Unit: Poetry

Class Projects:     704, 705, 708

Our Poetry

 

 

Step 1:  What do you think about poetry?  What kinds of poetry do you think you like?

 

to be honest, i've really always loved poetry, i just didn't always love the peotry i was supposed to

love.  i had these teachers that taught this real old kind of poetry.  the ptetry where it makes no sense

unless you live in the 1500's.   then it's like crazy slang.  but there is real poetry out there that feels

right.  i mean, there's slam poems and short poems and clear poems and crazy poems.  i think i really

got to liking reading poems when i really got to writing poems.

 

for me, reading and writing poetry goes together.  like shamma-lamma-lamma-shamma-lamma-

dingty-dong.  no, but for real, i feel like i like poetry that's real.  i have a tough time with capital P

Poetry, poetry that's supposed to be poetry.  i'm better with it now.  there was a time when i wouldn't

even read it.  there were whole genre, it's like the old white person poem.  i can see it more now, when

i feel like there's something different, something a little bit beautiful, a little bit off, a little bit new.

 

at the same time, that's the whole thing with poetry to me.  is it slows you down, makes you stop,

makes you see.

 

Step 2:   Read a whole mess of poems and respond

 

Forgetfulness

Billy Collins

3 Stars

 

I feel mixed, you know?  It's definitely a style that I don't like so much, but at the same time, I do know what he's saying.  It's crazy how they get you to forget what you want to think aboutwhat you thought about what you read.  And then it's the whole dumbing down thing of education.  It's kind of like I like talking about the poem more than I like reading the poem, you know?

 

Homage to My Hips

Lucille Clifton

4 Stars

 

i really like this poem because it's a bit to the side, you know?  she's not afraid, she's just at peace and proud with who she is and how she is, and i love her style.  she writes like she flows and it's all in voice.  i can't get enough on her poetry.  she also does this nice stuff with voices of other poeple, and it's crazay to see it in her voice here.  it's not my most favoritest clifton poem, but it is nice.

 

My Papa's Waltz

Theodore Roethke

4 Stars

 

i don't know that i love this poem right away.  the language is different than i like in my style poems, but the idea that there are two ideas is so good.  it's like you could really argue with people about some things, but there really is only one dominant reading.  for me, here, it's really hard to say that there aren't two possible readings.  i feel like that's really important, and i love that that's out of the poet's hands in some ways, here.  tyhis is one of the rhyming poems that made it over the edge.

 

We Real Cool

Gwendolyn Brooks

5 Stars

 

this is a peom standard, no?  i feel like this is a poem for me that's too good not to like even if it seems silly the first time you see it or if i want to not play it because it's tired by now.  but it's not really for me.  i feel like the language is nice because it's clearly dated but it's clearly still hot.  it's like the time has changed but the things haven't and it's getting at people who aren't normally voiced.  i love that in poetry, when people or moments and ideas that don't get voiced bet voiced.

 

This Is Just to Say

William Carlos Williams

5 Stars

 

i remember when my teacher in summer school after 9th grade showed me the poem, the red wheelbarrow.  i remember thnking this is so stupid, it's just so stupid.  but there's something about it that just stays with you.  it's the peotry of the everyday mundane life.  it's poetry that is really true.  it reminds me of this art piece by michel duchamps (is that the name?  maybe not) that was a toilet.  i mean, not really.  there really is something beautiful and artful abot the craft here that there is not in the art, but it also makes me think about how the everyday, the right here is truly beautfiul.  that is what's truly beautiful.

 

America

Allen Ginsburg

5 stars

 

i feel like this is the original slam poem.  this is like the original poem that got me into poetry.  one of the first poems that really caught me, that really got me, like this can be a poem?  it's real, it's straight up, and it's old, you know?  it's the new shit, but it's not really new shit at all.  and, at the end of the day, the thing that i love about it is that it's about america, but it's not about america.  it's america, but it's really him at the same time.  i think i really like that when it's about something big but it's really about something small.

 

Believing in Iron

Yusef Komunyakaa

4 Stars

 

i really like komunyakaa.  i feel like he's in the tradition, but he's out there, you know?  he is in the white guy tradition, but he's not white, so he freaks that form to make it new.  here, he is telling one of those story narrative poems, but his take on it is slanted.  how could those men bend so close to the earth for iron?  echoes of bends to the earth for cotton.  how could we spend so much time doing what it is we're doing?  so much of our heart, our sweat being who it is we're being?

