"At this shoreline of the inarticulate:" Prayer or Letter Poems

For this assignment, you have a choice. Three choices, actually: write a prayer poem, write a letter poem (also called an Epistle Poem), or combine the two assignments and write a letter to God.In 13 Ways, there are prayer or letter poems on pages 12, 72, 257, 288, 256, and 255. Sacrament of the Mundane also has several of each.

PREP FOR FRIDAY'S CLASS: read these poems, and start thinking about particular poems that make you stop and think, distract or disturb you, make you want to respond.Both poetic forms are about communication, messages, venting, questioning, finding ways to articulate things that cannot be articulated. I focus on Prayer Poems for this blog, since these are often raise more complex questions for writers than the Epistle.

Poets on Prayers and Poems (bold emphasis added):

Odysseus Elytis, the Nobel-prize laureate from Greece captures a sense of this when he says poetry is "the art of leading you toward what goes beyond you." - sounds a lot like prayer.

Edward Hirsch says,“There are ways in which poetry is similar to prayer. Serious poetry seeks the transformation both of the speaker of the poem and the reader waiting somewhere down the line. ‘To understand poetry,’ Garcia Lorca once said, ‘we need four white walls and a silence where the poet’s voice can weep and sing.’ One enters that space with the hope that, through the making of language, the making of poems—poesis, after all, means making—one will be taken away, one will go where one hasn’t been before. We hope to be possessed.”

Pattiann Rogers takes up the theme, commenting, “In a very real sense—real to me, anyway—my poems are prayers. They’re prayers that say, under their words, ‘Here, I make this in praise, in confusion. I make this while knowing nothing. Accept this, accept me.’ I believe that when human beings perform creative acts of imagination and do so with reverence and joy, they are praying. They are bestowing honor.”

Robert Cording sounds a similar note: “Both poetry and prayer acknowledge the limits of the ego. In this sense, their origins are rooted in invocation—a calling out to that which cannot be seen or logically understood and which ultimately cannot be put into language. As Wilbur writes in his poem ‘For Dudley,’ ‘All that we do / Is touched with ocean, yet we remain / On the shore of what we know.’ For me, prayer and the kind of poetry I admire...reside at this shoreline of the inarticulate. Both embody a longing and a reaching toward the inconceivable. Both refuse to be silent when they face that mystery, though they both admit that all words reach toward and end up in silence.”

As you'll see, "prayer" is a word that opens many, many doors. What is prayer? Who prays? Who listens to prayers?Sandburg creates an extended metaphor (a conceit) in this poem:

Prayers of Steel

by Carl Sandburg

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

Sandburg's imagery of beating, steel spike, girders, fastening, and the line "let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper" also brings to mind images of Christ on the cross, an image he may or may not want us to imagine as our own Crucifixions, our own sacrifices. Or is this Jesus speaking? Or is Jesus speaking for us? How does Sandburg's use of industrial jargon make this poem both contemporary, and American?

Patrick Donnelly's poem, below, does several things at once: it praises, it gives thanks, it questions God, and it brings prayer into the mundane, everyday life in ways that can be both surprising, and refreshing. Donnelly reminds us that prayer need not be formal, or ritualized, to be heart-felt and meaningful; that pleasure in the world is, in fact, another form of prayer.

On Being Called To Prayer While Cooking Dinner for Forty

When the heavens and the earth

are snapped away like a painted shade,

and every creature called to account,

please forgive me my head full of chickpeas, garlic and parsley.

I am in love with the lemon

on the counter, and the warmth

of my brother’s shoulder distracted me

when we stood to pray.

The imam takes us over

for the first prostration,

but I keep one ear cocked

for the cry of the kitchen timer,

thrilled to realize today’s cornbread

might become tomorrow’s stuffing.

This thrift may buy me ten warm minutes

in bed tomorrow, before the singer

climbs the minaret in the dark

to wake me again to the work

of thought, word, deed.

