English Creative Writing 2009

Session Three

Poetry/Lyrics

18 April 2009

About the 1st assignment

• Introducing the film– Objective report of the plot?– Selective focus on some of the issues?

• Characters?• Problems addressed?

– The narrator’s voice (gender, age, opinion about life and death, god, etc.)

– Always an interpretation (through the lens of the narrator)

2nd assignment

• Adam and Eve …

2nd assignment

• A response to a fictional personal narrative– Any form or genre– The inclusiveness of the type called “personal

narrative”– The multiplicity of the genre itself– A reference to a famous myth/legend/story

• General attention in writing– Accuracy (words, and the mood)– Form and content– Consistence (within the section and within the

overall story)

Today: Poetry/Lyrics

• Task one – the million dollar question

What is Poetry?

What is poetry - Dante

• Things that are true expressed in words that are beautiful

What is poetry – Samuel Johnson

• The art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason

What is poetry – Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• The best words in the best order.

What is poetry – William Wordsworth

• The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

What is poetry – Thomas Carlyle

• Musical thought.

What is poetry – Thomas Hardy

• Emotion put into measure.

What is poetry – Emily Dickinson

• If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry.

What is poetry – Gerard Manley Hopkins

• Speech framed … to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning.

What is poetry – Robert Frost

• A way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget.

What is poetry – Wallace Stevens

• A revelation in words by means of the words.

What is poetry – Mina Loy

• Poetry is prose bewitched.

What is poetry – TS Eliot

• Not the assertion that something is true, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.

What is poetry – WH Auden

• The clear expression of mixed feelings.

What is poetry – Elizabeth Bishop

• Hundreds of things coming together at the right moment.

What is poetry – William Stafford

• Anything said in such a way, or put on the page in such a way, as to invite from the hearer or the reader a certain kind of attention.

What is poetry – Gwendolyn Brooks

• Poetry is life distilled.

What is poetry – Robert Bly

• A poem is something that penetrates for an instant into the unconscious.

Task two

• Read the poem “You fit into me”– What kind of information do you get from the

four lines?– How are the pieces of information carried

across to you?

Task three

• Read the poem “Funeral Blues”– What do you feel is the poem talking about?– What part do you like most?– Watch the video and compare your

experience of the poem in these two instances

Task four

• Tell your partner(s) the Cinderella story that you know.

• Read the poem “Cinderella” and share with the class the differences

• What does the poet wants to do by writing a different Cinderella story?

Haiku

• A Japanese poem with 3 lines, using the 5-7-5 pattern

The falling flower

I saw drift back to the branch

Was a butterfly.

only one guy and

only one fly trying to

make the guest room do.

Task five

• Please refer to Linda Pastan’s poem “Ethics”. What has the narrator of the poem understood?

Rembrandt (1606-1669)

Functions of poetry …

• Stating the truth• Expressing feelings• Telling stories• Offering criticism/comments/opinions• Responding to previous stories/opinions• Playing with the musical qualities • Playing with the images created• Recording events: historical facts, personal

experience, etc.

Assignment today (A or B)

• Poems can be used for different purposes.

A) Imagine you are the captain, how would you record/comment on this encounter with Victor and the monster in a poem?

B) Write a poem about your writing experience.