POEM#6: POINT OF VIEW

Point: a spatial metaphor.  Imagine the person (poet or narrator of the poem) as a camera placed here or there, recording only the images visible from that spot.  This may mean, besides physical placement, placement in an unfolding story (in time, in a social situation), in a developing argument (in an intellectual context), and (most difficult to distinguish from tone or mood) in a psychic landscape.  Even in the trickiest of abstract circumstances, the essence of point of view is the relationship between a person and a set of circumstances.

Note the change in point of view between these two stanzas, and again in the second:

            How Western Underwear Came to Japan

            When Tokyo’s Shirokiya Drygoods caught fire

            in the thirties, shopgirls tore the shelves’ kimonos

            and knotted them in ropes.  Older women used

            both hands, descending safely from the highest floors

            though their underskirts flew up around their hips.

            The crowded street saw everything beneath—

            ankles, knees, the purple flanges of their sex.

            Versus the younger girls’ careful keeping

            one hand pinned against their skirts, against

            the nothing below and their silk falling.

                                                                        -Lucia Perillo

Or the dream-like shifting of point of view in the following poem:

            After the Attack

            The sick boy.

            Locked in a vision

with tongue stiff as a horn.

He sits with his back towards the painting of a wheatfield.

The bandage around his jaw reminds one of an embalming.

His spectacles are thick as a diver’s.  Nothing has any answer

and is sudden as a telephone ringing in the night.

But the painting there.  It is a landscape that makes one feel peaceful even though the wheat

            is a golden storm.

Blue, fiery blue sky and driving clouds.  Beneath in the yellow waves

some white shirts are sailing: threshers—they cast no shadow.

At the far end of the field a man seems to be looking this way.  A broad hat leaves his face

            in shadow.

He seems to look at the dark shape in the room here, as though to help.

Gradually the painting begins to stretch and open behind the boy who is sick

and sunk in himself.  It throws sparks and makes noise.  Every wheathead throws off light

            as if to wake him up!

The other man—in the wheat—makes a sign.

He has come nearer.

           

No one notices it.

                                                            -Tomas Tranströmer

ASSIGNMENT POV

1.               Pick an event, or a scene (real or imagined) that interests you with its dramatic possibilities. 

2.               Keep it simple (a child falling off a jungle gym breaks her arm, an old man and old woman sitting in silence on a porch, a body in a morgue stirs).

 

3.               Investigate the event or the scene from different points of view (from inside the characters, from the eye of a fly-on-the-wall, from within the mind of an omniscient narrator, from the vantage point of an uninterested bystander or that of an interested voyeur).

4.               Use at least two different points of view in the composition of your poem.  You can separate them by stanza or numbered section like Perillo, or integrate them within the body of the poem like Tranströmer.

This is an assignment about generation.  Get down on paper too much information, and then winnow it back to what most interests you. How the different points of view play off one another will create energy and tension in your poem. The two (or more) points of view needn’t be oppositional to do so. Slight changes in perspective can be thought-provoking. The Law & Order franchise created decades of successful shows by utilizing just this tool. Not to mention CSI. How does shifting your point of view affect you as the writer? Can you learn more about the event you’ve chosen to illuminate by working in this way? Or do you just elaborate upon what you knew about the scene from the onset? Discovery works differently for different people. After you’ve completed this assignment, reflect on how these limitations did or did not work for you.

RADICAL REVISION #1 / Mad Libs

Take a poem

Replace all nouns, verbs, and adjectives

You may use synonyms, you do not have to

Note the change in meter and rhyme

You may relineate (change line lengths), you do not have to

Note the syntax-skeleton of your poem

Note the changing flesh

POEM#5: SONNET

The sonnet, or “little song,” is a 14 line poem stolen from the Italian love-poem tradition (google Petrarch for details). In English, over the past four centuries it has gained a few admirers and a few recognized forms—the most common one is a meter of iambic pentameter (daDum daDum daDum daDum daDum) and a fairly rigid rhyme scheme. Shakespeare wrote his ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, but any formal rhyme scheme over 14 lines will do for your first effort.  (ex. ABA BCB CDC EFE FF, ABBA CDDC EFGEFG,  ABCD ABCD EFG EFG,  ABABAB  CDDC  EFFE,  you get the idea)

Sonnets have historically been written in the form of arguments, and when I say argument, I mean a text that attempts to persuade. In a love poem, persuasion can be seen in seduction or in a genuine expression of more spiritual and serious affection. When a sonneteer meditates on death or marriage or the decision to beget children, by the end of the poem reasons pro and con have often been discussed and a conclusion reached. You can argue taxes, drum a roommate out with escalating insults, make an impassioned plea for green architecture—anything can be an argument. Sonnets are less often "story" poems, though sonnet cycles (like Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus) can be written around an epic narrative. Yet each single sonnet in the Rilke cycle attempts to deeply address just one idea relevant to this tale of love and pride and loss.

