Description
Where are you from? by Carlos Andres Gomez
Links to an external site.the document with explanation is attached and the reading required for the document.the link attached is for the 2 question.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
1. After reading “Invitation” (the introduction) and Chapters 1 & 2 in the Mayes text,
discuss how the text influenced your thoughts about poetry. Make connections between
your existing thoughts about poetry and the text. Be sure to use specific evidence from
the text to support your discussion, including at least two specific poems/lines of
poems. Identify the title of each poem you reference and its author. Do not copy the
entire poem in your post; refer to only specific lines as needed.
2. Listen to the spoken word poem “Where are you from?” by Carlos Andres
Gomez. Consider the role of language in poetry–each word in a poem is chosen
carefully and purposefully– and comment on the importance of language in
“Where are you from?” specifically.
Discussion posts should be 250-300 words long, and must specifically reference the
specified materials (by using direct quote or paraphrase).
Invitation
Field guides always attract me. On a shelf near my desk I see volumes on
birds, marshes, geology, shells, forests, and wildflowers. Leafing through
my
shell book, I become engrossed in the variety of sea cucumbers, corals, and
anemones. The scallop shells are sometimes mottled like a rusty hinge,
sometimes dawn-colored, smooth, and nacreous. When I was a child, I especially liked what I called mermaid fingernails
— page 87 identifies them as
jackknife clams. Seeing them recalls me to the beach at Fernandina, where
at sunrise I rode on the back of a sea turtle as she
made her way back to the
sea after laying eggs in the cool sand.
A field guide is an aide-memoire as well as a taxonomic treasury and a
source of new information. An added pleasure is simply the joy of names, a
tactile discovery as real as finding shells the last high tide rolled
shore.
Now when
I
onto the
go down to the beach near my house in California, I am
walking on the last edge of America. My books stay at home on the shelf. No
one’s classifications interfere with the fresh air blown across the water from
perfumed islands, with the glass-green curve of the breaking wave, with
swags of foam, or with the mighty inner release afforded by the expanse of
x
/
The Discovery of Poetry
water. In his poem “Ocean,” Czeslaw Milosz describes this endless bine as
“a billion-year-old abyss,” a perception that tightens the rachet of my own
view. Calico clams, I say aloud, coquina, limpet, quahog, cockle, pandora,
Sea pin, jingle shell, kelp crab, basket star. The words in the air
astarte.
come alive, like the things themselves, blending without edge into that most
natural and ancient act, a walk on an early spring morning.
I
would like The Discovery of Poetry to be a field guide to the natural plea-
sures of language
— a happiness we were born to have. The
first
poems I
loved were those that let me swim in sound. Sidney Lanier’s “The Marshes
of Glynn” thrilled me because I went to those same coastal marshes every
summer. I learned long sections of the poem and, head out the car window
like a dog, shouted “Gloom of the live oaks, beautiful braided and woven,”
as
my mother drove over the low bridges to the island. The burning sulphur
stink of the paper mills poured into the car. “… with a step I stand/On the
firm-packed sand,” I continued. My sisters yanked me back in the car and
rolled up the window. Later, I fell into Steven Vincent Benet s great love of
American names — Carquinez Straits, Little French Lick, Medicine Hat.
The ending especially stirred me:
I
shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.
I
shall not lie easy in Winchelsea.
You may bury my body in Sussex grass,
You may bury my tongue at Champmedy.
I
shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.
Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.
When
I
went to college in Virginia, hundreds of miles north of my Georgia
hometown, I was used to Deep South seasons, a subtle blend of spring into
summer into fall. That first autumn startled me. The whole landscape along
the James River transformed, especially the ginkgo trees, which turned gold
and suddenly, all on the same day, rained their fan-shaped leaves in circles
around their trunks. I observed this with no accurate words to describe my
astonishment. When spring came, the enormous old weeping cherry outside my dorm bloomed as though it had invented the word. To stand under
a blossoming cherry and look up through transparent petals at the sky! I was
Invitation
/
xi
taking a poetry class. Leafing through the textbook,
I
came across A. E.
Housman s poem:
Loveliest of Trees
(A. E.