I have so little time to finish;

only I know how to turn the dish, so the first taste

makes my brother’s eyes open wide--

forgive me, this pleasure

seems more urgent than the prayer--

too late to take refuge in You

from the inextricable mischief

of every thing You made,

eggs, milk, cinnamon, kisses, sleep.

-- Patrick Donnelly

Joy Harjo's "Eagle Poem" (SM, 8) is one she's put to music, further blurring the line between prayer and poetry. Listen and watch at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Carolyn Forche, author of "Prayer," creates an invocation of sorts. Read aloud, the chanting quality produces a powerful experience. Listen to her read at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqLLeOzyzlI (don't worry; she is introduced in Greek, but reads in English).

Prayer

Begin again among the poorest, moments off, in another time time and place.

Belongings gathered in the last hour to be taken, visible invisible:

Tin spoon, teacup, tremble of tray, carpet hanging from sorrow’s balcony.

Say goodbye to everything. With a wave of your hand, gesture to all you have known.

Begin with bread torn from bread, beans given to the hungriest, a carcass of flies.

Take the polished stillness from a locked church, prayer notes left between stones.

Answer them and in your net hoist voices from the troubled hours.

Sleep only when the least among them sleeps, and then only until the birds.

Make the flat-bed truck your time and place. Make the least daily wage your value.

Language will rise then like language from the mouth of a still river. No one’s mouth.

Bring night to your imaginings. Bring the darkest passage of your holy book.

Writing Tips:

Prayers can take the form of a Beatitude (praise), Vespers (evening prayer), Matins (morning prayer), supplication (request), blessing, even a rant (see the Book of Job!), as well as many other forms. Experiment with your personal religious knowledge about prayer: is there a particular form you love? a form you'd like to argue with?

In Sacrament of the Mundane, "Poem in My Mother's Voice" by Susan Browne starts off,

When my mother meets God,
she says, Where the hell have you been?

Jesus Christ, don't you care about anyone

but yourself? It's time you wake up,

smell the coffee, shit or get off the pot.

Now, this is not necessarily the way everyone's mother speaks to God, but it gives you an idea of the broad definition we are using for "prayer" in this assignment. If prayer is a form of communication, Browne's poem hits the mark with originality and a great sense of scolding God in just the way a mother might reprimand a child for being careless with someone's feelings or property.

The key to a prayer poem: stay in the concrete for much of the poem (earn those abstracts!)' strangely enough, prayers full of abstract imagery are rarely compelling for anyone but the speaker/writer.

Go ahead. You have permission!. What do you want to say about prayer?

LISTS, CATALOGS, INVENTORIES, RANTS...

Third Assignment: List Poem

Read: 13 Ways Chapter 7, “Listing and Repetition – Catalog, Complicating, and Syncopating.”

BACKGROUND
The list poem (also known as a catalog poem) consists of a list or inventory of things. Poets started writing list poems thousands of years ago. They appear in chanted lists of family lineage in the Bible and in rich, musical lists of Trojan War heroes in Homer’s Iliad. About 250 years ago, Christopher Smart wrote a famous poem about what his cat Jeoffrey did each morning. It starts with the cat inspecting his front paws and ends with the cat going in search of breakfast; it is utterly fascinating. Walt Whitman is known for the extensive lists in his poems and the inclusive, joyful relish he clearly felt by naming the many details of the world.

CHARACTERISTICS OF A LIST POEM
- A list poem can be a list or inventory of items, people, places, or ideas.
- It often involves repetition.
- It can include rhyme or not; often involves lots of slant rhyme, alliteration, other sound-related strategies.
- The catalog poem may start as a random list, but is ultimately well thought out.
- The last entry in the list is usually a strong, funny, or important item or event that brings everything else together; think of the “turn” in a sonnet.

WHAT THIS FORM OFFERS
an opportunity to obsess, obsess, obsess!
a structure which, when carefully crafted and revised, can result in a powerful statement
It lends itself to interests or passions you’d like to explore and articulate
really good for a rant, diatribe, manifesto or personal platform

WHAT THIS FORM REQUIRES
List poems make great performance and/or reading materials. Be sure to read your poem out loud as you draft; let your ear help you determine things like repetition, line length, internal rhyme, rhythm, momentum.

