Poetry Essay

Students, please follow the guidelines below regarding your third and last essay in the 3011, Honors English course:

1) Your essay must be based on a poem of your choosing. The poem should have an author and a title. Your poem should have been published in a literary text (book, article, chapter, etc.)

2) Your topic should be based on a theme in the poem; for instance, hope, grief, love, fear, loss, belonging, etc.

3) You must be able to analyze your topic using the following elements of poetry:

a. image
b. diction (why the poet chose the words she chose)
c. comparisons (metaphor, simile, allegory, analogy)
d. form and structure: line and sentence
e. meaning: literal and figurative meaning

We have discussed these elements in class. However, feel free email me your questions.

4) Your essay should be at least 2 pages in length to read in the Honors Colloquium. However, you may wish to turn in an essay which is longer than two pages.

5) Your essay must be placed in a folder with your outline (hand-written) and your in-class draft (hand-written.)

We will work on the draft on Monday.

Sylvia Plath, Bio and Poems

Please visit the sites below to discover more about Sylvia Plath and her poetry. Feel free to post your comments on the blog space:

Critical essays written on "Lady Lazarus":

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A688197

http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/oberg.html

Understanding the "The Three Systems of a Poem" by Molly Peacock, through Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus"

"Poetry is really the fusion of three arts: music, storytelling, and painting."The line displays the poem's music, the sentence displays its thoughts, and the image displays the vision of the poet. When we talk about the body of a poem - its anatomy - the line is like a skeletal system, the sentence is like a circulatory system, and the image is like a central nervous system."

"THE LINE. Lines make the music of the poem. They function as a skeleton, holding the poem up. Lines contain every aspect of sound, from how words sound alike and different to how they reflect emotion - how such sounds, in fact, are emotions themselves. The line always means rhythm and sometimes means rhyme. Even a free verse poem that doesn't seem to have a regular rhythm or an obvious rhyme schme still has the baseline bones of music. The line's music give us our instinctive understanding of a poem, even when we can't articulate it" (How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle, 19-20).

"THE SENTENCE. Sentences open up the thoughts of the poem. The mainstay of prose, the storyteller's tool, sentences circulate through the lines of poems, often flowing past the lines themselves, pumping their meaning down through the poem, even when the poem is in fragments or has no punctuation to let us know where sentences begin and end. The sentences appeals to our intellectual pleasure, and following a sentence through a poem often enables us to articulate what we've understood."

"THE IMAGE. The image is the visual art of the poem. ... imagery sends the poet's vision, fired into word-pictures, throughout its length, the way the nerves inside a spinal cord send electrical charges to muscles. If the line is a way a child apprehends, intuitively, and the sentence is the way an adult apprehends, intellectually, then the image functions as a two-way mirror bewteen these states of understanding. It is both instinctive and constructed" (Peacock, 20-21).

POEM: "Lady Lazarus", Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
23-29 October 1962

Gabriel d'Annunzio, the Italian Poet and Neruda in the film "Il Postino"

Students, I am astounded. I have seen "Il Postino" several times, the first three times I saw it for pleasure: at the beginning, I saw it in a theater, amid the smell of hot but stale popcorn, nacho cheese, and cologne. The second set of times I showed it to my classes, watching them to make sure they were enjoying it for what it offers: a view into the magic of poetry. And honestly I would continue to watch it because I enjoy hearing the poems again and again.

Today, as I posted questions for you to consider in your blog commentary, I realized that ART (poetry, literature, visual art, film, dance, music) always moves us to view more and more of our world's brilliant spectrum. It is a planet's conscious and yet unconscious mouthpiece. And poetry connects us to our history. Why am I telling you this?

I was searching for information on Gabriel d'Annuzio so that the class could see the Italian poet's work, when I discovered an amazing connection between the poet, Neruda and the film (I am not the first to "discover" this information. Remember, teachers are also learners.)

The politician with the fedora hat in the film (the one who Mario confronted after he said he would not be able to continue work on the town's water system) mentions to Mario that he reads Gabriel d 'Annuzio. He does not mention it in passing; he purposefully gives Mario the poet's name. Why? Gabriel d'Annunzio was thought of a hero, a 19th century forerunner to Benito Mussolini - the creator of Fascism and a dictator of early 20th century Italy. Mussolini who spread terror among his populace. It is thought that Mussolini incorporated many of d'Annunzio's nationalists ideas into his own politic (kirjasto, para 4).

Remember, Mario is fraternizing with a loved poet, a man exiled from his own country for his ideas and for his confrontation against the government. Neruda is a communist. Communist and Fascists ideologies, though similar in the belief that class difference should not exist, constrasted in other ways.

The politician's mention of d'Annunzio in many ways adds a new layer to the film's point-of-view.

Please add your comments to this discussion. Feel free to search online to educate yourselves more on Fascism and Communism, unless you already have a healthy understanding of the two. I leave you with a quote from the scholar and Columbia University professor, Robert O. Paxton:

Fascism is "...a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion" (The Anatomy of Fascism, 218).

Pablo Neruda

Students, please peruse the information on Pablo Neruda at the above link. Read the poems there. Neruda was the king of metaphor. Find those metaphors.