Housman, 1859-1936)
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is
hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves
me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
I
read the poem out loud until I knew it by heart. I liked the soft-spoken
sound of the words; their lightness seemed to suit the tree. I was struck by
the knowledge that I had spent nineteen years without seeing a cherry tree
in bloom. Poems can change an experience by imaginatively naming or ex-
tending a feeling or thought. “Loveliest of Trees” connected, giving me perceptions in addition to my own. A friend and I copied the poem and tacked
it
to the tree. Every day we saw people stop to read the poem and look up at
the sky through the blossoms.
For years after (and perhaps still) someone placed the poem on the tree
each spring. I already had notebooks full of poems clipped from magazines
or copied
from books, but this experience began a lifelong passion. My
bookstore account soared. Yeats, Keats, Pound, Bishop, the Greek plays.
I
enrolled in a creative writing class and saw scrawled on my first portfolio,
what is to become of you? My family begged me to study something practical:
Get your head out of the clouds.
xii
/
The Discovery of Pom ry
i
Too late. I already had seen that reading a fine poem makes me rediscover the bright freshness of creation. Writing a poem doubles, triples the
experience or connection that initiated it. I became a teacher of poetry and
wrote hundreds of poems. On nights of insomnia or on long walks, I have
the poems I know as close companions. Even the back seat of my car is scattered with poetry books, in case I’m stuck in traffic. I leave my car unlocked
and no one ever has stolen one. Falling in love with a book brings the same
catapulting madness and zest that falling in love with a person brings.
About ten years ago, a move to Italy mysteriously propelled me into writing prose. I found that my long training in poetry migrated to the new form.
In my many years of teaching, I always told students that poetry is excellent
practice for the mind because it is the language art. Learning to see precisely
how words work pulls you closer to what you want to write — whether it’s a
newspaper article, a cost estimate, a letter home, or a novel. I found the
My old habit of reading while taking a walk transferred easily to my new life in Italy. A slender volume of poems, a bottle of
truth of that firsthand.
water, and I’m free to wander the
Roman roads and Etruscan terraces all
morning.
So many other joys come to mind. We look at art for clues about our
lives.
When you take a walk at night, lighted rooms are irresistible. You see
a child setting the table, a vase of wildflowers, a stack of books on a chair.
Through the open window you hear — is that Nina Simone singing “The
Twelfth of Never,” one of your favorites? You imagine what’s cooking on the
stove. All these images form a quick glimpse of how those mysterious others
behind the glass live their lives. Poems give you the lives of others and then
circle in on your own inner world.
Look at this private moment.
Glistening
(Linda Gregg, 1942-)
As I pull the bucket from the crude well,
the water changes from dark to a light
more silver than the sun. When I pour it
over my body that is standing in the dust
Invitation
/
xm
by the oleander bush, it sparkles easily
in the sunlight with an earnestness like
the spirit close up. The water magnifies
the sun all along the length of it.
Love is not less because of the spirit.
Delight does not make the heart childish.
We thought the blood thinned, our weight
lessened, that our substance was reduced
by simple happiness. The oleander is thick
with leaves and flowers because of spilled
water. Let the spirit marry the heart.
When
I
return naked to the stone porch,
there is no one to see me glistening.
But I look at the almond tree with its husks
cracking open in the heat. I look down
the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating
faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there
a long time with the sun and the quiet,
the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.
So many people are denied the deep gratification of poetry. Their educations have trained them to read for information.
When
I
told my uncle that
my poems had been published, he said, “Poetry is Greek to me.”
He did not open the pristine white covers of my first book. The same people
a book of
who play the cello, pilot planes, design software, and teach astronomy assume that poetry is difficult. Or the thudding rhyme and banal haiku of the
“poetry unit” assured them that poetry is irrelevant. So easy it is to forget
how to play. As children, we enter the spirit of make believe and accept
temporary worlds. We pretend we are pioneers or explorers; we follow our
imaginations. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called this process the “willing sus-
pension of disbelief.” As adults, we sometimes abandon this talent. Yet we
still
enter temporary worlds when we yell at a soccer game or swim meet, cry
or applaud at a play, or get carried away by a friend s story. For a while we
forget the
immediacy of ourselves and go with the witnessed experience.
