Poetry for Special Occasions
Valentine's Day Assignment:
Write a love poem. Don't be sentimental. Complementary Readings: Sexton's "Us," Amachai's "A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention," Lorca's "Somnambule Ballad," Sakanoe's "Love's Complaint," Catullus's "We should live, my Lesbia, and love,"Tsvetayeva's "An Attempt at Jealousy," and Verlaine's "Sentimental Dialogue." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
April Fools Assignment:
Write a poem which tries to do something radical, something you have never attempted before, in form, content, or both. Anything goes, especially self-indulgence, as long as we like it (or aren't too embarrassed for you). (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
Halloween Assignment:
Resurrect and assume a persona, but do not directly reveal the identity of your possessor. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)20 Advanced Poetry
Assignments
These assignments, designed for advanced undergraduate students and for graduate students, should be accompanied by complementary readings (suggested here or devised by you), in-class discussion of techniques, and (possibly) journal assignments.
1) The Uses of Narrative:
Assignment: Write a poem in which you tell a story or a fragment of a story, or in which a story "off the page" is referred to or influences how the poem is spoken. Choose your point of view thoughtfully.
Try to write a title and a first line or two that will make us want to keep on reading. In your poem, use at least two deliberate enjambments and one fully end-stopped line. Also use at least one example of either inverted syntax with colloquial speech or balanced syntax.
Try not to plan out what you will say before you write the poem. Keep writing until you surprise yourself. Try not to end with a "conclusion." Complementary Readings: Frost's "Out, Out-," Stafford's "Traveling
Through the Dark," Millay's "Recuerdo," Akhmatova's "Requiem," Forche's "The Memory of Elena," and Bishop's "In the Waiting Room." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
2) Dramatic Monologue:
Assignment: Write a poem spoken in the voice of someone other than yourself. Be sure to have this voice establish his or her situation, circumstances, and/or reason(s) for speaking. Use at least one metaphor,and write at least thirty lines. If you like, have this voice speak directly to or about another character. Complementary Readings: Pound's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter," and Gallagher's "The Kidnapper." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
3) Lyric Poetry:
Assignment: Write a poem that includes at least one fragment or image from a dream and/or from a partial memory of childhood. Somewhere
in the poem, ask a question or ask for something. Do something out of the ordinary with syntax. Complementary Readings: Merwin's "When you go away," Thomas's "Fern Hill," Simpson's "My father in the night commanding no," Levine's "Starlight," Lawrence's "The Piano," and Celan's "The Fugue of Death." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
4) The Mind in the Act
Assignment: Poems as a model of consciousness. Write a poem in which the reader can observe the speaker's mind moving. Begin with an observation or an abstraction, and feel free to wander from mode to mode as you continue, employing, perhaps, a bit of narra tive, an allusion to another text, a direct address to someone, some description, shift of time or place, etc. Have a reason to begin speaking, and see where it leads you. Minimum of 40 lines. Complementary Readings: Hass's "Meditation at Lagunitas," Graham's "Mind," and Larkin's "Church Going." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
5) Ode/Elegy
Assignment: Write an ode or an elegy. Somewhere in the poem, use anaphora. Complementary Readings: Neruda's "Ode to My Socks," Keats's "Ode on Melancholy," Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and Roethke's "Elegy for Jane." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
6) Animal Poem
Assignment: Write a poem about an animal, or that mentions an animal. Include at least one fact about the animal most readers wouldn't know. Look up the derivation of the animal's name in the OED. Complementary Readings: Digges's "Tartarchos," Rilke's "The Panther," Hardy's "The Oxen," Dickinson's "A Narrow Fellow," Williams's "The Sparrow," Kinnell's "St. Francis and the Sow," Hollander's "Adam's Task," Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," Montale's "The Eel." (Robin Behn, EH 504)
7) Find the most mawkish rhyme/verse/poem you can (e.g. Kilmer's "Trees" or a Hallmark card). Write a poem in which you try to transform the original objectionable sentimentality into honest emotion. Identifying which is which, reproduce both pieces. (Tho mas Rabbitt, EH 504)
8) Write a poem which begins with an ordinary thing, such as an apple or a sewer grate, and ends with a metonym of that thing, but which is not about that thing. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
9) Transform the lyrics of any popular song (any genre) of the last three or four decades into a poem. Don't stick so close to the original
that you might be accused of theft, but don't get so far away that any relationship is spurious. Reproduce both song and poem for the worksheet. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504).
