Carta Marina by Ann Fisher-Wirth

"A world-class poem about desire," Lesley Wheeler calls Ann Fisher-Wirth's long poem, Carta Marina, published by Wings Press (San Antonio 2009).

A Place to Blog about Poetry

The Intro to Lit course is finished, but I find myself continuing to blog about poetry here in anticipation of the Writing Poetry class I am teaching in the spring. The internet continues to be a growing resource for conversations about poetry, book reviews, and resources. So I've decided to keep this blog going, hoping it will become an ongoing resource of its own for future classes as well as lovers of poetry.

Poetry Slam? -- Rita Dove vs. Helen Vendler

The poetry world isn't always a peaceful place. Especially when a poet is given the job of creating an anthology and a famous critic disagrees with her choices. Recently Penguin books published an anthology of American poetry, edited by former poet laureate Rita Dove. Helen Vendler, Harvard professor and long-time poetry critic, wrote a scathing review published in The New York Review of Books, criticizing Dove's choices as too heavily influenced by political choices. (Dove's anthology includes a large percentage of African American poets.) At one point in her review Vendler attempts to attribute Dove's critical acumen to her being a poet, not an essayist. Dove, in an essay rebuttal of Vendler's review, takes the critic to task in the upcoming December 22 issue of the New York Review of Books according to The Atlantic Wire, an online publication of the venerable magazine.

What counts as poetry in America is rich and varied, but when a major publishing house attempts publishes a book that threatens to change the course of the canon--that is, the few poets selected for inclusion in a volume of what counts as the best of American poetry--some critics, in this case Vendler, get energized. For almost forty years Vendler has been an arbiter of taste in the poetry establishment. She has had the power to make or break careers. Earlier in her poetry career, Vendler praised Dove's work as a poet. But apparently, Vendler is not impressed with Dove's work as a critic--or, she is threatened by someone who has dared to create an arrangement counter to Vendler's taste. Who is to judge? There's no respectable way to do this without reading the book, which means the poets win--they get more readers!

For an in-depth interview with Dove by Jericho Brown and more insights into the editing and publishing process, see the Best American Poetry blog.

Gertrude Stein on Poetry

Gertrude Stein, the experimental writer, attempted to define poetry in her essay, "Poetry and Grammar."

Here's an excerpt from "Poetry and Grammar," published in Lectures in America (1935).

When I first began writing, I felt that writing should go on, I still do feel that it should go on but when I first began writing I was possessed by the necessity that writing should go on and if writing should go on what had colons and semi-colons to do with it, what had commas to do with it, what had periods to do with it what had small letters and capitals to do with it to do with writing going on which was at that time the most profound need I had in connection with writing. What had colons and semi-colons to do with it what had commas to do with it what had periods to do with it.

What had periods to do with it. Inevitably no matter how completely I had to have writing go on, physically one had to again and again stop sometime and if one had to again and again stop sometime then periods had to exist. Beside I had always liked the look of periods and I liked what they did. Stopping sometimes did not really keep one from going on, it was nothing that interfered, it was only something that happened, and as it happened as a perfectly natural happening, I did believe in periods and I used them. I really never stopped using them.

Besides that periods might later come to have a life of their own to commence breaking up things in arbitrary ways, that has happened lately with me in a poem I have written called Winning His Way, later I will read you a little of it. By the time I had written this poem about three years ago periods had come to have for me completely a life of their own. They could begin to act as they thought best and one might interrupt one's writing with them but one could come to stop arbitrarily stop at times in one's writing with them that is not really interrupt one's writing with them but one could come to stop arbitrarily stop at times in one's writing and so they could be used and you could use them. Periods could come to exist in this way and they could come in this way to have a life of their own. They did not serve you in any servile way as commas and colons and semi-colons do. Yes you do feel what I mean. Read more on line.


Here is a sample of Stein's writing from her book Tender Buttons.


A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS.

A kind in glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

Now, the same text in a Wordle:

What is Poetry?

To end the semester, we're revisiting the question, "What is poetry?" Based on their reading and writing this semester of 20th and 21st century poets--including a unit on the poetry of witness, the study of an individual volume of poetry by a poet of their choice, and the visits of several quest writers--students will write their own definitions. I can hardly wait to read them!

Students have just concluded their final project of the semester--a thorough study of an individual volume of poetry by a contemporary poet--and have gotten to know the work of a particular poet in depth. Visit their blogs to read their reflections on work by Margaret Atwood, Eavan Boland, Peter Fallon, Kenneth Koch, Denise Levertov, Audre Lorde, Anne Sexton, and Brian Turner.

