use this prompt). Today, we'll workshop three of the poems you handed in online on 1/31. Please print them out (they should be the ones with the asterisk) and bring them to class with typed responses that you're going to give to me and the writers at the end of class.

Assigned poems: post a poem on the first discussion board by Friday, January 31.

• Descriptive Poems:
• Write a poem describing a collections of old objects, a old photograph you have some connection to but don't know well, or a landscape, a list on things on your desk (or some other list), a poem using specialized vocabulary (like quilting), or an object (like an old boat) described as your parents--or choose another topic. 
• Or: write a poem that uses sounds, including interesting verbs.
• Or write a poem that retells a myth, like one of the poems we read for last Wednesday.

What to bring:

• The workshop poems
• Two copies of your typed comments (one for me and one for the writer)

Poetry readings today (Voice, Directives, and other kinds of persona poems)*

• Online: Homer, Odyssey Excerpt; Frost, Directive*; Ash, Road to Ogalma; Wilbur, Advice to a Prophet; Merwin, For A Comng Extinction*; Melville, Imperative Commands, Buck, Imperatives, Donne, Holy Sonnet; Lindsay, Tell the Bees*; Girmay, Consider the Hands; de la Torre, How to Look at Mexican Highways*; Tretheway, Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath
• Essay: Frost's Prime Directive
• Reading sheet due
• Discussion online instead of coming to class: Go to the "Discussion of Imperative poems 2/5" on Blackboard (select Discussion Boards on the menu) Start a thread, copy one of the above poems into the discussion forum (it could be a poem you're using for the reading sheet) and talk specficially about how the poem is affected by the imperative (and/or how it would be different if it weren't in the imperative). Follow up on two other threads.

Workshopping: Write a a directive (in which you give orders or instructions using the imperative mood. The imperative mood is when you say "do this" NOT when you said "this should be done.") Hand in poems by Friday 2/7.

Examples of topics that can be directives:

• Address (give instructions to) on eof the victims in this story, this story, or this story (take an unexpected point of view of society, the abuser, television reporters, etc.); Tell someone you hurt how to respond
• Give instructions to the present from the past (example: take the point of view of contributers to this time capsule) or from the present to the past
• Compile lists of instructions and put them together (for example, from self-help books, from songs by men to women or vice versa)
• Write instructions about how to do something awful (how to abandon you, how to do something unthinkable) as if it were a manual or a cookbook

Read 1-23 of Sightlines by Arthur Sze. Fill out  Poetry Book Analysis Worksheet, and hand in at end of class today (make sure you keep a copy for yourself).

• Sight lines Review
• (Sze Interview)

Poetry Readings for today: syllabics and stress prosody examples*

• Beowulf, Original (just look at it) and an excerpt from Heaney's verse transation
• Pound, "Seafarer," Wilbur, "Junk*""The Writer*"; Hardy's The Temporary the All*
• Moore, "The Fish"; Alexcander, Blues; Kate Lederer, Attention Deficit; Yoon, Between....;

Line breaks

• A video lecture
• Dickens and Strand
• An exercise
• Internal rhyme example

Activity:

• Play with syllabics, stresses,and line breaks
• One Rhymed Poem
• Syllable counter

Workshop: write a poem using either stress prosody or syllabics.*

Read pages 1-34 of American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes. Fill out  Poetry Book Analysis Worksheet.

• New Yorker review
• Emmett Till (poem 3)
• Golden shovel: poetic form

Poetry Reading: Sestinas

• Bishop, Sestina and a cool article about it (here is the entire article)
• Cummins, from The Whole Truth (sestina sequence)
  • Great essay by Cummins on sestinas
• Angelica Waters, Child Reading
• A bunch of recent sestinas by contempary authors
• Another collection

Online: Other repeating forms

• Canzonetta
• Triolet (Sandra McPherson's Triolet)
• Quatern
• Rondel
• Pantoums
  • My Brother at 3 Am by Natalie Diaz
  • A Ride in the Rain by Blas Falconer
  • Another Lullaby by A.E. Stallings

Workshop: Repeating forms

Papers (due April 27)

Homework: bring a poem by someone else whose ending you like. Be prepared to explain why you like it.

