Brief Presentations (5-10 Minutes) on Poetic Schools and Traditions as Context
- Describe the poetic school's main ideas about poetry, its function, what it should be like.
- List the key poets of the movement.
- What characterizes their poetry? In other words, what poetic forms, styles, themes, and/or techniques are characteristic of that school?
- Include in your presentation and post as a reply to this message:
- One or two typical poems from that poetic school,
- A brief analysis of the poems based on the context of the school/movement they belong to.
Poetic Schools and Traditions:
- Imagism, Vorticism, Objectivism -Ahiesha
- British & Irish Modernists - Blanca
- High Modernism - Zaira
- American Regionalism - Antonio
- New Criticism Poets - Castelar
- Black Mountain Poets - Gerardo
- Beat Poetry - Maria
- New York School - Sharon
- Deep Image Poetry and beyond - Lidsay
- San Francisco Poets -Jennifer
- Confessional and Postconfessional Poets - Wi Hong
- New Formalists - Cristina
- The Movement and Martian School - Stella
- African American Poetry: up to Harlem Renaissance - Wilmarie
- African American Poetry: Black Arts and beyond - Viviana
- Nuyorican and Chicano Poetry - Natalie
- Language Poetry - Janice
- Concrete and Lettrist Poetry - Sandra
- Native American Poetry -Karen
18 comments:
I chose the poem entitled Ada Ruel by John Crowe Ransom
The Queens of Hell had lissome necks to crane
At the tall girl approaching with long tread
And, when she had caught up even with them, nodded: "
If the young miss with gold hair might not disdain,
We would esteem her company over the plain,
To profit us all where the dogs will be out barking;
And we'll walk by the windows where the young men are working
And tomorrow we will all come home again."
But the Queen of Heaven who had advanced and stood
In the likeness, I hear, of a fine motherly woman
Made a wry face, despite it was so common
To be worsted by the shrewd ladies of hell,
And crisped her sweet tongue: "This never will come to good:--
Just an old woman, my pet, that wishes you well."
To my understanding the poem could signify that the Queens of Hell are competing with the Queen of Heaven in a race. However, good does not triumph over evil as the Queens of Hell who despise the Queen of Heaven defeat her. In defeat the Queen of Heaven is graceful as she wishes no harm to come to the Queens of Hell. The Queen of Heaven holds no remorse against the others, but knows that whatever may happen in the future it will be disastrous. Since the New Critics centralize on ambiguity the another possible meaning could be that The Queens of Hell are using the Queen of Heaven to satisfy a dark purpose that the Queens of Hell might want to fulfill. In other words, maybe they need the Queen of Heaven so that they may roam the Earth in the daylight where they are forbidden to be since they are creatures of the night.
Additional Note:
The setting is in an open rural area as it states “We would esteem her company over the plain” with plain meaning an extensive area of level or rolling treeless country. The irony to me is that the Queen of Heaven knows that the Queens of Hell despise her, but she doesn’t demonstrate any remorse against them
"In Back of the Real" by Allen Ginsberg
railroad yard in San Jose
I wandered desolate
in front of a tank factory
and sat on a bench
near the switchman's shack.
A flower lay on the hay on
the asphalt highway
--the dread hay flower
I thought--It had a
brittle black stem and
corolla of yellowish dirty
spikes like Jesus' inchlong
crown, and a soiled
dry center cotton tuft
like a used shaving brush
that's been lying under
the garage for a year.
Yellow, yellow flower, and
flower of industry,
tough spiky ugly flower,
flower nonetheless,
with the form of the great yellow
Rose in your brain!
This is the flower of the World.
The poem is representative of the beat movement since it is in open form as an allergic reaction to the closed form so popular among the formalists. The Beat Generation was all about following in the footsteps of the Lost Generation in which none of the politically correct conventions were the norm. Their rules were that there were no rules. They were aware that the world was not cockie cutter perfect and they wanted to write in representation of that.
Based on this information the content of this poem can be easily interpreted based on the poetics of the Beat Poets. The poem is about a representation of the world through the eyes of the speaker using a dead, beat up flower as the metaphor. This fits in with the school since their aim was to take real life and represent it through literature that was not fake, but raw and real.
My topic was African American poetry up to the Harlem Renaissance. I chose two poets characteristic of that last movement, Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.
Countee Cullen, “The Incident”
Once riding in Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue and called me “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December:
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
In this poem by Countee Cullen, one of the most notable poets from the Harlem Renaissance, we can see the distancing effort made by the poet to not use dialects or idioms from the country, of the poor African American peasants. I will explain it more fully in the presentation, but the effort was made to preserve the African American dignity, as the dialects, the poets felt, gave a false sentimentality to the genre.
