Lessons, Week 3, 3-7 February 2014

English 1302 Lessons Spring 2014 Week 3, 3-7 February 2014 …the dread memory of classrooms swollen into resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to ‘respond’ to a poem…It brings it all back, doesn’t it? All the red-faced, blood-pounding humiliation and embarrassment of being singled out for comment. (Stephen Fry, The Ode Less Travelled) 1. Lessons are cumulative; frequently refer to previous lessons, angryverbs.blogspot.com, and your own notes and work. 2. Finish your questionnaire, take-home test, and expository essay. 3. The Sonnet. I feel the excitement! Handout: Rachel Richardson’s essay on the sonnet, © Poetry Foundation. This is quite useful, but I must disagree with her allegation that a sonnet can be 13 or 15 lines. A sonnet, by definition, is a rhymed poem of 14 lines in iambic pentameter. There is no law regulating this, just as there is no law forbidding someone to refer to his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) 1956 Plymouth as a new Mercedes-Benz. Similarly, someone in a game of footie whose attempt at a goal skew laterally and conks out a cheerleader on the sidelines. The weak phrase “But it’s a goal to ME” is no more accurate than an amorphous mess of words flung carelessly onto a sheet of paper can be defended with “But it’s a poem to ME.” Note Miss Richardson’s very brief biography, which says she “earned a BA at Dartmouth,” not that she “got her BA.” If you earn a degree, you earn it; you do not “get” it. Further, avoid the use of “my” in this context. Yes, it is your degree because it is not someone else’s degree; still, the “my” is quite overused in our I, I, I, me, me, me culture. Instead of saying “I will get my degree,” say “I will earn a degree.” 4. “How to Read Poetry When your Teacher Assigns it for Homework.” Handout. Sourcing this is interesting; when I copied this several years ago I inadvertently cut out the author and copyright owner. When I looked it up on the Orwellian telescreen today I found the document at a location which I had never seen before. This suggests to me that someone is cutting and pasting this as his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) own work, which is unethical and illegal. I apologize to the original copyright holder, and will try to sort it out. This is an excellent discussion of what poetry is, and I will babble discourse on it. You should read all, well, readings at least three times. 5. A short glossary (a glossary is a short list of useful words and their definitions; this glossary is shorter than short) of poetic terms. © SparkNotes, Poetry Classics, Spark Publishing: New York: 2006. 6. John Keats, biography and several short poems from Poetry Classics. Take notes, either on these sheets, in your journal, or in your notebook. But however well or badly we were taught English literature, how many of us have ever been shown how to write our own poems? Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to rhyme. Don’t bother with metre and verses. Just express yourself. Pour out your feelings. Suppose you had never played the piano in your life. Don’t worry, just life the lid and express yourself. Pour out your feelings. We have all heard children do just that and we have all wanted to treat them with great violence as a result. Yet this is the only instruction we are ever likely to get in the art of writing poetry. (Stephen Fry)