SOKOL, GANNON, FAVORITE POEM

Agenda:

Let's do some serious work today on revision and selection of poems for Sokol and Gannon.

Write script for Favorite Poem Project:

View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtthI7eozeA

Mark Doty
Apparition (Favorite Poem)

The old words are dying,
everyone forgets them,
pages falling into sleep and dust,

dust and sleep, burning so slowly
you wouldn’t even know there’s a fire.
Or that’s what I think half the time.

Then, at the bookstore, a young man reciting,
slight for fourteen, blonde, without irony
but not self-important either;

his loping East Texas vowels threaten
to escape the fence of pentameter,
his voice seems to have just arrived here,

but the old cadence inhabits anyway.
He makes the poem his own
even as he becomes a vessel

for its reluctance to disappear.
All right, maybe they perish,
but the boy has the look of someone

repeating a crucial instruction
that must be delivered, word for word,
as he learned it:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.

WEBSITE---http://www.favoritepoem.org/

Portfolios!  End of marking period next week!

This City Eugenia Leigh

could use more seraphs. Anything with wings, really— a falcon, a swallowtail. Ravenous for marvels, I slit open a chrysalis. Inside, no caterpillar mid-morph. Only its ghost in a horror of cells. I pinch the luminous mash of imaginal discs and shudder, imagining the mechanics of disintegration. The wormy larva—whole, then whorled. A wonder it did not die. Even now, smeared against my skin, it beams like the angel in the tomb prepared to proclaim a rising.    Copyright © 2017 Eugenia Leigh. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem “I’ve lately turned to the natural world for instructions on how to survive, and the mystery of the chrysalis tells us that to transform into a new being, the larva must first submit to a period akin to death. This should alarm me, but instead, it gives me much-needed hope that our individual and collective seasons of pain and death will ultimately lead to seasons of resurrection and glory.” —Eugenia Leigh Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). She lives in Brooklyn, New York.