Introduction to Poetry Class

Hello, Nadia and Sadie!

I'm so excited to get to discuss and explore some amazing poetry with you this semester.  

Believe it or not, I did not always love, enjoy, or even like poetry.  When I was your age, my literature text books were... not awesome.  Dry and pedantic, yes.  Awesome, no.  In fact, my basic reaction to poetry was "YUCK."  That's because my literature "class" every year was actually a fat and floppy textbook with various things to read and then questions to answer.  Although some of the stories were pretty fun, since they included some Sherlock Holmes stories and chapters from books like Little Women, the poetry?

Merciful Zeus, it was awful stuff.

Stuff like this:

"Retribution"

Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting,
With exactness grinds he all.

          --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


Yeah, that one struck 9th-grade me as so loathsome that it branded itself into my brain as All The Reasons I Hate Poetry condensed into one bit of pedantic drudgery.  (I later discovered Longfellow is much more interesting that those four lines would indicate.)  I decided I hated poetry because it all was either preachy, lovey-dovey, or too obscure for anyone to understand.  

No one was more shocked than myself when I got to college and was introduced to poetry that I didn't hate.  And poetry I grew to love.  Because there IS good poetry out there.

Let's not read drudgery-poetry together.

Let's read poetry that makes us feel more alive, not poetry that makes us feel like we're already dead.

I'll be sharing a lot of poetry here over the next few weeks.  Pretty poems, weird poems, poems that make you think, poems that make you laugh -- all kinds!  We'll study a baker's dozen of poets, reading and discussing several poems by each of them.  I've got a schedule worked out right here if you want to take a peek at it.  (But be warned: I might change it a little.)

At its best, poetry is all about seeing the world, or some piece of the world, in a different way.  The woods on a snowy evening.  The first blossom that opened on a cherry tree.  The fog approaching a city.  The way you feel when you see someone you have a crush on.

Poetry, especially modern poetry, is about concentrating and distilling.  Not a sweeping 1,000-page saga about saving the world, but a pocketful of words about everyday beauty and pain and joy and sweat and love.  As Ralph Fletcher put it in his book Poetry Matters: Writing a Poem from the Inside Out, "Think snapshot, not video" (p. 92).  One feeling.  One minute.  One object.  One morning.  One person.  One look.  Not every look, or every feeling, or every morning of your life.  Not every thought you've ever had about the color green.  Just the green of a new leaf bursting open because it's suddenly 70 degrees today and that leaf is anxious not to miss the glory of that spring sunshine and warmth.

As Fletcher also said in that same book, "A poem is like an X-ray of what's going on inside you" (p. 14).  An X-ray doesn't show your whole body.  Just the inside of one part.  What's under the surface and holding you up, what's broken, what needs fixing, what's gone wrong or what's actually fine underneath but looks banged-up on the surface.

Why do people write poetry?  To capture a moment or a feeling or a memory or an image.  Like a snapshot or a portrait, not a movie or a book.

That's the sort of poetry we're concentrating on this year.  We'll begin with Shakespeare, travel through four centuries, and end up with a look at a couple of modern poets.  We'll work on understanding and appreciating what they're saying.  And, by the end of these six weeks, you'll be able to analyze poetry yourself!

This first week, I will do posts each day with this schedule:

Tuesday (today) -- Introduction to Poetry Class

Wednesday -- Lingo and Forms

Thursday -- Rhyming vs. Free Verse

Friday -- How to Analyze a Poem (Without Starting to Hate It)

For the rest of the semester, I will be posting an introduction to a poet on Monday, and then share one poem by that poet each day for the rest of that week for you to read over, think about, and react to.  I will try to give you a question to answer about each one, but I encourage you to also tell me anything else that the poem makes you think, wonder, or feel, too.  You can comment on them as I post them, or all at the end of the week, whatever works for you.  Do try to stay caught up week-to-week, though.  With the earlier poets, I'll be able to share their poems directly in my posts because they are in the public domain, but for the later poets, I'll have to link to places where their poems are provided legally online.

You'll have one final project due the last week of class, which will be to analyze a poem of your own choosing.  I'll talk more about that eventually.