Here's a Wordle creates with phrases students offered up to describe what they've learned about poetry in this class:

Paul Celan - Todesfugue

Paul Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Romania of German-speaking Jewish parents. (Celan is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his name.) They spoke German at home at his mother's insistence; she was a passionate student of German literature. Celan also knew Romanian, Russian and French, and could understand Yiddish, a German Jewish dialect. Celan went to France to study medicine in 1938, but returned to Romania in 1939 to study literature instead. First the Russians and then the Nazis took over the part of Romania in which he lived. Forced into a Jewish Ghetto created by the Nazis, he translated the sonnets of William Shakespeare and continued to write his own poetry. In 1942 both of his parents were captured and taken to concentration camps, where they died. Celan was made to do forced labor until 1944, when the Russians drove out the Nazis and took over again. Celan wrote Todesfugue at the end of the war, using accounts of the death camps he had heard when the camps were liberated. After the war he moved to Bucharest, where he worked as an editor and translator and changed his name. In 1948 he moved to Paris to study German philology and literature. He became a French citizen in 1955 and remained in France for the rest of his life. He committed suicide in 1970 by drowning himself in the Seine River.

Celan struggled with the irony of writing in German. It was both the language that connected him to his family, especially his mother, and the language spoken by the country that had killed his parents, uncle, and numerous other close friends and family members. He struggled with survivor guilt and depression, but became one of the major German language poets of the 20th century in spite of this. In 1958 we won the Bremen Prize for poetry and in 1960 the Georg Buechner Prize.

Of language, Celan wrote:

"Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, 'enriched' by it all." (from "Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen", p.34, in Celan's Collected Prose, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 1986.

You can hear Celan read "Todesfugue" by clicking on the link at the end of the poem on this site.

Musee des Beaux Arts - another Auden poem, with painting

"Musee des Beaux Arts" is a poem about art and suffering, and the ways in which our perspective influences what we care about. Although it's a very different poem than "September 1, 1939," it touches on some of the same themes and was written at about the same time. The Musee des Beaux Arts is a museum in Brussels, Belgium.

To make his point that suffering goes on all around us, yet we pay little attention, Auden describes a painting by Flemish painter Pieter Breughel the elder called "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." The painting focuses on a plowman in a landscape, and in the lower right hand corner there is a leg sticking out of the corner--Icarus.

Check out some informal, student-friendly commentary on Schmoop.

William Carlos Williams also wrote a poem about this painting with the same title.

Researching Poetry

Doing college level research and writing is one of the objectives of this course. Why not do it with poetry?

But how?!

First, it's helpful to look at the age of the poem and the context. Poems that have been around for a while in the public and academic consciousness will most certainly have been the subject of literary criticism or academic research. The way to find almost ANYTHING credible written about a literary topic is to explore the MLA International bibliography. You can find a link to this bibliography on the Goshen College Good Library web page.

There are several ways to find the MLA International Bibliography. (MLA stands for the Modern Language Association. This database indexes articles on literature written on ALL modern language literatures.)

1) Go under "Books and Articles" heading and click on A-Z Databases. You will find it alphabetically under "ML." Note: Do not click on the MLA List of Periodicals. That is a different database.

2) Go to EBSCO (listed on the left hand side of the page) and log in. Then look for the MLA International Bibliography.

Searching: Try several different searches before you give up. When I was looking up W. H. Auden's poem "September 1, 1939," I found different results for "W H Auden" and "September 1, 1939" than I did for "Auden" and "September 1, 1939." Which search terms do you think offered more results?

Depending on how many items you get, you may want to narrow further.

Don't simply go for the full text articles. Look over the range of "hits" you got in your search. Notice the subjects and types of things written about. If there's an article you really want and it's not available in full text, you can order it through interlibrary loan with a few clicks. Most articles will come free to your inbox within a week and you will be able to read and download them for a period of about 2 weeks.

The MLA bibliography does not index articles in newspapers, popular magazines, or on websites. (It does index some articles from online journals--including the Journal of the Center for Mennonite Writing, which I edit.) If you want to find materials from the popular press, look at the Academic Search Premiere database or the Historical New York Times database (if it's in The New York Times).

Make sure to write down all the citations of the articles you download or use for your research. Most databases will now give you the option of downloading a citation in your preferred citation style.

The preferred citation style for the class is MLA style. You will find further information on the Good Library website, the Purdue OWL, and in your Hacker Pocket Handbook purchased for this course.

Can you find these articles on Auden's "September 1, 1939"?


Burt, Stephen, "'September 1, 1939' Revisited: Or, Poetry, Politics, and the Idea of the Public," American Literary History, 2003 Fall; 15 (3): 533-59.

Miller, James, "Auden's 'September 1, 1939,'" Explicator, 2004 Winter; 62 (2): 115-18.


