Below is a list of famous poets along with one of the poems that make them great. Any serious writer of poetry should be familiar with these poets . . . or should at least nod knowingly whenever their names are brought up.
Assignment: Please pick three poets, close read the selected poems by them, and write a one page reflection in which you explain what you pictured, understood, felt, and/or thought (PUFT) when you read each of these poems. Choose one of the poems you read and emulate it by copying at least three of the poetic elements the poets used (like number of lines, number of words per line, topic or theme, rhyme or unrhymed.) When your poem is complete PUFT it...what do you want the reader the picture, understand, feel, and think when they read your poem?
[Directions for Mr. Brenner's classes: 1) Pick three poems and read them carefully -- two or three times each; 2) Write down one line from each poem that you wish you had written -- if a poem doesn't have any such lines, then pick a different poem; 3) Explain why you wish you had written each line; 4) Write a creative piece that incorporates ideas and/or stylistic elements from all three lines; 5) Submit your work]
Analyzing these poems in this way will give you a better sense of which elements and techniques you will want to master if you ever wish to write a "famous" poem that teacher's will torture their students with in the future. It will also improve your understanding of how poets reach particular audiences so that you may imitate their success and make lots of money for your estate after you're gone. Finally, we hope reading these poems will spark ideas for your own writing and provide a model for how to execute your ideas in a way that will make them truly timeless.
A Note From Ms. Katz:
Anyone can write a poem at 2:30 in morning when s/he is sad and crying about his or her life. The real trick to being a creative writer is to be able to “call” your creativity to you, when absolutely nothing is happening. Ms. Katz
Am I talented; no. I just work hard. Hard work beats talent and talent doesn't work hard enough. Lemon Anderson
The more well written, professional, published poetry you read the better your writing will be. Period. You can’t even imagine how much you don’t know and won’t know unless you start reading the greats. The mega famous father of Modernist Poetry TS Eliot explains why you must read in his seminal (look it up) essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. It’s an essay that I read, ponder, fight with, and inevitably learn something new from every time I read it and I’ve read it at least 10 times. What have you read 10 times other than a text message that had significant meaning to you?
If you want to be a great poet, a good poet, or even a competent poet you need to read poetry and about poetry. And you need to stretch your mind into uncomfortable yoga poses…push it…knead it like bread dough...let it rise. But I digress. Here is one paragraph from Mr. Eliot and what he has to say is a basic truth. As a writer, as a poet, your writing is part of the whole world’s tradition of communication. How can you hope to communicate well if you work in isolation? How will you ever find the common ground with a reader if you have no idea what that reader might know…how s/he might relate to what you’re saying? Why bother? Our job, here, in the Creative Writing Department is to help you communicate with others. If you just want to talk to yourself or your best friend (who may or may not actually be understanding your meaning btw) you might want to find another department. That’s not what we’re about. We are about the sharing, the reaching out, the stretching, the rising, the baking, and the serving of the words to others…the others we know and those we don’t. It’s a worthy goal.
Read the greats and become greater yourself. Yeah, it’s a challenge.
START HERE: (Be aware that this one paragraph might take you a long time to understand. It’s rich, and dense, and brilliant.)
Excerpt from Tradition and the Individual Talent by TS Eliot:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
Great Poets/Great Poems (American Edition…this is not exhaustive…it’s a start.)
Gwendolyn Brooks: The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/we-real-cool
Billy Collins: Introduction to Poetry
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176056
Stephen Dobyns: Loud Music
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/100.html
ee cummings: [i carry your heart withme(i carry it in)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/179622
Nikki Giovanni: Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
http://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/35345166036/cotton-candy-on-a-rainy-day
Emily Dickinson: tell all the truth but tell it slant
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247292
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself I
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm
Mary Oliver: Wild Geese
http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html
Elizabeth Bishop: One Art
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/one-art
Wallace Stevens: 13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503
WANT MORE and DIFFERENT INDEPENDENT READING TO CHECK OUT ON YOUR OWN TIME (Not for this assignment) GO TO Ms. Katz's Website and check out Literary Influences!
http://coopwriter.weebly.com/
Assignment: Please pick three poets, close read the selected poems by them, and write a one page reflection in which you explain what you pictured, understood, felt, and/or thought (PUFT) when you read each of these poems. Choose one of the poems you read and emulate it by copying at least three of the poetic elements the poets used (like number of lines, number of words per line, topic or theme, rhyme or unrhymed.) When your poem is complete PUFT it...what do you want the reader the picture, understand, feel, and think when they read your poem?