Like play, poetry lets us enter other territories.
s
xiv
/
The Discovery of Poetry
Why did no one ever hand my uncle a direct poem such as Jane Kenyon
four-line “The Sandy Hole”
— a brief and brutally accurate captured moment?
The Sandy Hole
(Jane Kenyon, 1947-1995)
The infant’s coffin no bigger than a flightbag.
.
.
.
The young father steps backward from the sandy hole,
eyes wide and dry, his hand over his mouth.
No one dares to come near him, even to touch his sleeve.
Something is named. Something is noticed. The words are spare and plain.
Isolated
on a white page, the poem seems to float in the white silence
around it. This is how a poem comes to the border between the speakable
and the unspeakable.
If no one ever handed you
poems that brought you close to the art of po-
etry, I hope that the words in this book will invite you. As a writer, teacher,
and
reader,
I
value the link between reading poetry and writing
it,
so
throughout the book I include suggestions for writing. When words from
your own imagination,
intellect,
and experience flow through your pen,
what you are reading in these chapters becomes generative. My suggestion
to you:
Acquire a
new notebook and, as Billy Collins does, record the
“bright, airy dictation” of your responses.
Tuesday, June 4m, 1991
(Billy Collins, 1941-)
By the time I get myself out of bed, my wife has left
the house to take her botany final and the painter
has arrived in his van and is already painting
the columns of the front porch white and the decking gray.
It is
early June, a breezy and sun-riddled Tuesday
that would quickly be forgotten were it not for
my
writing these few things down as I sit here empty-headed
at the typewriter with a cup of coffee, light and sweet.
Invitation
I
/
xv
feel like the secretary to the morning whose only
responsibility is to take down its bright, airy dictation
until it’s time to go to lunch with the other girls,
all of us ordering the cottage cheese with
half a pear.
This is what stenographers do in courtrooms,
alert at their dark contraptions catching every word.
When there is a silence they sit still as
I
do, waiting
and listening, fingers resting lightly on the keys.
This is what Samuel Pepys did too, jotting down in
private ciphers minor events that would have otherwise
slipped into the heavy, amnesiac waters of the Thames.
His vigilance paid off finally when London caught fire
as mine does when the painter comes in for coffee
and says how much he likes this slow, vocal rendition
of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and I figure I will
make him a tape when he goes back to his brushes and pails.
Under the music I can hear the rush of cars and trucks
on the highway and every so often the new kitten, Felix,
hops into my lap and watches my fingers drumming out
a running record of this particular June Tuesday
my eyes, a long intricate carpet
that am walking on slowly with my head bowed
knowing that it is leading me to the quiet shrine
as it unrolls before
I
of the afternoon and the melancholy candles of evening.
If I look up, I see out the
window the white stars
of clematis climbing a ladder of strings, a woodpile,
a stack of faded bricks, a small green garden of herbs,
things you would expect to find outside a window,
xvi
all
/
The Discovery of Poetry
written down now and placed in the setting
of a stanza as unalterably as they are seated
in their chairs in the ontological rooms of the world.
Yes, this is the kind of job I could succeed in,
an unpaid but contented amanuensis whose hands
are two birds fluttering on the lettered keys,
whose eyes see sunlight splashing through the leaves,
and the bright pink asterisks of honeysuckle
and the piano at the other end of this room with
its
small vase of faded flowers and its empty bench.
So convinced am I that I have found my vocation,
tomorrow I will begin my chronicling earlier, at dawn,
a time when hangmen and farmers are up and doing,
when men holding pistols stand in a field back to back.
It is
the time the ancients imagined in robes, as Eos
or Aurora, who would leave her sleeping husband in bed,
not to take her botany final, but to pull the sun,
her brother, over the horizon s brilliant rim,
her four-horse chariot aimed at the zenith of the sky.
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her,
barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window
in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor.