Another poetic characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance is Langston Hughes, who used urban influences in much of his poetry to give it a jazzy, bluesy feel, such as in “The Morning After”, where the poem’s voice narrates a bad hangover:
Langston Hughes, “The Morning After”
I was so sick last night I
Didn’t hardly know my mind.
So sick last night I
Didn’t know my mind.
I drunk some bad licker that
Almost made me blind.
Had a dream last night I
Thought I was in hell.
I drempt last night I
Thought I was in hell.
Woke up and looked around me-
Babe, your mouth was open like a well.
I said Baby! Baby!
Please don’t snore so loud.
Baby! Please!
Please don’t snore so loud.
You jest a little bit o’ woman but you
Sound like a great big crowd.
Gerardo Muniz Villalon
My School of poetry was the Black Mountain School of Poetry and i chose the Poem "Maximus of Gloucester, to You" part 1
"the thing you're after
may lie around the bend
of the nest (second, time slain, the bird! the bird!
And there! (strong) thrust, the mast! flight
(of the bird
o Kylix, o
Anthony of Padua
sweep low, o bless
the roofs, the old ones, the gentle steep ones
on whose ridge-polesthe gulls sit, from which they departs,
And the flake racks
of my city!
The poem is characteristic of the style of projective verse with which the school was highly known to utilize in the poetry. the message itself is the search for the beauty of flight and the perspective from points that are not reachable without that such ability in the human being but it can be optained by thought and creating it on imaginative states.
from Robert Duncan i chose the poem "What I Saw"
"The white peacock roosting
might have been Christ,
feathered robe of Osiris
the radiant bird, a sword-flash,
perched in the tree
and the other, the fumed-glass slide
-were like night and day,
the slit of an eye opening in
time
vertical to the horizon"
in the poem by Duncan it is as with Olsen's poem there is a trayectory of flight that is analyzed and discussed thoroughly as majestic and exalting to the peacock and all its beauty.
both of the poems deal with the use of the page to expose the emotions and the power that these writers wished to portray to their readers and about their own use of open composition as Olsen noted in his essay and the main object of projection have its place amongst its surroundings.
Imagism
The poem I chose to represent the Imagist school is by Ezra Pound titled, In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Pound's poem creates an intensive image in order to obtain an essence of life. Imagist
believe that by using visual images a clarity of expression could be obtained.
In Pound's In a Station of the Metro presents us with the manner in which the quick, unclear vision of the faces in the metro transformed into a clear visual of the petals. According to Pound, the use of metaphor provoked a sharp intuitive discovery in order to get at the essence of life.
Vorticism
Vorticism is an British art movement that used modern multimedia methods which included abstractions. This movement rejected traditional academic institutions and favored the future, but it was looked at with fear since it would make humans life purposeless. Jacob Epstein was a sculpture who was an artist of this school, his sculpture The Rock Drill, represents the fear vorticist had that robots would overtake the work of humans.
Objectivism
The objectivist movement, developed by Ayn Rand, believed that there is a mind independent reality and that individuals are in contact with this through their sensory perception through which they gain knowledge. They also believed that the purpose of life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness.
According to Louis Zukofsky the basic tenets of Objectivist were to treat the poem as an object and to emphasize the sincerity intelligence, and the poet’s ability to look clearly at the world. An example of this could be found in Zukofsky poem “A” which is a 24 section poem that according to him “interweaves the political, historical and personal life.
Deep Image Poetry
The following poem was written by Robert Bly (redeveloper of this poetic school)
“Counting Small-Boned Bodies”
Let's count the bodies over again.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
the size of skulls,
we could make a whole plain white with skulls in the
moonlight.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
maybe we could fit
a whole year's kill in front of us on a desk.
If we could only make the bodies smaller,
we could fit
a body into a finger ring, for a keepsake forever.
This poem was published in 1967 in Bly’s second book The Light around the Body. The bodies he mentions are those of the dead in the war (which by the way he does not specify which war it is).
The speaker of the poem, as any person surrounded by death, would try to have a tendency of blocking out so many grotesque images that keep on coming day by day. The way that the speaker creates this is by making the bodies smaller and smaller until the point that they can fit into a ring. It is common knowledge that jewelry is meant to be worn and by making the bodies fit into a ring, instead of them virtually disappearing; they become unforgettable because the person keeps on carrying the body and the sentiment with them always.