[Directions for Mr. Brenner's classes: 1) Pick three poems and read them carefully -- two or three times each; 2) Write down one line from each poem that you wish you had written -- if a poem doesn't have any such lines, then pick a different poem; 3) Explain why you wish you had written each line; 4) Write a creative piece that incorporates ideas and/or stylistic elements from all three lines; 5) Submit your work]
Analyzing these poems in this way will give you a better sense of which elements and techniques you will want to master if you ever wish to write a "famous" poem that teacher's will torture their students with in the future. It will also improve your understanding of how poets reach particular audiences so that you may imitate their success and make lots of money for your estate after you're gone. Finally, we hope reading these poems will spark ideas for your own writing and provide a model for how to execute your ideas in a way that will make them truly timeless.
A Note From Ms. Katz:
Anyone can write a poem at 2:30 in morning when s/he is sad and crying about his or her life. The real trick to being a creative writer is to be able to “call” your creativity to you, when absolutely nothing is happening. Ms. Katz
Am I talented; no. I just work hard. Hard work beats talent and talent doesn't work hard enough. Lemon Anderson
The more well written, professional, published poetry you read the better your writing will be. Period. You can’t even imagine how much you don’t know and won’t know unless you start reading the greats. The mega famous father of Modernist Poetry TS Eliot explains why you must read in his seminal (look it up) essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. It’s an essay that I read, ponder, fight with, and inevitably learn something new from every time I read it and I’ve read it at least 10 times. What have you read 10 times other than a text message that had significant meaning to you?
If you want to be a great poet, a good poet, or even a competent poet you need to read poetry and about poetry. And you need to stretch your mind into uncomfortable yoga poses…push it…knead it like bread dough...let it rise. But I digress. Here is one paragraph from Mr. Eliot and what he has to say is a basic truth. As a writer, as a poet, your writing is part of the whole world’s tradition of communication. How can you hope to communicate well if you work in isolation? How will you ever find the common ground with a reader if you have no idea what that reader might know…how s/he might relate to what you’re saying? Why bother? Our job, here, in the Creative Writing Department is to help you communicate with others. If you just want to talk to yourself or your best friend (who may or may not actually be understanding your meaning btw) you might want to find another department. That’s not what we’re about. We are about the sharing, the reaching out, the stretching, the rising, the baking, and the serving of the words to others…the others we know and those we don’t. It’s a worthy goal.
Read the greats and become greater yourself. Yeah, it’s a challenge.
START HERE: (Be aware that this one paragraph might take you a long time to understand. It’s rich, and dense, and brilliant.)
Excerpt from Tradition and the Individual Talent by TS Eliot:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
Great Poets/Great Poems (American Edition…this is not exhaustive…it’s a start.)
Gwendolyn Brooks: The Pool Players. Seven at the Golden Shovel
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/we-real-cool
Billy Collins: Introduction to Poetry
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176056
Stephen Dobyns: Loud Music
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/100.html
ee cummings: [i carry your heart withme(i carry it in)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/179622
Nikki Giovanni: Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
http://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/35345166036/cotton-candy-on-a-rainy-day
Emily Dickinson: tell all the truth but tell it slant
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/247292
Walt Whitman: Song of Myself I
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm
Mary Oliver: Wild Geese
http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_wildgeese.html
Elizabeth Bishop: One Art
http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/one-art
Wallace Stevens: 13 Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174503
WANT MORE and DIFFERENT INDEPENDENT READING TO CHECK OUT ON YOUR OWN TIME (Not for this assignment) GO TO Ms. Katz's Website and check out Literary Influences!
http://coopwriter.weebly.com/