Culture: February 2006 Archive Page

Found Poetry Exercise: So Rich with Lines I Could Post (Seton Hill University -- Home Page)

I can't remember when I first noticed it, but that's a "Blog!" link on the SHU home page. I'm delighted to see the value of SHU blogging reflected in such a visible way.

While the context suggests that the link will point to a place where prospective students can blog, the link points to the always useful SHU Admissions weblog. Of course, there is a wealth of other blogging going on at SHU, and which might also be of interest to prospective students.

I'm not feeling well enough to do this subject justice, but I can still copy and paste. So, in honor of all the great blogging at Seton Hill University, I present this "found poetry" exercise. Blog on, my friends!

So Rich with Lines I Could Post

First let me say that I am more than excited to finally be reading this story again.
The Bush Administration walks a fine line when it comes to finding out
the wolverine is the big pimp daddy of the animal kingdom.
he seems to be waiting for Ceasar to act and then he will counter-act

"separated" was the box I checked off
In the final pane, Snoopy asks, "Sick doesn't count?"
I have enough boxes for the first fifteen craftsters
our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share

She would rathter be ignorant of the affair
the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool
Upon arriving to campus Tuesday evening, you will meet other sleepover guests
This process continues until all the pieces in the room have been judged five times.

I love the way Cleopatra is described. She is the one who really rules
she is somehow better than he is, as a member of the "secret society"
Last semester, it was OK to uses APA Citation. Now we have to use MLA
do you think that love can work in something like politics?

When Students Count with Fingers in My Class (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The infection that's been toying with me for the last week has finally pounced. I've been idly surfing, looking for a lost CD, rearranging my bedcovers, and just sort of waiting to get tired so that I'll fall alseep asleep.

But what's going through my head is the delightful sight of my students counting off iambic pentameter syllables on their fingers during a brief blank-verse writing exercise in this morning's "Intro to Literary Study" class. A colleague presented on kinesthetic learning in a "Teaching and Learning Forum" today, and seeing students moving their mouths to pronounce words, bobbing their heads to the rhythm of the language they are thinking to themselves, and keeping track of how many syllables they've stressed was such an unusal unusual and delightful sight I won't soon forget it. I do invite my lit survey students to use their bodies when they recite poetry aloud, but I've never seen just how physical the act of creating poetry can be. If I weren't so sick right now, I might try to write a sonnet about the experience.

I'm having my students analyze and spoof a sonnet, so that they can become familiar enough with the form to write their own sonnet for an upcoming "Sonnet Slam." In class, I suggested that we work on a few quatrains on the subject of cold weather, but when one student mentioned blogs, the others thought that was better. I saved the six or seven lines we managed to get through during the 15-minute workshop, but I don't have them with me. They took the occasion to poke fun at me, my love of blogs, and the fanny pack I always wear.

At any rate, students reported that writing the spoof sonnet was harder than they expeted expected. Most seem to have forgotten that sonnets follow a rhyme scheme, perhaps beause because I didn't do a good enough job distinguishing the sonnet from blank verse. (Another reason we're working on iambic pentameter is because we're about to start reading Antony and Cleopatra.)

Since this isn't a course in sonnet-writing, I'll be generous when I eavaluate evaluate their spoofs, but I do plan to ask them to peer-review and revise the sonnets they create on their own, so they'll have two more chances to get that complex rhyme sceme scheme right.

Update, 21 Feb: Yipes, that was a lot of typos. I knew I wasn’t feeling my best when I wrote that, but I had no idea. In class today I came up with a metaphor about the nested stories of Nick and Gatsby as being the same theme in different keys, and I had to interrupt myself to ask the class if that was a good metaphor, because I really had no idea. Whatever part of my brain that I use for evaluating is not functioning very well right now. I usually correct my blog typos quietly, but this time I've just marked them like this in order to remind myself to be very careful the next time I try to blog while sick.

Tell your professors face to face every time you will be gone, I urged the baseball team, and express your eagerness to make up any missed work. Even more important, when you?re in class, show the professor that you are there to learn. Just as you know how to position yourselves on the diamond, learn how to position yourself in the classroom ? front and center, preferably, and definitely not in the back corner of the room with a bunch of other athletes. Just as you use your eyes and set your body to get ready before every pitch, use your eyes and your posture in the classroom to let the professor know that you?re fully engaged with what?s going on there.

[...]