Bly’s unique way of transforming the horror of death and decay into visualizing bodies in a weird, disturbed image as souvenirs is the type of poetry that can best describe this poetic school.
The poetic movement that I choose to present this week is the confessional and post-confessional poets. As the title implies, the poems are personal or of the "I". Many of the poems are autobiographical in which a poet presents himself or herself naked to the reader. They tend to talk about the death of a close friend or relative, their hardships in life, their relationship and their depressions.
Confessional poets do not have a specific style that they have to follow, instead they popularized even further the free verse. They do emphasize on the craft and the construction of the poem so that it can create an effect in their poems to demonstrate a poets feelings.
The poet I chose to represent the confessional poets is Sylvia Plath and her poem "Daddy".
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
This is only a fragment of the whole poem. I felt that this is one of Plath's most impacting poems as she is talking about how Plath as a woman is being oppressed and controlled by men and how she doesn't have the means to break free from it.
Another poem that I would like to present in "Persimmons" from Li-Young Lee. Although he is not considered to be part of the confessional movement, he clearly has qualities of confessional poetry in his poems which makes him part of the post-confessional poets which also focuses on the autobiographical aspects of their life but with a more lyrical vibrancy.
In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose
persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet
all of it, to the heart.
Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.
Once again, this is only a fragment of the complete poem as it is long. The poem presents the author in his most vulnerable moment in life and about his relationship with people he love. If any of you were to read the whole poem you will see how personal the poem is when he talks about his relationship with his father.
My topic was the San Francisco poets an d I chose two poems.
A Book Of Music by Jack Spicer
Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves‘ boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.
Hay for the Horses by Gary Snyder
He had driven half the night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay
behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the
sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral,
---The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds---
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought, that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit, that's just what
I've gone and done."
I chose both of these poems because in my opinion they show the tendency of the San Francisco Poets. Some of them went with the open verse and bohemian spirit of being open to feelings and great moments in their lives. For example making love like in Spicer’s poem. Others followed Whitman’s style of expressive exuberance and regionalism. The poems of the San Francisco Renaissance were frequently confessional and deeply evocative of their Pacific coast and San Francisco surroundings.
The movement that i choose this week is Native American Poetry. The poem that I've chosen is "Equinox" by Joy Jarjo.
I must keep from breaking into the story by force
for if I do I will find myself with a war club in my hand
and the smoke of grief staggering toward the sun,
your nation dead beside you.
I keep walking away though it has been an eternity
and from each drop of blood
springs up sons and daughters, trees
a mountain of sorrows, of songs.
I tell you this from the dusk of a small city in the north
not far from the birthplace of cars and industry.
Geese are returning to mate and crocuses have
broken through the frozen earth.
Soon they will come for me and I will make my stand
before the jury of destiny. Yes, I will answer in the clatter
of the new world, I have broken my addiction to war
and desire. Yes, I will reply, I have buried the dead
and made songs of the blood, the marrow.
© Joy Harjo
This is a modern American Indian poem but it shows characteristics of the three original forms of Native American Poetry. This specific poem is from an anthology entitled "How we became human" by the same author."Equinox" serves a spiritual purpose in the sense that the speaker is talking to a spiritual force or deity, explaining how he/she is trying to contain his/her inner feelings in order to "behave" more properly according to the rising society,until death comes to get him/her and face "the jury of destiny".
The poem I chose is "Black Art" by Imamu Amiri Baraka
Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step. Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down. Fuck poems
and they are useful, wd they shoot
come at you, love what you are,
breathe like wrestlers, or shudder
strangely after pissing. We want live
words of the hip world live flesh &
coursing blood. Hearts Brains
Souls splintering fire. We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between 'lizabeth taylor's toes. Stinking
Whores! we want "poems that kill."
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland. Knockoff
poems for dope selling wops or slick halfwhite
politicians Airplane poems, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . .tuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuhtuh
. . .rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr . . . Setting fire and death to
whities ass. Look at the Liberal
Spokesman for the jews clutch his throat
& puke himself into eternity . . . rrrrrrrr
There's a negroleader pinned to
a bar stool in Sardi's eyeballs melting
in hot flame Another negroleader
on the steps of the white house one
kneeling between the sheriff's thighs
negotiating coolly for his people.
Aggh . . . stumbles across the room . . .