She will look in at me with her thin arms extended,
offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
“How can you teach creative writing?” many dubious, querulous people
have asked me. And more aggressively, “Who taught Shakespeare? Did he
take Creative Writing 301?” The questions both bore and astound. No one
can teach anyone to become a great anything. If your blood is on fire with
the love of language and the desire to make something with words, you prob-
Invitation
/
xvn
ably know that. You probably know, too, that no matter how awkward your
writing is right now, something in you will make you a writer. The German
poet, Rilke, pinpointed this phenomenon when he wrote, “The future enters us in
order to transform us long before it happens.” Working on your
craft with a good
guide is a lucky move. You can save years. Many people
find an interest in writing late; their talent is just waiting to be uncovered
and developed. They’re the ones Ben Jonson had in mind when he said, “A
good poet’s made as well as born.” Teaching in a large urban university, I’ve
been surprised to find that genuine talent is not at all unusual. What is unusual is the perseverance and will it takes to become a writer. Even without
a blazing talent, almost everyone can learn to write good poems.
The architecture of The Discovery of Poetry suggests a personal course of
study that the reader may pursue alone or with a group of friends. Poetry differs from other kinds of literature in several ways. Poems, of course, are usu-
ally
structured in lines rather than in margin-to-margin sentences
and
paragraphs. Poets often arrange words in sound and rhythm patterns to ac-
cent particular words or intensify meanings. And poetry deeply involves the
imagination, both writer’s and reader’s. The present, a dream, a memory, a
conversation
— several aspects of experience may operate simultaneously.
These qualities require more of us. The way a poem is written has everything to do with the subject. Craft and subject work symbiotically. William
Butler Yeats asks:
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
We can’t know. And why should we want to? A poem’s subject, art, craft, inspiration, and sweat are as inseparable as dancer and dance. As a reader, I
am all for the swaying of the music and the brightening glance — the whole
poem, plucked like a warm, ripe peach from the tree. Still, I find that there
is
everything to be discovered by focusing on one aspect or another of the
poem’s anatomy
— images, sound, rhythm, form. In The Discovery of Poetry,
we will begin with words and images, the basic raw materials of the poet. We
progress by adding more elements of the poem in a sequence that reveals
how a poem supersedes its sum of parts. At the end of each chapter,
I
xvin
/
The Discovery oe Poetry
include a group of poems for further contemplation. I like the way poems
from varied styles and periods can talk back to each other. Reading aloud,
discussing chapters and poems with friends, going to hear poets read, writ-
ing in your notebook
a lifetime.
— this
is
a pleasurable way to spend a rainy winter, or
Sources
and Approaches
If Ifeel physically as if the top of my head
were taken off, I know that is poetry.
EMILY DICKINSON
The Origin of a Poem
What motivates a poet to write? When Emily Dickinson said about her art,
“My business is circumference,” she was talking about her desire to explore
experience by drawing it into a circle of her own, a world. Similarly, Wallace
Stevens wanted each poem to give “a sense of the world.” D. H. Lawrence
thought the essence of good poetry was “stark directness.” Telling or uncovering truth
is
the prime motive of poets like Muriel Rukeyser, who once
asked, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? /
The world would split open.” William Wordsworth valued “the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings.”
When William Carlos Williams called a
poem “a machine made of words,” he simply meant to say that the bestformed poems function smoothly, with oiled and well-fitted parts, not far
from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ideal, “The best words in the best order.”
Many poets aspire to reach “the condition of music” — some aim for the
heavenly music of the spheres, while others want the words to “boogie.”
William Butler Yeats thought, “We make out of the quarrel with others,
rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” His writing
emerged
from the internal fault line between conflicting thoughts and emotions.
2
/
The Discovery oe Poetry
Yeats s desire to understand his
human condition echoes Walt Whitman,
who wanted the reader to “stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”
For Matthew Arnold the impulse was external, not internal. His poetry came
from “actions, human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves,
and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of
the poet.” Some pull of inner necessity draws the poet to the page, whether
to explore a problem, pursue a rhythm, break apart logic, express an emotion, tell a story, or simply to sing.
When asked the familiar question, “Why
do you write?”, writers often answer, “Because I have to,” (though prose
writer Flannery O’Connor replied, “Because I’m good at it.”). The impetus
of having to, for the reasons named above, gives poetry its fire and urgency.
Because of all these diverse sources, no one ever has come up with a satisfactory definition of poetry, just as no one can define music or art. Those
who want to proclaim what is or isn’t poetry have thankless work cut out for
themselves. No umbrella is wide enough to cover the myriad versions, subjects,
and forms. If a poem interests you, better to just go along with Walt
Whitman’s assertion, “.