10) Write a poem which uses an actual current headline (including publication and date) for its title (e.g., Frozen ears found in doctor's office, The Tuscaloosa News, August 15, 1984). Your poem will employ a regular pattern of syllable count and a parallel pattern of true
rhyme. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
11) Write a poem in which you transform a myth (not necessarily reco Roman) into a contemporary parable. Your poem will incorporate a regular pattern of stress count and a parallel pattern of mostly slant rhyme. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
12) While someone from the South Bronx might find rural Alabama, its cows, kudzu, snakes and shack, strange and frightening, someone
from Gordo could find in the northern reaches of the Jersey Turn pike the ultimate industrial nightmare. Write a poem which ex plores, perhaps symbolically, what is surreal in an environment alien to you, but which you have actually visited, if only to pass through. (Hugo, of course.) Your poem should employ repetition as its major device. You may work in any form, received or in vented. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
13) Write an unambiguous poem which explores the sound-indeed noisy-possibilities of ambiguity, as in puns and homonyms, as well as the tenuous ambiguities of sounds, as in onomatopoeia and assonance. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
14) Write a serious poem based upon a joke. Identifying which is which, reproduce both poem and joke to turn in. (Thomas Rabbitt, EH 504)
15) The Poet as Observer (techniques: hypotaxis and parataxis)
Assignment: Write a poem that begins by describing a place or scene. Take your time with the description.See if you can use description as a method for discovery-not just noting down what you had in mind to say about the scene but using the language to lead you to notice new things. Write until the language itself be comes interesting to you, then use that sense of voice, wording, language-play to suggest ways to continue the poem.
As you begin describing, favor either a paratactic or a hypotactic mode of sen tence-making. The poem might begin and end with description, or you might vary the mode after a while, or at a particular point, stepping out of description and into some other way of talking or being in the poem.
As the poem continues, can you keep to the method of sentence and phrase-connecting-paratactic or hypotactic-, or must you evolve into the other method at certain moments as you either continue or vary from the descriptive im pulse?
Give the poem a title that indicates the place or scene or that does some other important work for the poem. Write at least 30 lines.
(Robin Behn, EH404)
16) The Poet as Image-Worker (technique: kinds of metaphor)
Assignment: Choose one of the following:
a. Include in your poem a situation or an image-fragment from a dream. Imagine that the reader is also in a dream-like state, and will accept anything you say as truth.
b. Adapt Tadeusz Rozewicz's title and method ("Homework Assignment on the Subject of Angels") for your own purposes. Pick an object or entity and describe it at length, making ample use of metaphor as you go. Another poem that shares this method is David St. John's "Dolls."
c. Like Shu Ting, write a poem that is made up of "Bits of Reminiscence."
d. Write a poem like David St. John's "Iris" in which the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor become, finally, indistinguish able.
(Robin Behn, EH 404)
17) The Self among Images (technique: thinking about the line)
Assignment: Think of an event or moment from your life, or from the life of an invented character, that is unforgettable but hard to describe. It might be a moment you remember, but don't know why you remember it. It might be an event that was pivotal, such that things after this moment were different from things before this moment.
Or it might be a moment in which time seemed to pass in a different way-more slowly, or more quickly than usual, or in which different moments or sense of time coincided or collided. Now enter this moment by referring only to things, images, sensations. Include actions-parts of the story-as fragments, as when Justice says, "Long after the future./ When the umbrella had been closed forever." (Robin Behn, EH 404)
18) The Poet as Storyteller, Tale-teller, Balladier: The Narrative Im pulse (techniques: representing and/or manipulating time in a poem,
paying attention to beginnings and endings)
Assignment: Choose one of the following:
a. Write a narrative poem based in a historical event or time. See Robert Hayden.
b. Write a poem like C.D. Wright's "Woman Looking Through a Viewfinder" in which someone is "looking through a viewfinder," literally or figuratively, at a story.
c. Write a narrative poem that covers a great deal of time, perhaps a whole life. See Justice's "A Dancer's Life" and Sexton's "The Rowing."
d. Write a narrative poem with an unreliable narrator. See Jarrell's "Seele Im Raum."
e. Write a narrative poem of any kind. (Robin Behn, EH 404)
19) The Poet as Storehouse of Inventor of Memory (technique: exploring kinds and uses of rhymes)
Assignment: Write a poem that deals with childhood in some way.Feel free to use any of these poems to suggest an approach. In your poem, make use of at least three different kinds of rhyme.
You might employ them in a regular pattern, or you might include them as "occasional" rhyme, here and there throughout the poem in the middle of lines or at line ends.
Complementary Readings:
Bishop, Elizabeth-"Sestina," "First Death in Nova Scotia," "In the Waiting Room" Jarrell, Randall-"Protocols" Rukeyser, Muriel-"from Eight Elegy. Children's Elegy," "Children, The Sandbar, That Summer" Stafford, William-"School Days" Justice, Donald-"Sonatina in Yellow" Sexton, Anne-"What's That?," "The Fury of Overshoes" Atwood, Margaret-"Game After Supper" Strand, Mark-"Where are the Waters of Childhood?"
Jensen, Laura-"Kite" (Robin Behn, EH 404)
20) The Poet as Prophet, Priest, Visionary (technique: figures of speech)
Assignment: Choose one:
a. Write a poem that mixes formal with very informal dictions, and that allows wit and language play to have free reign. Or write a poem using a diction you don't usually associate with poetry.
b. Write a poem in which you create an interesting dance of words on the page without trying to create an underlying meaning that makes "sense" in the usual way. Assume that art and experience are two different things. Use the language not as an expression of other things it refers to, but as a thing in and of itself. Focus on your excitement about language, rather than creating something the reader can "follow."
c. Write a poem in which the events described and the time it take to read the poem are the same.
d. Write an ars poetica. (Robin Behn, EH 404)