Complete assignments

AGENDA:

BOA DINE AND RHYME: Kai Carlson-Wee
http://kaicarlsonwee.com/

Go to website.  Read some of his poems.


Complete assignments from previous post including reading and discussion questions (post these).

For Tuesday, you should have 5 poems.  Select one for workshop.

Paradox and Oxymoron
Ashbery poem (already workshopped)
Object Poem
Self-Portrait Poem
"The Nails" assignment

W. S. Merwin "The Nails"

AGENDA:

1. Read W. S. Merwin's "The Nails" and the reading guide

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69462/ws-merwin-the-nails

Explore writing ideas about a "break up' poem and discussion guide:

Answer discussion questions and post on blog.  Work on one of the two writing ideas.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52501/the-nails#tab-resources


2. Work on object poem (see examples in previous post) and self-portrait poem (and any other missing work)

Examples of Object Poems

Examples of Object Poems

“Archaic Torso of Apollo”
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Wind   James Arthur

it’s true sometimes I cannot stop myself from spilling               the recycling unpetalling apple blossoms raiding a picnic making off with napkins I’m nothing               until I happen flipping an umbrella outside-in                       throwing its owner               into a fumble pelting the avenue with sleet or dust at times downtown               riding over galleries of air so full of high excitement howling I borrow an old woman’s hat               and fling it into the road arriving with news of the larkspur               and the bumblebee at times embracing you so lightly in ways you don’t even register               as touch

A NAVAJO BLANKET / May Swenson (1919–1989)

Eye-dazzlers the Indians weave. Three colors
are paths that pull you in, and pin you
to the maze. Brightness makes your eyes jump,
surveying the geometric field. Alight, and enter
any of the gates—of Blue, of Red, of Black.
Be calmed and hooded, a hawk brought down,
glad to fasten to the forearm of a Chief.

You can sleep at the center,
attended by Sun that never fades, by Moon
that cools. Then, slipping free of zigzag and hypnotic diamond, find your way out
by the spirit trail, a faint Green thread that
secretly crosses the border, where your mind
is rinsed and returned to you like a white cup.

FORK / Charles Simic (b. 1938)

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird’s foot
Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless and blind.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/archaic-torso-apollo



The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn't fight.

He hadn't fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely.
 Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown 
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed 
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.

--It was more like the tipping 
of an object toward the light.

I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip 
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines, 
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap 
when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons 
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings, 
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

OBJECT POEM/SELF-PORTRAIT POEM

AGENDA:

SELF-PORTRAIT POEMS


We have all seen self-portraits by visual artists—Frida Kahlo’s “Self Portrait with Cropped Hair,” “Self Portrait with Necklace,” or “Self Portrait with Monkey”—and what interests me in these works is what the artist chooses to highlight in these paintings.
For this writing exercise, you’ll begin with a title:
Self Portrait With ______________  (fill in the blank)
You are welcome to fill in the blank with any current obsession or interesting word/words you like.  Try to choose a word that excites you as in this exercise, as you will return to that word many times.  Your title can be anything from Self Portrait with Machete to Self Portrait with Mother Teresa.  You can use a few words to stretch your subject into something more such as Self Portrait with Broken Coffee Mug or Self Portrait with Winning Lottery Ticket.  It is completely up to you.
You are welcome to write a short story, creative non-fiction piece or in the form of a poem.  Or for an extra challenge, use the same title for two different genres and see what happens.
_____________
Self Portrait With Optic Neuritis
by Kelli Russell Agodon

The ophthalmologist is looking through me.
On the other side of my eye
is God or a peach and I can’t imagine

laughing again or seeing the purple
birthmark on my daughter’s arm.
When he speaks, I hear shadows.

I hear the empty mouths
of bells.  I begin to make promises
to remember long words,

to visit Taos before it is a cloudy city.
On the other side of vision, I can’t imagine
the braiding of nerves inside me,

the light reflecting off an unpainted wall
or the red matter, the rug from India
hanging across the window.

The eye chart hides beneath a haze.
They flip through a book and I am to see
numbers, what I say is: I don’t know,

I don’t know.  His assistant leads me
into the waiting room. I hear a man talking
to his child—she must be only two,

her footsteps sound like dancing.
I hear him tell her to follow him,
then say, I think you’ll need to hold my hand.

previously published in In Posse

Also:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/self-portrait

Self-Portrait

BY AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER

I see myself in the shadows of a leaf

compressed to the green blades growing

to a point like the shards of miles of mirrors

falling and cracking to perfect gardens.

I never inspect the withered assumption

of my face’s petty dialogue in raindrops,

the deceptive spreading of the words

oozing from the skin to the edges of water

etched on the ground by gravity and wishing.

Passing for the seriousness of my eye,

platitudes of my white collar or

the perfect posture of my lips, it skirts

from the leaves of the plant hiding me

and sits stoic like stone in my pupil,

mute and unassuming, like Rashi.

To gather myself I will swim naked

in the wind, bending my blind elbows

in circles, stopping now to dance

like the cherubic gold on the ark,

and gather myself from the particles

of this excitement another structure,

one closely resembling the beginning.

Afaa Michael Weaver, “Self Portrait” from Multitudes: Poems Selected & New. Copyright © 2000 by Afaa Michael Weaver. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books, Inc.

Source: Multitudes: Poems Selected & New (Sarabande Books, 2000)

Self-Portrait

BY AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER

I see myself in the shadows of a leaf

compressed to the green blades growing

to a point like the shards of miles of mirrors

falling and cracking to perfect gardens.

