English 200

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Here are a few of the items we will be discussing this week:

What is a poem?

How can we find poetry?

Can anyone be a poet?

We will look at the attachment and do a "found poem" exercise in class on Friday, January 3, in preparation for doing one on our own for the next Monday, February 3.  I will have further instructions in class on Wednesday and will answer any questions you might have then.

Here is the writing prompt for the assignment:

The directions for this assignment are fairly long and I hope not too involved. The purpose is to push the definition of poetry a little bit further than you might be used to and to create some poetry of your own. I think this might be difficult for some folks and not others, but I want you to try nonetheless. Here are the directions.  

Found Poem: The Cut-Up

To begin, take one page each from  different magazines or catalogs or newspapers— preferably ones vastly different in nature: Newsweek and Sports Illustrated, for example; or Soldier of Fortune and Good Housekeeping, or Motorcycle World and Young Bride, or Muscle and Fitness and Better Homes and Gardens. I haave already done this for you in the one we are working on together for class on Friday.

With a pencil or pen or highlighter, begin circling phrases or random groups of words from any one of the pages in front of you. Circle whatever strikes you without spending any time hunting around for ‘interesting’ words or unusual phrases. Just let your eyes glance over a few lines and circle something there, then move on.

Let this part of the process be utterly uncensored and altogether non-critical. If you are stopping to make considered judgments about what to circle, you are letting your cognitive faculties get in the way. You might certainly want to circle phrases that seem oddball or interesting, curious or intriguing, but ultimately it doesn’t matter what you circle; just keep doing it in a playful, nonjudgmental manner. For example, using the phrases in the previous sentence, you might have circled: ‘phrases that seem oddball,” or “just keep doing it,” or “it doesn’t matter what.” Do not focus on the meaning of the phrases you are circling so much as their sounds, so that they become an abstract language, their meanings fading and their music becoming increasingly apparent.

When you have circled twenty or thirty items on one of your sheets, move on to on of the other three pages you have chosen. By the time you have finished circling the two newspaper and two magazine pages, you might have about a hundred items circled. Then take your textbook and copy down at random three phrases gleaned from different poems.

Now you’re ready to compose the first draft of the poem by connecting the words and phrases you have circled, adding, where necessary, your own connective and transitional words and phrases. Give yourself the liberty to change parts of speech wherever you need to in order to turn those phrases into what looks like real, "poetic" English sentences.

For example, from the texts I am using you can connect “the scourge of elephants and hippopotomi” and “forever frozen”  and “ mind-numbing levels”to form “He was the scourge of elephants and donkeys /forever frozen in mind-numbing levels of political game play.” Now I don’t know exactly where that is going. In fact if I don’t like where things are going, then I might just push on and pick something else to circle. 

Don’t feel obliged to use all the phrases you’ve circled, and if there are uncircled phrases that pop out in you while you’re composing, certainly feel free to use them, too. Hopefully, most of the sentences you make up won’t mean much of anything, for your task is to work not for meaning but for intriguing combinations of words and phrases and a playful assemblage of sounds. It is as if you are writing a beautiful new language that utilizes English vocabulary and syntax but is not quite decipherable to an ordinary speaker of the language. If your assemblage starts making a good deal of literal sense, resist that urge! You are trying for a magical language here, not the ordinary one. On the other hand, don’t be surprised if some sense creeps into the poem. Once the words are arranged in conventional English syntax, the phases and sentences so constructed tend to become interpretable, meaningful.

 

This exercise has been borrowed nearly verbatim from Steve Kowit’s  In the Palm of Your Hand: the Poet’s Portable Workshop,  pages103-104.

· Quiz: Apply Your Revised Definition

Write an essay where you apply your revised definition of poetry to your second found poem.

1. Include a copy of your found poem in your response.

2. Include a copy of your revised definition in your response.

3. Use specific examples from your found poem as you respond.

4. Don't worry if you come to the conclusion that your found poem is not poetry as you have defined it.

5. Revise your definition further in small or large ways, if you need to do so.