Remember to watch Joy Harjo perform “Fear Poem”
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPoQxt5x0QQ
and listen to her read "She Had Some Horses" at http://www.rhapsody.com/joy-harjo/she-had-she-some-horses (if you scroll down, you can also listen to her musical version - Harjo's playing the sax and speaking/singing the words).


READING
13 Ways Chapter 7, “Listing and Repetition – Catalog, Complicating, and Syncopating,” as well as the List Poems in our class anthology, Sacrament of the Mundane.

Ars Poetica/what is poetry?

Here are a few more notes about this assignment:

1. You will understand ars poetica much better once you’ve read the poems in SM (they start on page 20); read them all a few times, see how the poets are painting you a picture of “what poetry is” by saying “Poetry is …” or “reading poetry is like …” Try to write a brief summary of what you think each poet tries to communicate.

A. - Al Zolynas says poetry is “a pile of clothes on an empty beach at dawn” and our job as readers is to investigate that pile of clothes, try to extrapolate who wore them, what they mean.

B. William Stafford contradicts the old staying that art must come from suffering; to prove his point (stated only in his title), he imagines writing a poem to be like climbing a mountain – it takes self-motivation, the desire to work hard, and willingness not to wait for inspiration, but to MAKE a way, make a trail. The mountain won’t come to you!

C. Ethna McKiernan, too, names her purpose in her title (“Beginning to Name It: Poetry”), then just starts her metaphor as “It is the strange vegetable/that grows outside the garden” and goes from there, expanding the metaphor for awhile, then switching to another metaphor, “It is the mystery scientists/ spend late-night hours researching” and takes off again. She does this several times, trying to find a way to describe what she thinks poetry is. Great way to express what isn’t really expressible!

D. In Maxine Kumin’s “Ars Poetica: A Found Poem” she uses a note left for her by a friend as her jumping off place. She realized that the friend’s comments about a horse being “broken” or tamed could be applied to the writing or “taming” of a wild poem! She uses that metaphor throughout the poem, subtly comparing the hard, tedious, gentle work of breaking a horse with the hard, tedious, gentle work of “conquering” or capturing the wild words of a poem, getting them to settle down and BE a poem.

2. Reading down the list of quotes by various poets, keep a list of comparisons that strike you as interesting or bizarre. For example: poetry is a journal of a sea animal living on land, a healer, a machine, a skeleton… start with one of those and freewrite on it. What would the skeleton of poetry look like? Would sonnets be ribs, would verbs be fingerbones, would metaphor be the skull? Once you’ve done this for two or three of the metaphors, read your freewrites over and see what seems most powerful. Follow that thought in another, longer freewrite.

3. Another way to approach this assignment: what is a poet? The same list of poets give various definitions of a poet, or what a poet’s job is. Write a job description for a poet. What would be required? What would not be useful? What temperament should they have? What skills?

4. Please feel free to email me your ideas for this assignment if you need someone to give you feedback. Also, please contact each other and start forming those smaller, outside workshops that can give you such great comments!

Thanks again for a great week of poetry. I’m looking forward to the rest of the semester. Oh, and remember that Professor Wheeler and Melanie Almeder are reading today at 4 p.m. at the Staniar Gallery (Wilson Hall at Lenfest Center)!!

Professor Miranda



What IS Poetry? What is GOOD Poetry??

We're approaching our next assignment: the "ars poetica," the art of poetry. A poem about poetry. Some people consider this an exercise in navel-gazing gone terribly wrong. However, it is almost irresistable for poets to try and describe what it is about poetry that is so compelling, and writing an ars poetica is almost a rite of passage. Below you'll find a few links to poets reading their Ars Poeticas, as well as a list of poets trying to come up with a one or two line definition. Steal from them! There are some great lines to start you off on your own crazy ricochet here.

"Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish, spoken by MacLeish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdLZBlYEt_A

Victoria Chang reads "Ars Poetica as Birdfeeder and Hummingbird" from Salvinia Molesta: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSa943Xo9m8

Elizabeth Alexander's 'Ars Poetica #92': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lC9Vyhir2Y

And if you'd like to hear to GORGEOUS Spanish original of Neruda's "Poesia," listen to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCODhcSiYhE


Quotes from random poets:

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. ~Leonard Cohen

Poetry is what gets lost in translation. ~Robert Frost

Imaginary gardens with real toads in them. ~Marianne Moore's definition of poetry, "Poetry," Collected Poems, 1951

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. ~Paul Valéry

Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. ~Eli Khamarov, The Shadow Zone

Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered

A poem begins with a lump in the throat. ~Robert Frost

The poem is the point at which our strength gave out. ~Richard Rosen

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ~Stephen Mallarme

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~Novalis

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing. ~John Cage

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. ~Christopher Fry

If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the inquisition might have let him alone. ~Thomas Hardy

The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ~Jean Cocteau

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry. ~Gustave Flaubert

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own. ~Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is life distilled. ~Gwendolyn Brooks

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. ~Robert Frost

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. ~Paul Engle, New York Times, 17 February 1957

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts. ~Robinson Jeffers

You can tear a poem apart to see what makes it tick.... You're back with the mystery of having been moved by words. The best craftsmanship always leaves holes and gaps... so that something that is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash or thunder in. ~Dylan Thomas, Poetic Manifesto, 1961

[P]oets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science. ~Sigmund Freud

To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. ~Robert Frost

I've written some poetry I don't understand myself. ~Carl Sandburg

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth. ~Jean Cocteau

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose-petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. ~Don Marquis

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. ~Rita Dove

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. ~Salman Rushdie

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know of. - Emily Dickinson, from her Letters 405

A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. - William Carlos Williams, from Selected Essays

Poetry is prose bewitched, a music made of visual thoughts, the sound of an idea. - Mina Loy, from “Modern Poetry”

A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. - Charles Olson, “Projective Verse”

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation, a skilled re-creation of emotion in other people, and, conversely, a bad poem is one that never succeeds in doing this… At bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having, for which the dutiful mob that signs up every September is no substitute.
Philip Larkin, “The Pleasure Principle”

Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat… No one should experience anything they don’t need to, if they don’t need poetry bully for them, I like the movies too… As for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough that everyone will go to bed with you.
Frank O’Hara, “Personism”

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.
Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury”

Listen to Sandra Cisneros read "You Bring Out the Mexican in Me"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1866475

Check out this NPR website and hear Cisneros read a section of her love poem. Her voice may surprise you.

Also, watch "You Bring out the Sri Lankan in Me" by Sharanya Manivannan on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbZfGA1l3vc or Maiana Minahal's "You Bring Out the Filipina in Me" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmU2V7G2cz8 or "You Bring Out the Writer in Me" by Regie Cabico http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAt_5spJRSw&feature=PlayList&p=2BEC93DA8D77C5DE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=51
And if you'd like to see Bao Phi read his version, check out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owJBY8SoBy0

http://www.wordle.net/

Try this: Word Clouds. Pick a chunk of prose, or a poem you've written, or a note from someone. Plug it into Word Cloud. Play with it (there are different fonts, colors, designs, even languages to try out; also, repetition of a word makes it appear as a bigger image within other words). Post it here to share. I used the Neruda quote about "words" that appears at the bottom of our blog, and did a quick screen capture* to get it here. Wordle also provides a way to link to their website to see your finished product.

Professor Miranda

*screen capture: clear your screen of all windows but the one you want to copy. Frame that image using resize tools on screen. Hit "print screen" key. Open up something like Microsoft Paint; hit "paste". Resize that screen as needed, save in My Pictures, and upload to blog.

How to Prepare & Present an Annotated Poem

ANNOTATION ASSIGNMENTS IN DETAIL

Presentation of an Annotated Poem. Each of you will be called at least once during the semester to lead the discussion of a poem you have chosen for your Annotation Anthology. Ideally, your work on these little discussions will also help develop ideas for your Annotated Anthology.