 

Cotton Song

Jean Toomer

3 Stars

 

i feel like this poem has to be read aloud and slow in your head.  if i read it fast, or if i don't want to read it, or if i read it quiet, i don't like the poem as much.  but if you read into the rhythm, with the rhythm, its got beat.  i feel like there is an old school hymn, an old school beat that's going on when you read it aloud that makes it possible.  he's a harlem rennaisance poet, but it's on the underground.  anyway, that whole thing, roll with it, hew it, i feel that.

 

140 Syllables

Kenneth Rexroth

5 Stars

 

i really really like this poem because it flips on them.  it's like i hate all these structures and forms and how people say that this is good or this is the right reading or this is how to read this thing.  and it looks at all of that stuff, english and bigger than english, and is lie, screw you.  this stuff is all messed up.  your forms are messed up.  your ideas are messed up.  your rules are messed up.  but it does it all at the same time in their language, using their form, using his language.

 

Sisters

Janet S. Wong

5 Stars

 

i really like this poem.  it was on the wall of our teachers' room for a long time and i didn't know what was up with it.  i just like some of the moves.  tofu?  that's crazy.  i love it!  i love that her sister is tofu.  then i looked back at it and it's almost like two haikus.  it's not perfect syllables, right?  but it slim like that.  it just gets to it.  it turns out that she's a children's author and there _is_ something spare and simple about her language.  it's simple, but it's also really sharp:  ginger, fire.  there's an edge.  i mean, i don't know who's right.  i don't know anything about these sisters.  still, there's an an edge.

 

What My Child Learns of the Sea

Audre Lorde

4 Stars

 

Blackbery Picking (video)

Seamus Heaney

4 Stars

 

may i feel

e.e. cummings

4 Stars

 

this poem is a bit crazy.  i mean, i know the students always go a little bit crazy over it because it seems raw but it also reminds me of the william carlos wiliiams simple poems.  this is life.  yes, it is crafted, but what's up with everyone always thinking that love and acting on love is secret and crass and inappropriate.  it's love!  you know?

 

Dream Deferred

Langston Hughes

5 Stars

 

first of all, this poem is history, right?  i mean, this poem is a poem on its own, but its also a poem that speaks to a time and a setting and an issue and a problem that is at the heart of america.  are we able to be who we want to be?  are we all able to be who we really want to be?  and if not, what happens to us?  i mean, what really happens?  it's especially important to me right now. . . what's going to happen?  i feel like my poetry dream, my own poetry dream was, at the very very least, deferred.  what will happen?  will i keep going?  or will it dry up, you know?

 

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou

4 Stars

 

you know, i'm kinda torn on maya angelou.  first off, maya angelou was one of the poets that i just loved.  that got me into what poetry could do.  just a voice, you know?  her voice and her perspective, always.  and i was so excited when she read an inaugural poem for president clinton.  but i also see the downsides, here.  i hear also the critics who say she is too simple, too plain, too sophomoric in ways.  at the end of the day, though, still, it's that it's so original even it's own way.  the choice of the metaphors and everything make it totally different.  "i dance like i've got oil wells at the meeting of my thighs."  what!  that's amazing.

 

Am/trak

Amiri Baraka

3 Stars

 

The Gift

Mayda del Valle

3 Stars

 

Knoxville, Tennessee

Nikki Giovanni

3 Stars

 

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/168.html

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2007/06/19

 

Personal Letter No. 3

Sonia Sanchez

5 Stars

 

Good Jelly

Sam Cornish

4 Stars

 

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

4 Stars

 

We Would Like You to Know

Ana Castillo

3 Stars

 

Lines from a Fortune Cookie

Frank O'Hara

4 Stars

 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

4.5 Stars

 

Upon Hearing a 2 Year-Old's First Attempts at an Elvis Impression, I Recall the Difficulties of Her Birth

John Hadgen

4 Stars

 

Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night

Dylan Thomas

3 Stars

 

September

Jennifer Hecht

4 Stars

 

What the Doctor Said

Raymond Carver

4 Stars

 

poetry

nikki giovanni

 

Sharon Olds

On the Subway

 

Sharon Olds

my son the man

 

sharon olds

looking at them asleep

 

alice walker

did this happen to your mother?

 

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

3 Stars

 

this poem is there, you know?  it's just there.  i feel like you can't miss this poem if you're poeming.  i mean, it's aiiiight.  i like the general idea it makes me think about:  go your own way.  at the same time, it's trite.  i don't know if it's trite to me because it made the idea or crystallized the idea so well and it was breakthrough at the time.