Coach Cleanthes and I both wondered whether, after a full day of baseball and with a Sunday game looming, the team would want to spend more than a few minutes touring the library?s museum. As it turned out, after two hours the museum guards had to round up the players ? students ? and tell them, sorry, but they had to leave, it was closing time. The baseball team?s trip to the Clinton library may have been the first occasion in the history of the college when an academic event was woven into an athletics road trip. It won?t be the last.--Michael Nelson --A Win-Win-Win Situation (Inside Higher Ed)

A thought-provoking, eye-opening article. I can't argue with the good intentions and potential benefits of such an approach. But the first comment appended to it took the words right out of my mouth:

[D]o athletes really need more attention — more than students in other groups on campus?

What about students in the drama department getting ready for the spring musical? Do single parents who also work part-time need special understanding from faculty, especially during cold and flu season? How about students who are the first in their families to go to a four-year college?

What wonders the newspaper staff or lit mag staff could accomplish with this kind of support network! Ah, well. I'm fortunate enough to have work-study hours to pay some of the most dedicated members of the newspaper staff, and some staff members take a course that earns them credit for their work.

"Along with the Sphinx, the DaVinci code and Easter Island, college admissions is one of the world's great mysteries," said Mary Beth Kurilko, associate director of undergraduate admissions at Temple University.

"I see it in the faces of the parents who hover around their children during our information sessions. They're listening for it, leaning forward in their chairs so as not to miss it -- that one thing that will throw open the door to their child's dream college." --Eleanor Chute --Who Gets In? The key to admission remains a mystery (Post-Gazette)

The Swing
Robert Louis Stevenson

HOW do you like to go up in a swing,
  Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
  Ever a child can do!

Up in the air and over the wall,
  Till I can see so wide,
Rivers and trees and cattle and all
  Over the countryside?

Till I look down on the garden green,
  Down on the roof so brown?
Up in the air I go flying again,
  Up in the air and down! --Happy, Happy Poetry (Introduction to Literary Study (Seton Hill University))

This is one of several happy poems I've assigned for tomorrow's Intro to Literary Study class.

I've had students who expect all poetry to be like this -- light and snappy and short, with only a single point to make. But happy people who live stable lives just aren't very interesting, artistically. It's the threatened, terrified, and dying people do things worth writing about (and reading about).

On the other hand, art covers the full range of human emotions -- including cheerfulness. While cleverness in poetry will only get you so far, I think that angst-ridden poets who pour their heart, soul, blood, phlegm, and bile into their verses could learn a thing or two from these examples, which demonstrate the potential of poetry to delight.

Why? Well, in part, I want to make up for the depressing selection of poems I asked you to read last time. But budding poets can also learn from this example. If you know really well how poems can delight, then you can focus on creating delight in the reader, rather than simply expressing the feelings inside you.

If you create poems out of a need to express the innermost, deepest feelings that would otherwise go unexpressed, then you'll end up with poems that mean quite a bit to you (because you mention a song that was important to you, the name of a person who invokes strong feelings, or a place that holds emotional significance for you), but leaves your readers scratching their heads.

In addition, once you've mastered delight, you can subvert your newfound talent to make poetry that totally creeps people out. (See Dr. Arnzen's Gorelets.)

They come with cameras dangling on their wrists and dressed, respectfully, as if they were about to issue an insurance policy or anchor the news. An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of "To Kill a Mockingbird," the occasion attracts no actor, politician or music figure. Instead, it draws someone to whom Alabamians collectively attach far more obsession: the author of the book itself, Harper Lee, who lives in the small town of Monroeville, Ala., one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters. --Ginia Bellafante --Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day (NY Times (will expire))

This is Harper Lee's first interview in about 40 years.

This quote caught my eye: "Her one stipulation for the contest was that children who were home-schooled be eligible to compete."

Good for her.

While it is important to understand how the culture that led to the creation of a particular work differs from the culture in which you are reading that work, you should understand that a work is a particular author's personal, creative, artistic representation of reality. Even when basing a story on a fictional event, authors leave out certain details, change the timeline, combine characters into composites, invent scenes, etc. All this is in the service of artistic truth, but it may stray far from the verifiable facts. Nobody wants to read stories about boring, ordinary people, so all literature is a distortion of some sort. Few farm women are married to husbands who are so cold that they strangle songbirds and send their otherwise meek and quiet wives into homicidal rages. It is therefore dangerous to use a fictional account of one incident to support an argument about what life was "really" like. --Representations of Reality (American Lit II (EL 267))

I'm introducing my lit students to the concept of the close reading. While they have several low-risk tries to get it right, I do recognize that students often have difficulty moving beyond plot summary and character analysis, which was good enough to get them through high school.

What else is there to write about?

It's not so much "what" but "how". We spent some time in my Video Gaming course discussing the concept of the "close playing," and the principle is really the same. Look carefully at the specific choices that the artist made while creating the artifact. Consider the artifact not as a window on reality, and not as a mirror to examine your own emotional responses, but rather as a thing to look at.