Monday, February 18, 2013

Poetry Explications and MIDTERM INSTRUCTIONS


We talked last week (and, well, every week before that) about sound in poetry.  Obviously, each poet decides for her or himself (often from poem to poem) if the bulk of a poem's energy will come from narrative, lyricism, imagery, etc.  But to better illustrate how sound and imagery can work together,  take a look at this famous poem by Marge Piercy that relies almost entirely on sound and imagery.

Touch Tones
by Marge Piercy

We learn each other in braille,
what the tongue and teeth taste,
what the fingers trace, translate
into arias of knowledge and delight
of silk and stubble, of bark
and velvet and wet roses,
warbling colors that splash through
bronze, violet, dragonfly jade,
the red of raspberries, lacquer, odor
of resin, the voice that later
comes unbidden as a Mozart horn
concerto circling in the ears.

You are translated from label,
politic mask, accomplished patter,
to the hands round hefting,
to a weight, a thrust, a scent
sharp as walking in early
morning a path through a meadow
where a fox has been last night
and something in the genes saying
FOX to that rich ruddy smell.
The texture of lambswool, of broadcloth
can speak a name in runes. Absent,
your presence carols in the blood.


A great way to refine your own aesthetic, not to mention develop a more technical appreciation for poetry (see also the Pinsky line, "Read the way the chef eats"), is to perform an explication of a published, well-regarded poem.  In other words, go line by line and theorize on what the poem is (or isn't) doing. Another big benefit of this is that once you've come up with a detailed, hopefully complimentary explication of a poem, you have something nice to send out to journals (National Poetry Review is interested in explications) or at the very least, post on your blog to show everybody how smart you are.

To see some examples of explications, check out my explication of the above poem, which also contains info on the midterm (due Feb. 25), as well as my explications "To Pull into Oneself as into a Locked Room" by Stephen Dobyns and "Waiting" by James Valvis.  You should also check out my lesson on scansion, since that's another time-consuming but very effective way to develop a deeper awareness of what's going on in your or someone else's poems.


And now for something completely different...


One way to refine your aesthetic… and, well, get better at stuff… is by seriously attempting something that is more or less impossible.  So with that in mind, let’s try an exercise based on some poems I selected off Verse Daily. 

 If you’re not familiar, Verse Daily is a site that, each day, republishes one poem selected from all the copies of journals and recently published books that are sent their way.  They tend to publish a wide range of styles so obviously, not everybody’s going to agree on the subjective quality of each piece.

Still, in the interest of sharpening your aesthetic and quite possibly starting an argument, I’d like you to read these pieces and try and nail down some kind of reason for why you think each piece is “good” or “bad.”

Monday, February 11, 2013

Invention Exercise


We’ve talked before about how a good poem (much like a Zen koan) can seem to pull you in two different logical and psychological directions at the same time.  That’s part of the magic and, eventually, you want to be doing it while basically writing on auto-pilot.  Initially, though, it often takes some conscious, concerted effort to get a feel for the rhythms and music that exist in all artistic language but seem to be heightened in poetry.
   
1) So for practice, begin by listing some 1 or 2 syllable words you like, then come up with words that have the same beginning and ending sounds in the reverse order.  Examples: cedar and repose.  Rabbit and temper.  Fort and tariff.  Risk and killdeer.  Russet and tier.  Donkey and yield.  Feel and leaf.  Fumble and bluff.

2) Come up with a few words that have the same internal sounds but different connotations.  Examples: gloom and boon.  Glow and drone.  Bastard and happy.  Jewel and coup.  Rigor and cigarette.

3)  List a few nouns and join them with seemingly unrelated adjectives.  Examples: naked sunrise, screaming whisper, cellophane skyscraper, paper temple, lonesome anthill, purple stoplight, raspberry wrath, plexiglas salvation, disjointed symphony, prehistoric tuxedo, oscillating freeze.

4) Now, take something from #3 and turn it into a simile describing a seemingly unrelated noun.  Examples: the setting sun blinked like a purple stoplight, she was lonesome as an anthill, typewriters rang like a disjointed symphony, he wore the earth like a prehistoric tuxedo.

5) Come up with some two syllable words that have both syllables stressed.  These words add extra punch to your sentence.  Examples: Riptide, whirlwind, whitewash, spendthrift, whiplash, toothpaste, snowmelt, ragtag, cupcake, laptop, stonewall, slapdash.

6) Come up with an elevated, sophisticated image or phrase (or even a bit of scientific terminology).  Sandwich that next to something more guttural, pedestrian, etc.  Another way to think about this: follow a pretentious statement (distinguished not just by overly elevated images or concepts but lots of unstressed syllables) with something blunt and plain-spoken.

7) Now, try weaving these together.  With your words for #1, don’t just put them side by side.  Put them a few words or even a whole line apart.  This creates a subconscious feeling that your lines are connected by an internal rhythm.  Don’t worry about literal meaning yet; you’re just trying to clear up your creative lens and hammer out some lines that have a sense of rhythm, music, and raw imagination.