 

Island Mary

Lucille Clifton

5 Stars

 

this poem is the first poem that i really really thought deeply about that was given to me by somebody else.  i read it in college and i had to write an essay on the poem, and it's one of the only pieces of literature ever that has been assigned by a teacher.  there's something that this poem makes me think about:  about how our heroes are conflicted.  i'm always really interested in that.  how do make people that we idolize real?  there's just something about how mary is conflicted here.  can i do this?  am i good enough?  can i do this?  i am not christian and i don't think so much about jesus and mary like that.  but it's powerful to think about

 

Flophouse

Charles Bukowski

5 Stars

 

i love this poem because it's just straight up.  the beat poets try to just pull down the whole facade, the whole fake front, you know?  yes, those feelings the old romantic poets wrote abot are real, but their words are not real anymore, their palces are not real anyomore.  this is what's real.  and i love the way that he's just straight up, this is waht i see, this si what's happening.

 

To a Stranger

Walt Whitman

3 Stars

 

looking around, believing

Gary Soto

3 Stars

 

Urgent Telegram to Jean-Michel Basquiat,

Kevin Young

4.5 Stars

 

this poem is startling because it really is different.  it's so different it made me kind of want to write a telegram.  i mean, it is a beautiful thing in the way your words have to be economical.  ig uess in some ways it's the forerunner of im speak.  it's the shortest possible way to get someone to understand what they need to understand because you have to pay for each word.  even that idea, that you have to pay for each words is an amazing thing.  paying for each word.

 

Trouble

Matthew Dickman

4 Stars 

 

i wasn't caught by the list.  i mean, i liked the list idea, but in some ways i thought it was done better in frank o'hara fortune cookie poem.  i mean, the idea was these connected but unconnected things that in some way all connect but of course are completely random.  i just felt like the idea of these famous poeple or famous writers dying and how they died was in some ways kitschy but i was not ready for the end.  the end ran into me.  i got stopped by the end and it is still there.  the end made me write two poems, "envelope" and "10 clouds".

 

For Tess

Raymond Carver

5 Stars

 

it's funny because raymond carver is really known for being this amazing short story writer, and i can't say how many times i've fallen in love with one of his short stories.  and i think his writing in fiction doesn't make you think immediately that he'd write poetry well.  i feel like there's something about his poetry that is a little plain, but there's also something that is true at the heart of things.  what is the small truth, the big truth, the small moment in our lives when we understand it all.  i think, i'm guessing but i don't know, that some of his poetry really came out after he was diagnosed with cancer and dying.  it seems like some of his famous poems are later.

 

Tuesday 9:00 AM

David Butson

4 Stars

 

this poem is a little crazy.  this is exactly one of those poems that i wish i had the idea.  i really like this poem and the move that he makes really makes me think, i wish i had made that move earlier.  i'd love to revise this poem because i feel like some things are written a bit differently, but the idea is powerful.  it makes me think about how we go through these things, these amazingly powerful and deep things that we had no idea are going on.  we're so cetnered on ourselves and these things are so powerful.  also, how these things may or may not be alike or connected.  they are just there.

 

 

 

Step 3: Collect a group of favorite poems (Anthology)

 

1)  This Is Just to Say

William Carlos Williams

 

it makes me think. . . love is this beautiful and it is also not, you know?  this poem stays with me, in part, because it reminds me to stay simple.  stay simple in life.  stay simple in love.  when my life gets crazy, it's because i've forgotten things that are at the base of this whole thing.  plums.  icebook.  cold.  you know?  the important thing about plums is that they are sweet and cool.  the important thing about love is that you maintain it.  that you consider the other person.  that you leave them a note.  even if you made a mistake and ate all of the plums that were so sweet and so cold.

 

2)  140 Syllables

Kenneth Rexroth

 

You see, the thing about this poem is that I just can't shake it.  It just stays there.  I mean, yes it's that the idea always shakes me to remember that this craziness is an illusions, it's all just a weird construction that makes us makes sense.  Still, it's more than that:  it's that he totally flipped their own stuff right back on them.  it's a poem that brings up the real stuff:  the students say it says the truth.  and they're right.  and it's not easy to say the truth.  and he's part of the system but he's also not in the system.  i feel like i can relate to that.  you can be in the system and change the system.  you can be out of the system and out.  he's in the system and he's calling it out.  he's a good cop in a bad police station. 

