- Many discussions on various forums which, though interesting, are too changeable to reference.
- If any readers would like to recommend sites or blogs please do! Feel free to recommend your own blog or poem if you like but please don’t post your poem in the comment field (provide a link and the first lines).
- Search terms used to find these posts: Rhyme, Meter, Formal, Formalist, Poetry
A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone…
A poem is a creation of English language , a result of learning poem foundation,
It is a creation of imagination, of memory’s recall and retention of education,
Of alphabet’s vowels, a,e,i,o,u, and any consonants combination,
Of b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y, and z that make syllable formation,
Of their dissimilar, multiple mixed natures that become all word creation,
Words are but syllables, but vowels and consonants made arrangement,
All are made definition in any dictionary and an exact denotation,
Sometimes also explained in varied ways within any connotation.
Selfish Want
I wrote this today actually and I am so proud of myself. Not the subject of the poem, but myself. The poem itself is going to make me look badly I’m afraid, but then I wouldn’t be a very honest person if I were unwilling to show my flaws. This is a rather profound piece on my part really. It says a lot about myself and my own conception of morality, of right and wrong. I enjoy my random moments of self-discovery and introspection. I like epiphanies and it is nice to have one now and again even if they are about myself and not some other problem with society or something more important. I hope all of you enjoy my poem even if it doesn’t make complete sense to you.
Sir Phillip Sidney: His Meter and his Sonnets
So… Sidney is slyly suggesting that, if only his Sonnets achieve their aim, she might take some pleasure (her own orgasm) from his orgasm. If you think this far-fetched, then I would recommend a book like Filthy Shakespeare. The Elizabethans saw life very differently than we do. Death and sex was ever present. Life, in all its glory and decay, was intimate. They weren’t nearly so prudish about the realities of life as we have become – which isn’t to say that prudishness didn’t exist. The Elizabethans were all too ready to find sly humor in the crudities of life – much to the dismay and denial of our more puritan contemporaries.
The University of Arizona Poetry Center
solar poetry contest [Only open to University of Arizona Students and Staff]
This spring the Poetry Center is partnering with the Arizona Research Institute for Solar Energy (AzRISE) to present a university-wide Solar Poetry Contest. The contest is presented in celebration of the University of Arizona’s upcoming participation in the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, an international student competition to build a house fully powered by the sun.
The final judge for the contest will be UA Creative Writing Professor Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Science and Other Poems and numerous essay collections about the role of literature in our natural world. Deadline for submission (one poem per entry) is May 15, 2009. Winners will be announced in August 2009 and will have the opportunity to read their work at the public viewing of the solar house on August 28….
- I’m not sure if this was posted during the last week. Google states it was posted Mar 29, 2009. The information is interesting enough to merit a link.
Teaching Form Poetry
by Yvonne BlomerAlthough modern poetry tends to favour what we call “free verse,” lately there seems to be a revival of “form poetry,” or poems that make use of traditional structures, such as the sonnet, pantoum, glossa and ghazal. For many, writing in form is a way to create a framework in which to work. For others it feels like a constraint. W.H. Auden went as far as to say that “The poet who works in free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry, and darning himself.”
As Auden suggests in this quote, free verse is formless. Though that can be argued, it can also be said that free verse does not contain many of the constraints or rules that apply to poetry in form. Formal poetry contains lines that are broken into a pattern of stress, often iambic pentameter. It follows a rhyme scheme. Though in contemporary poetry, even formal poems break many of the rules of the traditional form, the poems still contain within them the essence of the original, a framework within which to write. Based on the Auden quote above, this framework does some of the work for the poet. The difference between free verse and traditional forms, as well as modern takes on traditional forms, are important distinctions for students to note.
Why Does He Hear Singing Now?
Welcome to “The Gods Are Bored!” Today we add a new hero to our Pantheon of Special Mortals. He is Walt Whitman.I think Walt Whitman must have been very brave to pen the poetry he did in an era so dedicated to rhyme and meter. His courage certainly bore fruit. Who among us does not love the guy? ….
