After reading Pinsky’s Chapter 2 my mind wonders towards this idea of trite old meters and how we still must teach them, especially in High School. How we must make them relevant to today and at the same time explain their historical context. Last year I taught Beowulf and Chaucer and I kept pushing forward to get to at least the romantic period, modern British literature was barely reached and I was a bit ahead of my teaching peers.
As mostly a teaching device, I thought it might be fun to force this poem into a trite old meter that breaks down in the middle.
The poem is already old hat so what the heck. I mean what is there really left to say about world war II and pastoral themes.
So I thought I would try giving this poem the feeling of an old Irish jig, and then allow it to break down somewhere or break down along the way. It does not seem very effective, but it might be an intersecting device-better planned.
More importantly is why all of this belongs in the pedagogy forum.
Some younger students might be most attracted to rhythm especially students who rap. So perhaps we could play with our own poetry inside and outside of forms in order to learn how to teach students to do the same.
If you take something that is written for the purpose of conforming to rhyme and meter it will frequently be trite, but what happens if you start with the free writing exercises expansion and contraction and then force it into form and then take it back out of the form again. i already tried this with the sonnet form but that was mainly because my knowledge was limited and I thought of that first. This form was much more fun. I might try some form of rap later.
The more this happens forced compression and expansion the more a student may become detached from the meter and the words. The more likely the student will be willing to give up what does not work. To accept criticism. If you have changed a poem 10 times what does it matter if you change it again 2 or 3 more times with suggestions from a teacher or from peers.
I think it was in triggering town that I read you should print out a poem and sit with it a while. Maybe you should print out several different drafts of a poem and put those somewhere where you have to live with them for a while. Maybe you will piece together a form that is fresh and get rid of the junk along the the way.
Hopefully this will all lead to surprises and new manners of expressing the word. Words students would never have found if they stayed in meter or if they stayed away from it, or if they simply never played with it at all.
Sorry for so many drafts of the same poem on here, but I am trying to get use to the idea of a poem is never finished. and posting unfinished drafts seems to make that concept easier.
The aged house with stone fire places,
thirsty porch and mounts of clay.
Its orchards, gardens, barns and breeches
Where Rose climbs the loft of hay
To shun the switch she hides their reading.
Hides their reading till the noon
An aged barn provides protection
From her papa coming soon.
An aged farm where Rose and celeste,
sing their songs and stage their plays .
To share with rag dolls, and old orange peels.
play till firelight breaks the day
Imagination reels as rose slides
o.re the hilltop, o,re the field
and finds a rainbow wind fast blowing
landing in a tree swings song.
August winds blow, rainbow and swing.
Hair floats Flaxen, from the girl
And when her eyes float through the colors
From the rainbow borrows blue.
Two fronts they hide behind the backdrop.
Prisoners of war help papa plow.
Niedliches kleines Mädchen, und blondes Haar
blaue Augen, girl with features fair
Merry adorations are aimed at,
sweet Rose blue eyes und yellow hair.
Evening comes and sister Winnie,
Picnics by Lake Cleverness,
feeling The Magoo of pure flesh,
soft folds round the soldier Jim.
Glamour boy he makes sweet promises
'I’ll be home soon For my Win’.
Outside the San Jose clip joint, the
Modock drugs-up, just before
Hiroshima skylines remind him
of pain, of killing more and
A fetish, the opiate fruit, picked from the islands black market,
help him monopolize meaning, Balls-up, he fosters his task.
Somewhere a nun lies prostrate,
Abraham cries freedom,
A Muslim packs,
Buddha sits.
All are awaiting the radio broadcast to hear, new survivals.
Their bodies fail them.
Poets fail them.
Souls cry,
where are you shining deity.
Many contemporary poets have used Old English "strong-stress alliterative" form to great success. Wilbur's experiments come to mind here. (He's a wonderful formal poet.)
ReplyDeletePerhaps looking at some contemporary formalists might offer you some ways to see relevancy in closed form right now.
But I also admire your sense of history, here. iambic pentameter may seem "old" to many of your students, but we could construct a sort of "timeline" to it that would make that metrical line seem highly plastic, highly innovative based on the historical period. That is, Shakespeare's line is different from Milton's, is different from Pope's, is different from Wordsworth's, is different from Whitman's, is different from Eliot's, is different from Lowell's, is different from Plath's. Often illustrating a formal tendency over time really helps to instill this fundamental tenet of semiotics and, indeed, strong close reading over time: these notions of form are at least in part cultural constructions. Sure, there are rules to these forms, but the presiding aesthetic biases (in short, culture) decides which rules to follow.