.
.
what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom
belonging to me, as good belongs to you.” Reasons for reading and for writing seem almost as numerous as atoms.
Sometimes poets write to recreate an experience.
A Blessing
(James Wright, 1927-1980)
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
Sources and Approaches
/
3
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I
would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girls wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
What happens at the end? After a simple, sensuous description of stepping
over barbed wire into the field with the Indian ponies, the poem abruptly
changes. The speaker (the “I” in the poem) stops describing external action.
He shifts to the inner experience of his happiness. The last two lines surprise
us with their bold originality. Rapport with the natural world is a common
experience, but the speaker here reacts intensely. He expresses an imaginative level
of that experience, allowing us to recognize our own feelings in a
new way. If he’d ended the poem at “wrist,” we could not possibly have
imagined the powerful idea of the spirit transforming into blossom.
A poet may write primarily out of a delight with the sounds of language:
Counting-Out Rhyme
(Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892-1950)
Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.
Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.
4
/
The Discovery oe Poetry
Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.
Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.
Millay plays with words, rhymes, and repeating patterns of vowels and consonants. There is nothing to understand, only something to hear and imagine. Even though it has no message, the
a chant.
poem evokes reactions. It sounds like
You probably remember the one-potato, two-potato counting-out
rhymes from childhood, and how repetition can cast a spell. Perhaps Millay’s
words call up images of trees in different seasons or memories of playing in a
forest.
I
remember the passwords to a club I was part of in the fifth grade:
Tinky toesy timbo nosey
Hooey booey booskie
Pin pin rickey
Pom pom mickey
No me oh non phooey hoo.
Who knows where such rhymes come from, except from the basic fun of
making noises with words?
Sources of poems, like their subjects, approaches, and meanings, are endless. Whatever the motivation
tal
might be, the making of all art is a fundamen-
and instinctive impulse. More than twenty thousand years ago, at Pech
Merle in France, the earliest artists painted a group of spotted horses on the
damp walls of caves. Around the realistic forms are several handprints. No
one who has seen them could forget these strange reminders, like signatures,
of the cave painters. These are startling images of the human desire to create.
Did the drawings give magic control over hunting that animal? Was the horse
a religious image? Were the paintings done for entertainment on long, cold
nights in the cave? Were the horses so beautiful that the painter searched for
just the right spot, placing the chest of the animal over a swelling in the cave
wall to get the right sense of the animals form? Perhaps none
— or all — of
Sources and Approaches
/
5
these possible sources were in the artists mind. As we look at the pictures, the
artist mixing paints from blood and soot and ashes seems very close.
We have
to resist matching our hands to the black outlines on the wall. The natural
desire to make art easily spans the epochs.
Art is the real “news” source of any culture. The cave paintings are the
liveliest news items from prehistory. Today, as ever, movements in art reveal
more about a moment of human consciousness than the Ten O’Clock
News. Art reveals a culture s values, pressures, breakdowns, new directions.
Contemporary poems are comments on our time; poems from other times
and places give us glimpses into other lives.
The Art of Reading
When an interviewer asked William Stafford how old he was when he
started writing
poems, Stafford
replied,
stopped?” Writing poetry, he meant,
is
a
“How old were you when you
normal function. So is reading.
This is especially important to realize because many of us are overtrained to
read for factual information. Overly pragmatic, we look for a result, a conclusion. In addition, Americans are particularly time-conscious.
Although poems may include useful information and conclusions, these
aren’t prime reasons for reading.
Poems take concentration and time. Be-
cause many people assume they cannot understand poetry, they bring to it
an overly serious mind-set. They fear that complex meanings must be wrung
from the poem like water out of a dishrag.
The writer starts and ends elsewhere:
from An Atlas of the Difficult World
(Adrienne Rich, 1929-)
XIII
I
(dedications)
know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
6
/
The Discovery of Poetry
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I
know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses
momentum and before running up
the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I
know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I
know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I
know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I
know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I
know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I
know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I
know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left
to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
1990-1991
.
Sources and Approaches
/
7
Many poems, on first reading, are as direct as this one.