Put it on him, poem. Strip him naked
to the world! Another bad poem cracking
steel knuckles in a jewlady's mouth
Poem scream poison gas on beasts in green berets
Clean out the world for virtue and love,
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly. Let Black people understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world
We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD
During the Black Arts Movement, especially during the 1960's the black comunity exhibit great pride for their heritage. The poets during this era tried to look for ways to step away from what was considered to be the norm in the American Literary establishment, in other words those writings that were considered to be "white" or "Eurocentric". In this poem Imamu Amiri Baraka expresses the type of passionate spirit poets during this era exhibit to make their people more assertive.
I selected the poem "Meditatio" by Ezra Pound.
When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs
I am compelled to conclude
That man is the superior animal.
When I consider the curious habits of man
I confess, my friend, I am puzzled.
One of the most important themes in High Modernism is disillusionment. To understand the relevance of this theme we need to explore the reality of the 1900's. Many technological advancements were made by human beings such as the airplane, the atom, and the automobile. However, with all these "advancements" humans were in a sense going backwards. This century experienced extreme violence and death through the two World Wars.Complete generations were banished, and ita was through writing that many artists found a way for exploring and sharing the sentiments they felt towards such a troubling reality.
Contemporary times are not as different from the 1900's; we still have people dying for the interests of other. Countries profess democracy but take with them dozens of life who are not there by free will. High Modernist poetry could easily be used to study negative sentiments towards humanity present in the mind of the students. It could be used as a way of showing how poetry serves a reflective purpose.
Hello everyone, it's me Stella. I decided to talk about the Martian school.
A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
Craig Raine
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings --
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
The Martian School is a movement in poetry that creates poems by describing things through the eyes of a martian. Isn't that simple enough? Since the poet imagines that he or she is seeing through the eyes of a Martian, it gives a new spin to everything. Things that are common for us, such as a book, are described as Caxtons with wings. The descriptions are riddles for the reader to try and guess what the poet/Martian is talking about. Therefore, I think that Raine's poem is truly representative of the Martian School.
Cassius Hueffer; by Edgar Lee Masters:
They have chiseled on my stone the words:’
His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.’
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.
My epitaph should have been:
’Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life,
In the which he was slain.’
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!
Well, this poem is an example of some of the kinds of poems that fall under American Regionalism. Here we don’t really see a good description of the setting so that we can actually identify the place (other than the fact that we are at a cemetery), but the poem is centered around a character and that is one of the things that AR does. Also, this poem is part of an anthology titled: The Spoon River Anthology, written by Edgar Lee Masters, and this anthology, all of his poems are about the people of a village, who are now dead. So reading the whole thing, I believe, would make much more sense than reading this one poem all by itself.
I selected the poem Wind by Eugen Gomringer. Since this is a concrete poem, it is difficult to show it in my post. However, here is a link for it. http://www.ubu.com/historical/gomringer/gomringer03.html.
It will also be at the presentation. The poem shows the idea of concrete poetry with the way in which the words are arranged according to the poet's purpose. In the poem you can appreciate the letters moving around as if the wind was moving to different positions.
Concrete poems do not follow a specific format or style as this one. It all depends the author.
Blanca Said:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
In this poem by Yeats it can easily be percieved that he in fact does use alot of rhyme schems typically in the AB-AB form. The peom could be interpreted as an escape form Ropmanticism symbolicaly speaking. We also note that even though Yeats is writing during British/Irish Modernism, he continues to mantain a romantic-like theme in his poetry, i.e. his fantsy of escaping to Innisfree.
PS.
It appears under Maria because I wrote it from Maria's computer and account.
Blanca Said:
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
In this poem by Yeats it can easily be percieved that he in fact does use alot of rhyme schems typically in the AB-AB form. The peom could be interpreted as an escape form Ropmanticism symbolicaly speaking. We also note that even though Yeats is writing during British/Irish Modernism, he continues to mantain a romantic-like theme in his poetry, i.e. his fantsy of escaping to Innisfree.
PS.
It appears under Maria because I wrote it from Maria's computer and account.
Just to clarify something. The Creek tribe which the author of the poem was part of. even though she is a modern american indian poet. this poem could also be seen from another poin of view (which makes more sense).
The Creeks were involved in "The Red Stick War" which began as a civil war within the Creek Nation, only to become enmeshed within the War of 1812. Inspired by the fiery eloquence of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh and their own religious leaders, Creeks from the Upper Towns, known to the Americans as Red Sticks, sought to aggressively resist white immigration and the "civilizing programs" administered by U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins.
The poem "Equinox" could also be seen from this historic point of view as a reaction and spiritual answer to this specific momen in their lives.
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