 

Personal Letter No. 3

Sonia Sanchez 

 

i don't think i would've loved this poem when i was younger.  there's something about this poem that is ee now.  there's something that is tired and weary in life and there's soemthing that's real about that.  i remeber when i started teaching and i was married now and iw as just out of school and i started geting further away from the songs on the street.  is tarted to stpo listening to the radio and i started to be further away from the sounds.  it isn't that you have to do it forever to be cool.  and it isn't that there wasn't something of a front in the songs.  it's just that there comes a time that you are just true.  you're just you.  you're just a little bit tired and a little bit ready to be tired. 

 

America

Allen Ginsburg

 

this poem is raw in a way that i really do feel.  i mean, it's not the sense that everything is wrong with america.  i think that's what peole on the right would sya. i fyou hate america, get out.  but there's something about his calling out america that makes us understand that he really loves america.  he loves america and i love america but it's just so crayz and messed up and if you don't call that out then you aren't being real.  there's something truly beatiful in our founding ideals.  but they're messed up and imperfect sometimes. a nd yes, there's something about capitalism that makes us.  and there's something about it that screw the whole thing up.  allen ginsberg was the first poet that i ever really truly loved and this was the poem that started that love.

 

For Tess

Raymond Carver

 

i feel like this poem is it, you know?  i have to have my moments alone.  i know this more and moe know.  i mean, i always knew this.  i have always needed my own space, but it's more than that now.  and it's not like ewww i don't like you and i can't be around you "own space".  it's i need to do my own thing, my own person, my own ideas.  sometimes, now, i find that space late at night.  it's not a pattern, it just started happening.  i passed out during the day for a short nap and then i am up real late after samantha has gone to bed.  and i sit on the sofa and i think about htings.  and sometimes it is sad.  and sometimes it is right.  but i know that that space is almost like a restart button that reminds me, that catches me.  and then i say, i love you.

 

Flophouse

Charles Bukowski

 

a whole bunch of crazy.  i love this poem because it's just upfront.  this is what it's like.  and it makes me think about the flophouse, yes, about how crazy that whole thing must be, being in a flophouse, being in that place in life, not having nothing, not having somehwere except there, but of course, it also just makes me think this is us too.  this is our life.  these are the same things we do, pile our bodies up, stink our bodies up, not really really, but this is really us.  this is really us because we let this happen, but more than that, it's also us in our lives.  we think we're not all dirty, and i really wonder sometimes, does that make us dirtier?

 

Island Mary

Lucille Clifton

 

this poem stays with me becasue i always think about hwole the whole concept of heroes and celebrities is that they're better and greater and more pure than us.  but i feel like it's not true, you know.  we always think that people are so pretty and so thin adn so perfect and it's all a fraud.  i started trying to write entires in our blog about how it's really tough to be a aprent, that it isn't all perfect all the time, that you really make mistakes soemtimes, and that it doesn't make you a bad parent, it's just real.  (it turns out there's a whole genre of these posts, but anyway)  i feel like the whole idea is to make it more real.  mary and jesus and joseph (or whoever) were not more perfect than us.  they were us.  in fact, that's what makes them such powerful figures right?  it isn't that they're so much better and more certain than we are.  mary was wracked with doubt and confusion.  can i do this?  am i ready to do this?  is this really me?  i feel that all the time.

 

Step 4: Selecting the favoritest poem  

 

 

Island Mary

Lucille Clifton

 

 

after the all been done and i

one old creature carried on

another creature's back, i wonder

could i have fought these thing?

surrounded by no son of mine save

old men calling Mother like in the tale

the astrologer tell, i wonder

could i have walk away when voices

singing in my sleep? i one old woman.

always i seem to worrying now for

another young girl asleep

in the plain evening.

what song around her ear?

what star still choosing?

 

at the end of the day, it just has to be this poem, you know?  i mean, i love 140 syllables, and it really reminds me about all the bullshit everybody sells.  (and people do sell a whole bunch of bullshit, you know?)  still, i cannot cannot ever shake this poem, this poem.  island mary.  it's not that the words or the lines are absolutely perfect.  it's a little imperfect in some ways.  (and in some ways, for me, that connects right back up to the larger idea!)  i'd like to change this word here or that word there.  it's just that the idea that it makes me think about is too much to turn down.  it's us, right?  the hero is us.  the villain is us.  the mother is us.  the child is us.  the whole thing is up to us.  what questions do we ask?  what answers do we have?  what lives do we have?  what lives don't we have?  i don't know that this is the idea of the poem.  i don't know.  it's just that i love this idea.  there's a lot there.  there's the kind of cadence.  there's the allusions.  there's the contradiction.  it's just that the whole thing stays with me.  it just stays there.

 

Step 5:  What do you think about poetry (now)?  What kinds of poetry do you think you like (now)?