The most important aspect of appreciating any poem is extensive reading—the more the better — of poems of all kinds, and the best reader is the
one most open to the poem on the page. Novelist Henry James said, “Be one
on whom nothing is lost.” Here are some guidelines toward that ideal:
•
Poems are written in lines. The length of the line and where it breaks
help establish the poem’s rhythm. We’ll read more about this later. For
now, let the punctuation mark at the end of the line guide you. A comma
indicates a distinct pause; a period indicates a full stop. If there
is
no
punctuation mark where the line breaks, regard that break as a very slight
pause
— a half-comma — that emphasizes the last word on the line. Lines
are not necessarily units of sense. Often the sense flows on from line to
line in a continuous sentence. If there’s no period, keep reading; don’t in-
terrupt your reading of the sentence just because the line stops, as in
these lines by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
I
met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert
.
.
New lines often start with capital letters, but this does not necessarily indicate that a new sentence
is
starting.
Understand the lines above as: “I
met a traveler from an antique land who said, Two vast and trunkless legs
of stone stand in the desert.'” Capitals along the left margin of a poem add
a formality to the poem and give a slight emphasis to the opening words of
the lines. Practice pausing for the line break but continuing the thought.
Look, for example, at the importance of the realize, break, and blossom at
the line breaks in this excerpt from James Wright’s “A Blessing”:
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
Emphasis on realize signals a change in the speaker’s thinking. The emphasis on break is tricky: for a suspenseful instant, we don’t know what
8
/
The Discovery of Poetry
will come next. Blossom is the most important word in the poem.
Com-
ing last in the shortest line, it gets strong emphasis both visually and orally.
Read a poem once silently, then once aloud, just listening to the sounds.
With long poems, read at least a few sections aloud. Notice the action of
the verbs.
Old wisdom claims that all poems come from courting, praying, or fighting. The traditional classification of poetry is into lyric, narrative, and dra-
matic. A lyric is a songlike poem (originally played on the lyre), usually
told in
first
person; a narrative is a story poem; and a dramatic poem
demonstrates a conflict, often using the third-person voice. These categories easily blur.
A narrative may have lyric passages; a lyric may be dra-
matic; a dramatic poem may tell a story. More useful for sharp-focusing a
poem will be to pinpoint two or more basic qualities of its subject: Is it a
poem of personal experience? A description? A revelation of a single moment? A poem of political or social comment? A poem of word play? A
retelling of a myth?
A memory? A meditation on a spiritual or religious
question? A song? A sermon? An argument?
What makes a poem effective? You gradually will build a critical vocabulary
for why and how rhythm, image, and word choice work. Right now, notice
your general responses to the poem. What is your first impression? Is the
poem interesting? Does each line propel your attention down the page?
What personal associations does the poem evoke? A poem usually has plural meanings;
Who
is
some of them are entirely personal to an individual reader.
speaking? “I”? “We”? A character, historical or invented? To
whom is the poem addressed? “You”? The reader? A character, named
or unnamed? A nation or group? What is the overall tone of voice of
the speaker? Sincere? Ironic? Intimate? Matter of fact?
Mocking? Dis-
tant? Contemplative? Frenzied? Questioning? Tone of voice shows the
speaker’s emotion and sense of the situation. Reading aloud will help you
hear the speaker’s tone.
Note difficult sections. Sometimes copying these parts will clarify them.
Look up unfamiliar words and allusions, those references to people, objects,
or events outside the poem.
A poem might mention Norse gods,
brand names, or English spies; it might refer to a biblical story, a battle,
an ancient tool — or another work of literature. Not every allusion is important to understand, and many are self-explanatory in the context of
Sources and Approaches
the
/
9
poem. Arm yourself with a good dictionary and a book of myths.
When you see a poem titled “Leda and the Swan,” you’ll need to track
down exactly who Leda was.
•
Don’t overinterpret. Meanings don’t hide behind every bush. If you paraphrase (put what the poem says into your own words), that will be a useful
prose replica of the
poem, a flat rendition of what the poem says
without the qualities of craft that make it a poem. Poems usually suggest
much more than they actually say; some are complex, with layers of
meanings that repay weeks of study. However, wh