Shelley’s Sonnet Ozymandias
It is the heart – the synechdocic figure of the human soul, compassion, and capacity to empathize – that is at the heart of the sonnet and that is alive within the sculptor. The heart is what fed the hand – the hand that mocked and gave life to lifelessness through compassion and morality – through art. It is because of the human heart that anything at all survived and continues to survive. And perhaps Shelley means to instruct us that art is the highest and most durable manifestation of the human heart.
Open Letters A Monthly Arts and Literature Review
Steve Donoghue: The Aeneid of Vergil
translated by Sarah Ruden
Yale University Press, 2008Virgil took the assignment and went to ground, laboring for ten years (sometimes, if legend is to be believed, at the rate of only a line or two a day). There were work-in-progress readings given to friends and colleagues (who assured those not present that a great work was being born), and we may presume that when Augustus met with Virgil in Athens in 40 B.C. the emperor inquired after more than the weather. But even after ten years, there was no finished epic. Virgil grew sick during a trip to the East, gave the standard poet-deathbed instructions to destroy his work, then promptly expired, leaving behind literature’s single most impressive fragment, which, of course, Augustus ordered preserved….
Danna Williams: Surreal Estate Agent
Animal Flower Cave Sonnet
The following poem was almost submitted to H&H for review, but I considered it a waste of an effort so snatched it from the queue to place here as the early start of National Poetry Month. “Animal Flower Cave” is one of a few recent attempts to compose a contemporary sonnet. I won’t bore readers with the source of inspiration, but I will admit it has been too long since I’ve done a strict meter and rhyme verse. My hope is that anyone reading it won’t judge it or the poet too harshly. This may be my last sonnet, unless the ghost of Shakespeare inhabits my body, which is very unlikely.Without further ado about nothing:
Animal Flower Cave SonnetYour parting lips that touch the brazen sun,
also graze my tongue – suddenly struck dumb.
The thought of our sex under a sea bed,
and Barrett Browning swimming in my head…
- In case you need a rhyme for velocity…
Elegantly Dressed Dressing Down
“Having climbed to the summit and started to cross it, he
rolls down the side with increasing velocity.”What! We’re already up to G20 Summit and they still haven’t sorted it out?? Well – Obama’s here now. Really. He’s here in London. Everything’ll be fine. Michelle came off the plane and onto the front pages in a wonderful yellow statement dress & hopefully London will bask in the glow, rather than being smashed up by a crowd of idiots as predicted.
REAR-MEAT RHODA
Girls come in assorted sizes,
Predictable, and sans surprises.
But there’s one who breaks the quota:
The guys all call her Rear-Meat Rhoda.Rhoda has a rounded bottom
(Not too many females got ’em).
Men who pass say “Get a loada
That caboose!” when they see Rhoda…
Strange Bedfellows and inquiry
But then I find these poets coming from very different places who are both speaking directly, in very different ways, getting it on with language, and I am moved to write of them, and share. Is that not a call to action if nothing else? And actions are many, some of them more meditative than others, as with Johnson: “our text today is the heliotrope/swiveling its holy troupe.” We are down in the violet bed oh, natural poets, we are down in “hoar” and our tongues a “fovent choir” (10). How unhip the language: “vulgate,” “spinal block” and “womb,” not the province of language poetry, far too sincere and bodily, far too rhythmic, but more unwieldly than the formalists. What would Heaney think? What would Silliman say? Can one have an opinion?…
Sylvia Plath’s “I Am Vertical”
As an experiment I have opened to a random page in Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems (New York: Harper’s and Row, 1981). The volume encompasses four collections of poetry: The Colossus, Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees (all copyright dates 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981). She died in 1963 at the age of 30. Four of the poems in the collection originally appeared in The American Poetry Review and four in The New York Times Book Review. I opened randomly to page 162, poem numbered 143: “I Am Vertical” (28 March 1961)…
PoemShape 