Wormser, Baron, "Meeting the Agony: Three Poems of the Twentieth Century," Sewanee Review, 2008 Summer; 116 (3): 411-427.

Sonnets

A sonnet is a "little song." A very old form that originated in medieval Italy, the sonnet was first made popular by Petrarch, who serenaded his lady love Laura with sonnets.

The Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet is a poem of 14 lines that has the following form and rhyme scheme:

abba abba cdecde or some other variation of cd or cde, such as ccddee or cddcee or cdcdee or cdcdcd. (Because an Italian sonnet can end with a rhymed couplet, you need to look carefully at the rest of the poem to make sure it's not an English sonnet--which is described further down below.)

As Nelson Miller says in his excellent online guide to sonnets, the sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines that attempts to contrast two ideas, or bring together to different things, or to raise a question and answer.

The Italian sonnet, therefore, is often referred to having an octave (two quatrains) and a sestet. There is often something referred to as a "turn" in the poem because of the shift from one idea to its contrasting counterpart. The octave and the sestet are marked by the rhyme scheme rather than by obvious stanza breaks, because sonnets are usually printed in one "chunk."

The English sonnet, also referred to as the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet, allows for a bit more variety in rhyme. This is in keeping with the demands of English, which has a very rich vocabulary, but fewer rhymes. There are several variations on the English sonnet, including the Spencerian Sonnet and the Wordsworthian sonnet, which incorporate aspects of the Italian sonnet. English sonnets are written in iambic pentameter. See Nelson's website (above) for more detail on this.

Meanwhile, here's a basic overview of the Shakespearean sonnet.

Rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. Many times you will find a list of questions or points in the three quatrains, and a point or commentary in the final couplet.

Often poets have written sonnet cycles, or a "crown" of sonnets, in which sonnets on the same theme share first and last lines -- the second one beginning with the last line of the first one and so on until the final one, which ends with the first line of the first sonnet. A heroic crown of sonnets is a sequence of fifteen sonnets that follows this pattern--the fifteenth sonnet is then made up of one line from each of the preceding sonnets.

Hope this basic guide is helpful as you do the work of wrestling with Brooks's off-rhymed sonnets in the sequence "Gay Chaps at the Bar."

After working with Brooks's sonnets and reading Rules for the Dance, will experiment with writing our own sonnets.

Dancing with Formal Poetry

For the past week or two we've been reading poems from World War I and World War II and the period in between. Many of the poems we've studied combine modern realism with the use of metrical form: Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, Auden's September 1, 1939, and now Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet sequence, Gay Chaps at the Bar. Alongside the study of these poems we've been reading Mary Oliver's Rules for the Dance, a poet's study of the poetry of sound.

This week we'll be posting on segments of Auden's and Brooks's poetry. As we trace the references and allusions in the poems, and tease out their imagery, let's also apply our study of meter as we try to understand why these poems have moved readers from several generations. Although these are modern poems, their use of formal elements for tough, realistic approaches to traumatic subject matter suggests a desire to re-order the world through language patterns.

Here are some overall questions to consider about the poem "September 1, 1939":

What's the metrical line length of this poem?

What's the meter of "September 1, 1939's" most famous line, "We must love each other or die?"

Although Auden later repudiated "September 1, 1939" (much as T. S. Eliot dismissed "The Wasteland" after writing it), readers have kept it alive. For instance, it was the most frequently quoted poem after 9/11. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them I think lies in its sound patterns, its rhythms, and the feelings that are conveyed through sound.

Class, as you post on the stanza of this poem you were assigned, please make sure to note the meter and speculate on questions of sound, as well as of tone, image, and meaning.

Here's my post on the first stanza:


I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Auden begins this poem from a worldly perch in a bar in New York, giving us the street address--midtown Manhattan--as he meditates on the end of "a low dishonest decade," the 1930s. A sinister international event has happened--Germany's invasion of Poland is inferred by the date of the poem, though it is not mentioned--bringing "waves of anger and fear" and "the unmentionable odour of death." Auden tells us that this event "obsess[es] our private lives," but he also shows us through the speaker of the poem who shares a private moment of his brooding obsession with this event.

Although this is a brooding and contemplative poem, its lines are rather short. Mary Oliver suggests that pentameter lines are the proper length for meditation, but these lines are shorter than pentameter, giving the poem's meditation a sense of agitation. The meter is iambic, but there are numerous anapest sprinkled throughout, rushing the line along, as though intermixing the regular heartbeat of the iamb with a skipping, panicky beat. The most sinister line of the stanza, the 10th--"the unmentionable odour of death"--has a hypersyllabic anapesitc rhythm, with the hypersyllable occuring in the middle to accommodate the 5 syllables of "unmentionable." This irregularity keeps this line from singing and intensifies its panicky heartbeat.

