End of marking period/Field Trip/Contests

AGENDA:

End of marking period--January 31---PORTFOLIO complete, post on Goggle Classroom, participate in 3 workshops

Permission slips---Field Trip---prepare 2-3 poems or a short prose piece

CONTESTS---Extra credit for 1 or 2 entries--SOKOL, GANNON, ROC the Sonnet

AUDITIONS--Tuesday and Wednesday next week--4:45-8--need volunteers for community service

College life--Ms. Taylor can answer some of your questions

Sestina   Marci Nelligan

after Hieronymus Bosch There’s no there there, no here here— a timetable shows the missing trains, the fruit bowl longs for oranges. We went ahead to lurch behind, booked a passage so circuitous it carves new dimensions in the tabletops. They’ve posted soldiers in the laundromats and everything you want Irradiates to dust. I wanted to become a different human, left myself here among the daisies, tied the horse to a newell post and let him nibble all the oranges. Sweet tongue to the fruit, sweet agronome—carve statues out of butter to venerate the cows—your books with all their fractured mirrors, diminish me, bookend this life with the twin ghosts of hollowness and want. Among all the things we might have carved into trees or out of marble, not a single effigy captures the here of our simplicity, the rolling hips of fields, the slutty orange of trees that turn on you each fall. Whereas a fence is made of posts the country’s made of crosses and we post death threats on the clothesline flapping with the sheets. I thought         a good book could solve it all, the proper smile. Yet tyranny wears orange trappings, a mine fire, a deposition. I want something to put my body in, I want to feel the here- and-now draw its tongue along my neck, carve a cuneiform instruction manual in my shoulder blades, make me         a carved idol for this new century of cosmic meltdown. Write this on a Post-it note and affix it to the future: “Here lies the history of America, one big comic book of medical interventions.” There’s a way to want that’s simple as our minds. There’s an orange    sun fatter than the sky, an orange demon on a blitzkrieg mission to barbeque oblivion. Carve me a corner I might hole up in, give way to what you want and want for nothing. All we have are postage stamps from foreign places, an attic full of musty yarn. Strike a         matchbook to it all, flee the scene and we were never there. I want so many things for us, post my hopes on a telephone pole         like lost puppies but the book is here, our names carved from its narrative—all lost,         all devastation. Peel and pith the orange holds its essence in its skin. Peel and pith         its bitterness, too.            Copyright © 2020 by Marci Nelligan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 17, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry challenges

AGENDA:

Make sure you have the poems that were assigned this marking period posted on Google classroom and have copies for your portfolio:

1. Ghazal
2.American sonnet
3. Ekphrastic
4. Gift
5. Meaning of a word/Multiple meannings

In addition, take up a challenge (see handouts):

1. Rita Dove's 10 minute spill
2. John Ashberry
3. Apocalypse poem

CONTESTS:
Enter Sokol and/or Gannon for a classwork credit of 10 or 11 if you do both

FIELD TRIP to the Village  1/28  TUESDAY:
I need 6 volunteers to read poetry.

Workshop

AGENDA:

Workshop new poems.

CONTESTS:  Enter Sokol and Gannon

Gift Poems/Etymology Poem

AGENDA:

If you have not completed your gift poem from the last class, please do so and give it to Ms. Thomas.  If you have shared and/or turned it in, please begin work on your Etymology/Word Poem.
We will share additional gift poems 2nd period.

Etymology/Multiple Meaning of a Word Poem

Explore the origin or multiple meanings of a word. Check out dictionaries and encyclopedias, including the O. E. D.

https://poets.org/poem/etymology

Homophones:
http://homophonelist.com/homophones-list/

http://www.singularis.ltd.uk/bifroest/misc/homophones-list.html

Weird words:
https://voxy.com/blog/2011/03/weird-english-words-from-a-to-z/

https://www.lexico.com/explore/weird-and-wonderful-words

https://chartcons.com/unusual-words-100-most-unusual-words/

SEARCH ONLINE ETYMOLOGY DICTIONARIES FOR ORIGIN OF WORDS

Gift Poems

AGENDA: Gift Poems, Poems of Giving or Gratitude

1st period:
In the spirit of the gift-giving season that has just passed, write a poem that would be a gift to a person or persons who you feel would appreciate receiving it or a poem of gratitude for a gift you have received.

Remember Billy Collins' "The Lanyard"?

2nd period:  Finish your poem and SHARE OUT (if possible)
Read your poem and explain your reason for GIVING it to whomever.

The Gift

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he’d removed

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man

planting something in a boy’s palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this,

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father.

Li-Young Lee, “The Gift” from Rose. Copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with the permission of BOA Editions Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

Source: Rose (BOA Editions Ltd., 1986)

The Gift Outright (Inaugural poem for John F. Kennedy)

BY ROBERT FROST

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

Golden Retrievals

BY MARK DOTY

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.