I've added a second link which shows how much he was loved by his readers. The picture is titled "Pablo Neruda's Funeral, Santiago, Chile, Sept. 73". The link follows:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcelo_montecino/11239157/

Film "Il Postino"

Please respond in the Comment Box. We will also briefly discuss these notions in class:

How does metaphor affect Mario?

Mario is not the only person affected or moved by metaphor or poetry. Is there anyone else in the film who is affected by metaphor?

In the film, poetry comes out an experience with the natural world. In which other ways does poetry manifest itself? Be specific; your answers should relate back to particular scenes in the film.

Mario asks Neruda a very complex question, in which he ponders on whether everything in the world is a metaphor for something else. Neruda never answers him. What do you think Neruda might have answered?

Class Scheduled for Saturday, December 5, from 9am -10 am

Students, please remember that we have a make-up class scheduled for Saturday, December 5th, at 9 am. We will meet in Room 221, which is the English Lab (large green doors on the second floor).

I will post a sign on the doors in case you aren't sure which room it is.

We will view a short film and continue to discuss poetry. Next week we will discuss the conference paper for the Honors oral presentations.

Yusef Komunyakka Reads "Facing It"

Poem: "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa

Click on the link above to read the poem "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa, Pulitzer-prize-winning American poet.

Questions to consider in relation to in-class discussion on language (image and figures of speech):

1) Which metaphors or similes jump out at you?

2) Find the intriguing juxtapositions in the poem and explain how they affect your reading of the poem.

3) Komunyakaa employs a tool of craft called enjambment, defined by Merriam-Webster as "the running over of a sentence from one verse or couplet into another so that closely related words fall in different lines." Enjambment creates a collision of meaning, a surprise twist of meaning between line breaks. For instance, in "Facing It", we find the following collision of image and meaning:

"...slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go."

The enjambment occurs when the reader arrives at the image of the narrator as he turns. ("I turn"). The reader does not know to where the narrator is turning and when he will stop turning. The reader knows only that narrator will turn. However, when the reader arrives at the beginning of the next line, she sees the narrator's direction: "this way - the stone lets me go." Though the reader does not know the direction in literal terms, she understands that the narrator no longer sees himself in the stone, the reflection has disappeared (the stone lets me go) as he has finished "the turn" that started in the previous line. What's most important here is that the enjambed lines take the reader on the same trip at the narrator. The narrator turns, therefore, the reader will turn too.

If the poet had NOT used enjambment and deleted the line break, then the surprise collision of meaning would have been missed. "I turn this way -- the stone lets me go."


Which other lines use enjambment in the Komunyakaa poem?

Important Questions to Consider

What is the function of a written text vs. storytelling or oral literature?

What is a poem? How do you define poetry?

What types of poetry did you hear in your childhood?

What is the function of poetry? (Feel free to imagine poetry in all its variations: on the page, on the stage, in rap, in commercials, etc.)

Music: Decima: "Alla En La Altura" by Juan Morales Ramos, Puerto Rican troubador

Yo tengo en la serranía
una finca bien sembrada
desde malanga morada
ñame, plátano, y yautía.
Es porque al salir el día
enseguida cojo el arado,
el terreno preparado,
señores, y lo cultivo
así de felíz yo vivo,
mejor que un adinerado.

I have in the mountains
a well-planted farm
from purple malanga
yams, plantains, and yautía.
It’s because at sun rise
I immediately grab my plow,
people, and I cultivate it
the ground prepared,
Thus I live happily,
better than a rich person.

Article: "Defendiendo la (Agri)Cultura: Reterritorializing Culture in the Puerto Rican Décima"

Students, I'd like you to read the article linked above. Though you might recognize the form of poetry discussed (the decima), I think it's important to understand the context of the style of poetry as it relates to historical and socio-cultural norms and practices on the island.

Critical reading/thinking: The quote below, taken from the article linked above, highlights an important aspect of poetry. What does the author mean by "I thought I was hearing formulas?" What is the importance of the repetition of themes?

"As I listened to the songs, I thought that I was hearing formulas. This turned out not to be the case, the similarities coming instead from the repetition of themes. Reading through transcripts of the 58 improvised verses, the major themes that emerged were music or poetry (referring specifically to the décima form and its composition) and life in the country where people work hard on the land, eat traditional foods, and enjoy the beautiful scenery. Deictic references emphasizing a co-presence in time and space were also plentiful as is common in improvisatory traditions."

Critical reading/thinking: How does the style serve the poet, the community or audience listening to the poet, and the reader who reads the poem?

Critical thinking: How is the decima, an improvised form, different from the forms of poetry we've discussed in class so far?

Questions on Oral Traditions in Puerto Rico

1) What are the different ways of storytelling in Puerto Rico or what is the island's oral tradition? Names two forms of orality on the island and explain why you think they fall into the category of oral tradition.

2) Have oral traditions in Puerto Rico changed or died out?

Joel Dias Porter's Blogspace

Everyone,

I've pasted a link below to Joel Dias Porter's website. You might enjoy the other poems he's written. You can also click on the title above and will take you directly to the link.

http://renegadesblog.blogspot.com/

Keep track of the webpages of poets and poems I send you, so that you will have a list of possible poems for your final response essay.

Have a great holiday with your family.

Prof. Alberdeston