Blank verse (with Kim McMurtry's blank verse version)

• Literary Devices Examples
• Robert Frost "Birches"
• Reed: Carolina Prayer
• Browning, The Bishop Orders his Tomb
• Wilbur, Lying
• Adams, Time Cats
• Edward Thomas, As the Team's Head Brass
• Duhig, Blockbusters
• Stallings, Epic Simile
• Ferry, Martial 1.101
• Hecht, The Plate
• Campo, Lost in the Hospital
• Schuyler, Sweet Romanian Tongue
• Barbauld, Washing Day
• Voight, Blue Ridge
• Write at least 14 lines in iambic pentameter (required assignment)

• Collection of blank verse poems
• Examples of Iambic Pentameter
• Iambic pentameter generator
• Masterpiece generator
• Language is a virus generators

Ecstatic Poetics (Exercises)

• Twenty Little Poetry Projects (in- class)
• xercise: Half poems
  • Borrowing forms
  • Borrowing syntax
• Found Poems, Collages, and Cut-outs
  • Annie 's Mornings like This; Adams's Dense..; Eliot's Wasteland; Mad Libs Poetry
  • Mad Lib Poetry Generator
  • In class exercise
• Read: Bly, Leaping Poetry

Reading Sheet 6 due

Interesting words

• Factacular
• Vocabula
• J Carpenter
• Gef's Hotlist
• Hecht's

slant rhyme and rhyme hiding

• My handout: hiding the rhyme
• Kinds of rhyme

Poems:

• Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts (prose lines;irregular rhyme scheme)
• Wilbur, Advice to a Prophet (enjambment)
• Herbert, Man (mutating rhyme scheme)
• Hebert, The Collar(irregular line length/line scheme
• Owen, Strange Meeting (slant rhyme)
• Sally Thomas Tree Cutting (slant rhyme)
• Kazim Ali, Explorer (internal rhyme)
• Kay Ryan, In Case of Complete Reversal;
• Kay Ryan, New Rooms

Two rhyming forms in threes

Rhyme Dictionary

Terza rima or infernal meter

• Dante's Canto 13 (Pinksy)
• Frost's Terza rima sonnet
• Sylva Plath, Sow

Villanelle

• Villanelle (a definition with examples including Thomas, Do Not Go Gentle...
• Another definition with most of the classic examples including Bishop, Art of Losing; Roethke, I Wake to Sleep
• E.A. Robinson, The House on the Hill
• Wilde, Theocritus: A Villanelle
• Auden, Villanelle (note white text)
• Justice, Villanelle at Sundown
• Disch, Rapist's Villanelle
• Williams,Paul, Villanelle for the Cows (search)
• Kumin, The Nuns of Childhood
• Cramer, Villanelle After Burial and Entropic Villanelle (scrolll down)

Terzanelle (combines a vilanelle and Terza Rima

• Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, Terzanelle: Manzanar Riot

Rhyming

Issues and Elegies

• Issues: Poems about Social Problems
  • Make it personal: Moore, You say you said; Betts, When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving, Laskar, Taking the Poem from the Poet;
  • Find a metaphor: Limon, What it must have felt like (Voting); Gonzalez, Cage;
  • Find a persona: Rekdal, Wild Horses;
  • Focus on an image: Hayes, American Sonnet....;
  • Speak as part of the problem: Kaminsky, In a Time of Peace; Hirshfield, My Debt; Popa, Letter to Noah's wife; Novey, Nearly
• Elegies: Read Online: Broughton, Song for Sampson, Levine, Animals are passing from our lives; Hardy, Last Words to a Dumb Friend and At Castle Boterel; Bishop, North Haven, Millay six elegies To Elinor Wylie; Roethke, Elegy for Jane; Justice, Psalm & Lament; Dickey, Dusk of Horses

Constructing a Portfolio with a preface

Synaesthesia or Etymology

Synaesthesia

• Victor Hugo poem
• Charles Baudelaire poem
• Another one by Baudelaire
• Emily Dickinson poem
• Arthur Rimbaud poem
• Frost "Tuft of Flowers

Etymology

• McHugh, Etymological Dirge
• Stricker, The Poetry of Etymology
• Resource: Etymological Dictionary (Cognates)

Ekphrasis: Poems about Art

• Read four examples of Ekphrasis: Keats, "Ode on a grecian urn"; Hughes "Dream Boogie" ; Auden "Musee des Beaux Arts" (also inspired by other work in the same wing); Stevens, "The Paltry Nude" (inspired by Botticelli's Birth of Venus) and "Thirteen ways" (inspired by Cubism); Williams "The Dance"
• The Poets speak of art (online project at Emory University) (link updated)
• Some examples from Poetry Foundation
  • Matuk, Subject and Object
  • Platt, Cloud Study
  • Mlinko, Two Hangings from Ovid (Note how you can read the poem as two poems or just one)
  • Wilson, Impression of a Rib
  • Spaulding, Tableaux: Four 19th c. Photographs
  • Other Poetry Foundation Ekphrastic poems

Arts Poetica (Poems about Poetry)

• Read poems about poetry (download)
• Some Poetry Foundation examples
  • Olivarez, Arts Poetica
  • Vuong, Essay on Craft
  • Collins, Memorizing "The Sun Rising" by John Donne
  • Kenyon, Briefly it Enters, and Briefly it Speaks