Poetry Materials

Hello Poetry Enthusiasts! After a while we are seeing each other again. Posted here is a  guide for your upcoming midterm exam. Enjoy!

English 44 Understanding Poetry

Images – appeals to us through our senses. They deal in color or sound, temperature, feelings or physical contact

Concrete Image – appeals  to us as bodily sensations

            Ex. Men do their broken weapons rather use

                        Than their bare hands.

Abstract Images – appeals to us a ideas, aspirations, et al.

            Ex. Just because you’re so proper, does that mean other people cannot enjoy?

Symbol – from Greek word Symbolon which means something put together; an image that stands for more than it denotes literally

Figures of Speech

‘The most exalting word is the word LIKE, whether it is pronounced or implied.”

-          Andre Breton

Simile – Latin word for “like”

Metaphor - - from Greek word for transfer; stronger than simile since it is more concentrated, it                            hits with greater impact.

Analogy – shows resemblance in form or function, between unlike objects

Synesthesia – from a Greek word which means blended feeling

Allusion – follows a “it-reminds-me-of” pattern; an incomplete reference to something that those              who share our knowledge or background will understand

Personification – seeing abstractions, movements, or events as people

Mythology – natural product of the symbolizing mind; it allows us to see people, places,                           abstractions, or events in a different light as associated to the figure with which they                     stand

Synecdoche – from Greek word which means taking as a whole ; it singles out some part of a       thing as important enough to stand for the whole thing

Metonymy – so close that it overlaps. Ex. I saw the Axe today!

Allegory – a narrative in which characters and events stand for ideas and actions on another

            Level.

Paradox – a statement that seems to imply contradiction

Oxymoron – translated from the Greek as cleverly stupid or paraphrased as absurd on purpose

Irony – directs our attention, to a play of opposites

Archetypal Image – patterning whose unconscious charge can stir and disturb us

Emotions

Dark                                                                Light

Despair                                                            Pity

Apathy                                                            Love

Sorrow                                                           Pride

Fear                                                                 Joy

Hate                                                                wonder

Anger                                                              Hope

Please make certain you have known by heart the poems we have tackled in class. 

           

Let's talk about the girls....

Hello poetry enthusiasts!

Kindly upload your answers on the comments section of this entry on or before November 26, 2015. Have a good time!

With a partner, discuss the following:

1. Identify least 3 symbols found in the poems. What do these symbols stand for?

2. Discuss how these symbols help achieve the meaning of the poem.

3 For Girls Working in Banks, discuss how Shapiro described to us the nature of banks and hoe important these establishments to different kinds of civilization.

4. For Loose Woman, Who killed the woman. Why do you say that is the killed?

5. A. What is the theme of Girls Working in Banks?

B. What is the theme of Loose Woman?

6. Kindly upload your softcopy on my blogspot on or before Thursday, Nov. 26, 2015.

Girls  Working in Banks

By: karl Shapiro

Girls working I banks wear bouffant hair and shed

In their passage over the rather magnificent floors

Tiny shreds of perforated paper, body flakes.

They walk through rows of youngwish vice-presidents

With faraway looks, who dandle pencils and tend to ignore

The little tigerish lights flashing on their telephones.

When the girls return to their stations behind a friendly grid

They out money neatly or graciously take it,

For not far from them the great interior glow of a vault

Built out of beaten dimes, stands open, shines,

Beaming security without ostentation.

If you glance inside it there’s nothing to be seen

But burnished drawers and poslished steel elbows

Of the great machine of the door. It’s s speckles world

With nobody inside it, like the bestroom in a crate.

The girls change places frequently, moving their own addresses

From Open to close, next counter, or they walk away

With surprising  freedom behind a wall or rise up on escalators

Past aging and well-groomed guards whose pistols seem

Almost a apologetic as they watch people

Bending over Formica stand-up desks writing

With ballpoint pens attached  to rosary chains,

After which the people select a queue in which they stand

Pious, abashed at the papery transactions,

And eventually walk with the subtlest sense if relief

Out  of revolving doors into the glorious anonymous streets.