Usually a sonnet contains a “turn” about two thirds of the way through—an AHA! moment, or a shift in logical language (if this and if this and if this THEN this), or a changing of direction (often signalled with diction like “yet well I know” WS 18 or “But” WS 130 or “but just from listening” RI.i. or “Or perhaps he would stay there” RII.xiv. or “but never this /fine specimen” from e.e.c.’s  pity this monster...).  No matter how it is offered up, a turn is nearly always present in a sonnet, signaling the close of the poem.

So—meter, rhyme, argument, a turn in logic: these elements, plus the kitchen sink—that’s all I want to see in your sonnets.  Otherwise, surprise me and yourselves.

Here's a few:

i carry your heart with me                                 by e.e.cummings

           

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

'pity this busy monster, manunkind' pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness --- electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go I.i.(from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus) A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared. Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests; and it was not from any dullness, not from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves, but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been at most a makeshift hut to receive the music, a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing, with an entryway that shuddered in the wind- you built a temple deep inside their hearing.   II.xiv. (from Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus) Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly, to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate. And if they are sad about how they must wither and die, perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.  All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness. Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace. If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept deeply with Things--how easily he would come to a different day, out of the mutual depth. Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and praise their newest convert, who now is like one of them, all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows. WS (Shakespeare) 18 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?  Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date:  Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;  And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st;  So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.  WS 130 My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks;  And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:    And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare    As any she belied with false compare.

POEM #4 : SYLLABIC VERSE

DUE THURSDAY, FEB 13th

Read: MoP (136-155). RR (17-25). And below.

The first poems many of you ever wrote were haiku—a verse form borrowed from the Japanese in which each line has a prescribed number of syllables: 5,7,5 (this, regardless of the number of stresses). Japanese, as well as other languages which tend to emphasize stressed syllables less (Finnish, modern French) have several forms that organize their poetry by counting syllables rather than stress (in English—the most common type of verse form is that organized along an accentual-syllabic [stress-counting] meter, as in iambic pentameter [Shakespeare and sonnets], iambic trimester and tetrameter [ballads], and the more galloping anapestic and dactylic feet—see Rhyme’s Reason).  However, many poets in English have fallen in love with the more subtle number-pleasure that syllabics offer and have organized their poems accordingly in one of two ways.  


1. By having all lines of a certain length:

In My Craft or Sullen Art   BY DYLAN THOMAS

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

Lions Are Interesting   BY JOEL BROUWER

Each morning in the little white cabin  

by the river they woke to a raccoon  

clawing under the floorboards or banging  

in the wood stove. They did not discuss this.  

Instead they said it was a perfect day  

to pick blueberries on the hill, or that  

a hike to the old glassworks sounded good.  

They were beginning to speak not in meat  

but in the brown paper the butcher wraps  

around it. Brown paper around dirty   

magazines. Like dirty magazines, they  

only traced the contour of substance: silk  

over skin, skin over muscle, muscle over  

bone. What’s under bone? Marrow? Their forks so  

small and dull. As if for dolls. You can tell  

dolls from animals because the latter  

are made of meat. Many eat it, also.  

Lions are interesting. Lions don’t eat  

the flesh of their kills right away, but first  

lap up the blood, until the meat is blanched  

nearly white. White as the little cabin  

by the river they stayed in that summer.  

White as the raccoon covered in ashes,

his black eyes bottomless and bright with hate.

2.  Or by creating stanzas or different syllabic line lengths that then repeat (Marianne Moore [1887-1972] was the high-priestess of this form):

No Swan So Fine   BY MARIANNE MOORE

“No water so still as the

     dead fountains of Versailles.” No swan,

with swart blind look askance

and gondoliering legs, so fine

     as the chintz china one with fawn-

brown eyes and toothed gold

collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth

     Candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

tinted buttons, dahlias,

sea urchins, and everlastings,

     it perches on the branching foam

of polished sculptured

flowers — at ease and tall. The king is dead.      

Poetry  BY MARIANNE MOORE

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful. When they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand: the bat

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

      nor is it valid

         to discriminate against "business documents and

school-books"; all these phenomena are important. One must make

      a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

      result is not poetry,

   nor till the poets among us can be

     "literalists of

      the imagination"--above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, "imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness and

      that which is on the other hand

         genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Five Haikus   BY RICHARD WRIGHT

1.

I am nobody:

A red sinking autumn sun

Took my name away.

2.

I give permission

For this slow spring rain to soak

The violet beds.

3.

With a twitching nose

A dog reads a telegram

On a wet tree trunk.

4.

Burning autumn leaves,

I yearn to make the bonfire

Bigger and bigger.

5.

A sleepless spring night:

Yearning for what I never had

And for what never was.

NOW YOU

Your assignment is to create a syllabic form for yourself (all lines 13-syllables long, or a repeating stanza of 2-7-11-5 or 1-1-2-3-5-8, or 9-5-3.) Only caveat: the poem must be a minimum of 12 lines long. Experiment with line length to see what the effects are.  If you are having trouble—write 5 or 6 lines that are 10-12 syllables (a common thought/phrase unit in English) and then start dividing them in a way that heightens your meaning and draws attention to ideas and units that increase the power of the work. Good luck.