The opening 11-line stanza doesn't have a regular rhyme scheme, but it has several pairs of rhymes: The first and the ninth line (dives, lives), the third and the fifth line (afraid, decade), the seventh and the eleventh line (bright, night), and the ninth and eleventh lines end with a slant rhyme (earth, death). It's as though the poem can't find a regular form because the event it is trying to absorb threatens chaos, even as the mind seeks order.

OK--so let's see what insights you all will add to this in your posts! Looking forward to it;-)

Julia Spicher Kasdorf at Goshen College

This weekend Julia Spicher Kasdorf visited Goshen College as the 41st S. A. Yoder Lecturer. Reading from her newly published book of poems, Poetry in America, Spicher Kasdorf read to a packed house in Rieth Recital Hall. Her audience was composed of three generations of readers--some of whom had been her professors when she was a student at Goshen, some who are her peers, and some who are the ages of her students. Laughter and thoughtful pauses punctuated the reading.

The poems evoked the characters of a rural Pennsylvania landscape, from the Cardio Kickboxing Instructor in Bellefonte to a legendary Amish grandmother killed in a buggy accident caused by a runaway horse. Kasdorf's poems are filled with a respect for the stories of others and the humanity of her subjects. The title poem of her new book evokes the solitary stranger who came to hear her read poems at a Barnes and Noble. In a gracious reversal of poet and listener, Barbara, who "had bangs and plastic glasses like Ramona the Pest," becomes the heroine of this poem. This is the generosity of Kasdorf's style--she draws the reader in and makes of her or him a poet.

Which poem drew you in?

Poetry Lovers are Everywhere -- Even in the End Zone

Peyton Manning, legendary quarterback of the Indianapolis Colts, has been know to quote poetry in the game's crucial final minutes. Read about it here.

Walt Whitman's legacy

Why begin a class on contemporary poetry with Walt Whitman? Because Whitman's poetry created innovations that today's poets still use.

In class we experimented with writing "Whitman imitations"--poems using the style of Whitman that contained our own imagery. Check out the student blogs to see some fun and creative responses in poetry. Any number of contemporary poets have paid homage to Whitman, including Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and Charles Wright. Allen Ginsberg looks to Whitman as his poetic forbear in his famous poem Howl, and more playfully features Whitman and Whitman's style in "A Supermarket in California."

A Favorite Poem: Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ever since I read Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Brit Lit as a first year student at Kenyon College, back in 1972-73, it has been one of my favorite poems--one I've returned to again and again.

Although it's written in a style that seems very old fashioned today, the images in the poem, and the way it opens up a moment into a chain of interlocking thoughts, feels both intimate and contemporary. Coleridge shares his thoughts on a winter evening, as he stares into the fire, focusing on a fluttering bit of ash, a "stranger," caught in the grate. This reminds him of when he was a lonely orphan at boarding school in London, and then he thinks of his own son lying close by in the cradle, hoping that he will grow up healthy in the countryside and have a better childhood.


What really grabs me in this poem, though, is the first line, "the frost performs its secret ministry." Coleridge suggests that the natural world has secrets to tell us, if only we will listen. But it's not just the idea here that captures me--it's the word "frost" on the tongue and how it catches on the "s" sound in each subsequent word--performs, its, secret, ministry. Hey, I just noticed that there's an "s" in every one of those words!

Richard Burton reads Frost at Midnight on YouTube

Part of Frost at Midnight dramatized in a clip from Pandaemonium (2000).

Frost at Midnight is one of Coleridge's "conversation" poems, in which he converses with, or explores his own thoughts, and draws the reader into the conversation. This method would become the foundation of the modern lyric poem, which includes much so-called "confessional" poetry. I was fortunate enough to meet the former Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, a few years ago in Ireland, and he told me of his fondness for the conversation poems, especially Coleridge's "This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison." This surprised me for a few minutes, until I realized that Collins' own conversational poems draw the reader right into an intimacy with his own imagination in a similar way, but in a very contemporary style. See, for instance, is poem, Introduction to Poetry. You can read more of Collins' poems at the Academy of American Poets website.

Here's a photo of yours truly and Billy Collins taken at the John Hewitt Summer School in July 2008 in Armagh, Northern Ireland. The summer school is an annual event that features poetry readings, political discussions, concerts, and lots of good "craic."

Welcome to Intro to Lit: Poetry at Goshen College - Fall 2011

What is poetry?
How does it function?
Why is poetry important to us?
How is our understanding of poetry shaped by cultural context?
What work does poetry do in our world?
These are questions we'll be discussing and blogging about in Introduction to Literature: Poetry at Goshen College.