Loose woman

By: X.J. Kennedy

Someone who well new how shed toss her chin

Passing the firehouse oglers, at their taunt,

Let it be flung up higher than shed want,

Just held fast by a little hinge of skin

Two boys come from the river

                Of underbrush and stooped. One wrecked a pair

                Of sneakers blundering into her hair

And that day made a different sort of catch.

Her next-best talent, setting tonues to buzz,

                Lasts longer than her best. It still occurs

                To wonderhad she been our fault or hers

And had she loved him. Who the bastard was,

Though long tyhey asked and notebooked round about

                And turned up not afew who would have known

                That white inch where her neck met shoulderbone,

Was one thing more we never did find out.

Visual Poetry

Hello there, Poetry Enthusiasts!

Kindly upload your work of art in the comments section. See yah!

Hello there, Poetry Enthusiasts!

To spend a better weekend that is both enjoyable and intellectually enriching, I am encouraging you to do the activity. Kindly submit an encoded answer on November 17, 2015. As agreed, please upload your soft copy in the comments section of this entry. Thank you.

1. Identify and evaluate the figures of speech used by the poet in the poem that follows. Discuss how the poem appeals? Do you think the poem is successful in delivering its intended meaning because of the devices used? If yes, how? If no, why?

 Habitation

- Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:


the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire 

2. How well do you think the imagery (lake, skates, saint, thin ice) works in the following love poem, published early this century?

Her bosom’s like a frozen lake

            On whose cold brink I stand;

Oh, buckle on my spirit’s skates,

            And take me by the hand!

And lead thou, loving saint, the way

            To where the ice is thin

That it may beak beneath my feet

            And let a lover in.

The Purse Seine

- Robinson Jeffers

Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net,
unable to see the phosphorescence of the
shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting
Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color
light on the sea's night-purple; he points,
and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the
gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great
labor haul it in.

I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,
then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall
to the other of their closing destiny the
phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body
sheeted with flame, like a live rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside
the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up
to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls
of night
Stand erect to the stars.

Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how
beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet
they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we
and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all
powers--or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls--or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are
quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew
that cultures decay, and life's end is death. 

Nims, J.F. 1913. Western wind. New York: Mc Graw Gill.

The End of the Weekend

Hello there, Poetry enthusiasts! As agreed you would be uploading your literary review of Anthony Hecht's The End of the Weekend. Kindly click the comment button and paste your work together with your surname and section code. Enjoy!

Not Sense by Gail Tremblay

               Poetry is always a mixture of the five senses, and the sixth? the ability to know and celebrate what really matters. Here's to the celebration of poetry and life:-) 

 

Not Sense

By Gail Tremblay (b. 1945)

The tongue shapes and molds sound. Speech

Becomes sensation in the mouth vibrating

on the palate and the teeth – touch

done with more than fingertips transmutes

itself to rhythm in the ear. Words outleap

meaning and turn into a way to move.

We speak the names that objects will become.

Voice wakes the light, and we begin to see

the shadows leaves can make against the wood.

We say Earth spins, and suddenly the clouds

move like ghosts of old ones bringing rain

that loves the growing things upon the ground.

I listen to your breath against my skin

and wait for you to name the way you feel,

to tell me where you’ve been and where you go,

to find the shape of things we share and have

to give. I learn and whisper words to let you see

My tongue slips nimbly past my teeth

and finds lips ready to caress

the line of small round scars that mark

your cheek. Nothing mars the surface

of your skin; what is is graceful and words

could never see it any other way. I watch with senses

more perceptive than my eyes, and let you touch me

more than once or twice. Your voice says little;

sound echoes in my senses like the wind.

You fill the dark passages of form with murmurs

that  inhabit me until I learn it’s sound not sense

that fills the world, that keeps me warm.

Nims, F. (1992). Western wind: An introduction to poetry. New Yor: McGraw-Hill.