I never inspect the withered assumption

of my face’s petty dialogue in raindrops,

the deceptive spreading of the words

oozing from the skin to the edges of water

etched on the ground by gravity and wishing.

Passing for the seriousness of my eye,

platitudes of my white collar or

the perfect posture of my lips, it skirts

from the leaves of the plant hiding me

and sits stoic like stone in my pupil,

mute and unassuming, like Rashi.

To gather myself I will swim naked

in the wind, bending my blind elbows

in circles, stopping now to dance

like the cherubic gold on the ark,

and gather myself from the particles

of this excitement another structure,

one closely resembling the beginning.

Afaa Michael Weaver, “Self Portrait” from Multitudes: Poems Selected & New. Copyright © 2000 by Afaa Michael Weaver. Reprinted by permission of Sarabande Books, Inc.

Source: Multitudes: Poems Selected & New (Sarabande Books, 2000)

Ashbery poem workshop

AGENDA:

1.Register Scholastic, Bennington
https://www.artandwriting.org/what-we-do/the-awards/how-to-enter/

https://www.artandwriting.org/what-we-do/the-awards/how-to-enter/
 
 

2.Workshop Ashbery poems

3. Continue work on object poem and Golden Shovel

Object Poem/Golden Shovel poem

AGENDA:

1.Workshop on Ashbery poems (Poem assignment #1 and#2)  re-scheduled for WEDNESDAY

2. Work on OBJECT POEM: (Poem assignment #3)
Go to previous post and look at Ted Kooser's "The Notebook"
Check out Billy Collin's "The Lanyard"

https://penandthepad.com/write-object-poem-5085351.html

3. Begin work on Poem #4

Golden Shovel Poem

Poet Terrance Hayes:  WATCH VIDEO!

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=terrance+hayes&adlt=strict&view=detail&mid=63BD3114B3661F38A25863BD3114B3661F38A258&FORM=VRDGAR

From Writer's Digest: Golden Shovel: Poetic Form

By: Robert Lee Brewer | June 24, 2014

Earlier this year, I came across a mention of the “golden shovel” form created by Terrance Hayes and made a note to check it out. I’m so happy I did, because it’s a fun poetic form.

Here are the rules for the Golden Shovel:

• Take a line (or lines) from a poem you admire.
• Use each word in the line (or lines) as an end word in your poem.
• Keep the end words in order.
• Give credit to the poet who originally wrote the line (or lines).
• The new poem does not have to be about the same subject as the poem that offers the end words.

If you pull a line with six words, your poem would be six lines long. If you pull a stanza with 24 words, your poem would be 24 lines long. And so on.
If it’s still kind of abstract, read these two poems to see how Terrance Hayes used a Gwendolyn Brooks poem to write the first golden shovel:

• We Real Cool, by Gwendolyn Brooks (original poem)
• The Golden Shovel, by Terrance Hayes (golden shovel poem)

As you can see, the original golden shovel takes more than a line from the poem. In fact, it pulls every word from the Brooks poem, and it does it twice.
This form is sort of in the tradition of the cento and erasure, but it offers a lot more room for creativity than other found poetry.
*****
Check out these links!  Remember each line ends with a word taken inorder from the line of the original poem you have quoted from.  We should be able to read the last words of each line of your poem going down to the end and get the quoted line from the borrowed poem.

www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/golden-shovel-poetic-form

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55678/the-golden-shovel 
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92023/introduction-586e948ad9af8 
https://web.njit.edu/~ronkowit/poetsonline/archive/arch_goldenshovel.html

4. Write a Golden Shovel poem:

Resources: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/resources/learning/core-poems?page=4

Google Classroom Code

Sign in to Google Classroom:

8542sv

Translate this poem

Gloria

 

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

In the late eighties, in the middle
              of middle school we break from studying our ancestors,
pass on the Phoenicians for a while, leave the terraced fields

of Canaan and the hanging gardens of Babylon
              for European History. Miss Magda
is our guide and she contextualizes

the continent, intertwines it with our own lives, the shapes
              of our maps, the narrowing of our family names. She has
no patience for girls who are charmed by France,

even though a veil of Chanel No 5 unfurls
              over our heads as she enters the room, nor for adults
who praise London’s museums. She narrates

a list of our possessions housed there. Miss Magda speaks
              many languages: the queen’s English, impeccable
French, some Greek, maybe others? Her Arabic

an elegant Cairene, her eyeliner distinctly Cleopatran. She speaks
              مش فارقة معها her mind, she names conquerors, and the servile
regimes they birthed. She liberates the word احتلال

from its quotidian presentation, locates our current colonizers
              on a continuum of violence, sends us asking
our grandparents for stories. She enacts her name

as she towers over our desks and asks rhetorical questions
              كثر خير العرب  who translated Aristotle? Who filled libraries
with books that would later make الرينيساس بتاعهم  possible?

In the middle of middle school we are devotees
              of American pop songs, they trickle into our lives
months after they top the charts, our childhoods are museums

housing the no-longer hits of the Reagan era. Miss Magda’s
              class coincides with our Laura Branigan phase.
Miss Magda barely tolerates our tastes. When she cannot find

a way to escape playground duty and we are perfecting
              our hair flips, passing the Walkman around and singing
“Gloria,” she raises a perfect eyebrow and turns toward us

and I think maybe even smiles. In class, ever the historian,
              she remarks على فكرة that’s originally an Italian song.

Ashbery/9/11

AGENDA:

1. Morning reflection:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usltm7FSm38

2. Discuss Kooser article


3. Ashbery Poem workshop


4. Writing activity: Object poem

https://penandthepad.com/write-object-poem-5085351.html

Senior Town Meeting 9/13 7:45