Please give some thought to both the content of what you want to present and the process by which you want the class to engage with that content. Will you use handouts? overhead? a brief CD, video or internet clip of the poet reading? What are the specific questions you want to ask your peers? Will you need bio information on the poet? Is there historical context necessary for discussion?

Be sure your remarks focus primarily on the aspect of poetic craft under discussion. There are of course many other things to be said about poems, but we won't have time to include them all in every conversation.

Post your annotated material and any other useful links or materials on our Blog before or immediately after class.

After our discussion, turn in your annotation to me.

Annotated Anthology. In this project you will select ten poems from our readings and briefly discuss (500 words) poetic strategies (form, alliteration, imagery, etc) used in each poem. You will turn these on due dates throughout the semester.

Choose possible poems and make notes on them as the weeks go by. You should accumulate more possibilities than you will need, and the sophistication of your notes should rise as you encounter more poems and more ideas about poems. If you lead class discussion on some of your chosen poems, this may also help develop your ideas – your classmates often help you find new understandings of poems that you didn’t catch on your own). As each due date approaches, make your selection based on your preferences, my guidelines for selection (#5 below), and which poems have yielded the most interesting ideas.

This assignment is a lot like writing a poem: the end product is relatively small but to arrive at that product you need to compress a lot of thought into very few words. Keep this in mind as you work and don’t be fooled by the short format of each discussion. You won’t need to turn in a large number of words. However, the grading standard will be high in terms of how much substance you present.

Here’s the anthology format. Please read this carefully.

1) Type the poem. This is required because physically reproducing a poem, letter by letter, teaches you a lot about how it’s made. It makes you a good observer. You are on your honor, here – “cut & paste” is easy, but doesn’t train you as a writer.

2) Write one or two paragraphs explaining some specific strategies used by the poet to create meaning in the poem. "Strategy" in this case can mean a basic formal choice, such as iambic pentameter, sonnet, enjambed free verse, etc. It can also mean alternating slant rhyme, hyphenating words across a line-break to preserve a pattern, metaphor, allusion, a particular conceit, voice, hyperbole, or any other poetic strategy that you feel is important to the poem’s message. In most cases it will be best to focus on one or two aspects of the poem, rather than trying to include everything that might be said about it.

Yup, you can write a good analysis in 500 words if you’ve thought it through clearly before you begin, or if you allow yourself to write first, edit second (the phrase “WRITE CRAP” isn’t derogatory: it simply means, to create a beautiful garden, you have to spread a lot of manure around first – and then weed like crazy).

3) Include (in your presentation and with your 500 word analysis) a copy of the poem with your marginal notes. This is often the most efficient way to point up formal features or thematic motifs (see attached example).

4) However you choose to combine prose with marginalia, your aim should be concision and specificity. For example, using poetic terms, though sometimes tedious to learn, greatly advance the cause of concision and specificity. "McKay makes brilliant use of anaphora," takes up a lot less space than a sentence explaining that the author utilizes the same phrase fourteen times in order to create a sense of chant or ritual, and tells me more about your level of analysis, too.

5) In making your selections, keep in mind that your anthology will be strongest if it addresses a variety of formal problems or ideas. I won’t specify that each poem must address a specific aspect of form off a check list, but I will be looking for a range of forms and for an engagement with several kinds of poems.

6) No unifying theme is required. However, this is a chance to explore poets and poetry, to widen your reading habits, and absorb new and often startling imagery/writing techniques. One way to do that is to construct your anthology around a unifying idea, such as "poems about different kinds of loss" or "poems about childhood," or "how voice is created in coming-of-age poems;" you should be able to follow your interests while still meeting these guidelines. Feel free to talk over your ideas with me as they take shape.

7) I will collect your annotations in three installments (3, 3, and 4 poems for each deadline), as noted on the schedule. For each of the first two I will assign an in-progress grade and provide feedback on how you can develop or improve your work. In some cases I may ask you to revise or expand an annotation and turn it in again.