PROOF · Voicetraining 52 Playing puppeteer 52 Thealeatory voice 55 Calland response 56...

PROOF

9780230_008120_01_prexiv.tex 21/10/2008 10: 51 Page v

C o n t e n t s

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1The stretch in between 1Serious play 4

Part I Foundations 7

1 Establishing Practice 9Poesy, prosy, and poetry 9Downplaying the vertical 12Flow theory and committed detachment 13Defamiliarization 15The concrete versus the abstract 17‘Improv’-ing and journaling 20Showing versus telling 23

2 Form and Structure 28Form and formlessness 28Question-and-answer: the beginnings of form 29The expansion–contraction process 35Contraction strategies 39

Radical arrangement 39Creative erasure 39Guided imagery 40

Discovering form and structure 40

3 Voice 44One’s own true voice 44Voice as palimpsest 46Assuming the voices of others 47Throwing your voice 50Voice training 52

Playing puppeteer 52The aleatory voice 55Call and response 56The infantilized voice 57

v

PROOF

9780230_008120_01_prexiv.tex 21/10/2008 10: 51 Page vi

vi C o n t e n t s

4 Style 59Styles versus style 59Romanticism and Modernism: two dominant

legacies of style 61Starting in style 62The recursive method 64Stylistic arrogance 69

5 Subject 70Downplaying polemics 70Chasing poems 71Negations and reversals 73Juggling 75Oblique critique 78

6 Cultures of Poetry Writing 85The workshop culture 85The valuable because 86Written commentary 91Creating a critical preface 94

Foundations: Exercises 961 Expansion/contraction modes 962 Nuancing and fleshing out 973 Eliminating redundancies and cleaning house 984 Metaphor substitutions 995 Syntax mimicry 1006 Seeing double 1007 Recursivity or (re)cycling 1018 The art of interrogation 1029 Engaging the absurd 104

10 Object studies 105

Part II Speculations 109

7 Exploring Possibilities 111Creative-critical consciousness 111Gaining a sense of tradition 113Semiotics and poetics 115Interpreting a cultural sign 118Semiotics and the poetic self 120Greater linguistic play 122

PROOF

9780230_008120_01_prexiv.tex 21/10/2008 10: 51 Page vii

C o n t e n t s vii

The poetics of power 125Signing off 129

8 Form and Structure 131The material realities of poetry 131Taking inventory of poetic material or ‘signs’ 132Unpacking the meanings embedded in signs 136The poetics of history and critical awareness 138Tapping into literary history 141

9 Voice 146The unvoiced 146The dangerous because 149Leaping away from logic 151The exceptional because 153The dangerous lack of reason 154

10 Style 156Postmodern irony: the style of our times 156The past and present of postmodern irony 157Understanding related forms of irony 158Stable and unstable irony 160Prufrock and other observations 162Irrelevance and irreverence 164Quantum irreverence 166

11 Subject 170Making the sensational mundane 170The magical realist approach to subject 173The semiotic simian 177The contrapuntal subject 182

12 Cultures of Poetry Writing 186Poetry culture wars 186Campus culture 188Creative writing and the university: a brief survey 193Five reasons to make poetry writing a part of any education 195

Speculations: Exercises 2021 Occupational oddities 2022 Imagining the unimaginable 2033 Resurrecting the classics 206

PROOF

9780230_008120_01_prexiv.tex 21/10/2008 10: 51 Page viii

viii C o n t e n t s

4 Lexical accretion (or the piling up of similar words) 2085 Ekphrasis 2086 The documentary lyric 2117 Sonic translation 2148 Suspensions and reverberations 2159 Recursivity redux 216

10 The implied because 217

Notes 220

Selected Further Reading 233

Index 235

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 7

P a r t I

F o u n d a t i o n s

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 9

1 E s t a b l i s h i n g P r a c t i c e

Poesy, prosy, and poetry

In our opening chapter, we introduced you to a couple of publishedpoems by former students. We begin this section with another studentexample. The following poem, by Nick McRae, appeared in the journalDIAGRAM:

The Body: A Concise History of Burial

I

When I see a fresh grave torn into the ground,I consider everything that has made it possible:immigrant workers,the flashings of anonymous shovels, the shovelmakers,the industry of writing checksand the paper and ink that feed it.Least of all some unfortunate family.

Though, at Giza, there exists a graveyardfor those who fell atop the Pyramid,who, ropes across their chests,were crushed under the colossal weight of the sun.Even slavemasters bury their dead.

Five thousand men diedconstructing the Great Pyramid.An entire nation sweated to bury one man.Some would call this tragedy.

II

My assumption is this:that somewhere a dog plods through the woods,comes upon a body sprawled under brambles,takes his mouthful, noticing the sky through the branches.I wish, now, to see those leaves,the way the body’s open wounds cling to them,as though to take them into the flesh.

9

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 10

10 F o u n d a t i o n s

There are three essential differencesbetween the buried and the unburied.First, that a dandelion might grow.Second, that a dog should go hungry.The third is that they are the same.

III

Irish mobsters in New York hung their dead onmeat hooks to cure,

or tossed them piece by piece into the Hudson in trash bags.In doing so, it is important to tear out the lungs.Otherwise, the torso will not sink.One man lamented into the camera,I forgot to tear out the fucking lungs.

IV

In all of this, one thing remains –that to die is to be torn from the body,to be sprawled in deep shade,or to be planted carefully in the glorious,nearly impossible sun.

How wonderful, to shoot upfrom the earth as a carrot flower.

Always remember this.That the body is a questionone must come to oneself,one that begs to be held up to the lightlike a carrot,turned in your handand tasted.You could spend more than a lifetimehovering over the vegetable bin.1

‘The Body: A Concise History of Burial’ succeeds for several reasons,not the least of which is Nick’s studious avoidance of two potentialpitfalls: poesy and the prosy . What are these common hazards, andwhy do they often prevent poets from reaching their full promise inthe craft?

Drawing distinctions between poesy, prosy, and poetry can help yousharpen your awareness of the differences between language adoptedin everyday verbal communication and language found in poetry.

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 11

E s t a b l i s h i n g P r a c t i c e 11

Under poesy falls the expected ‘poetic’ clichés, the stuff of sentimentalgreeting cards. Words and concepts such as soul, spirit, embrace, rose,kiss, broken heart, love, and rapture, for example, come easily to mindwhen many people imagine what is ‘poetic’. In addition to conventionaland time-worn poetic vocabulary, we may also add anachronisms suchas thou and methinks, along with huge abstractions such as hope,desire, and eternity. The idea of poetry as mere self-expression mightalso belong here, as it fails to acknowledge any difficulty or deliberatecraft. After all, we express ourselves whether we choose to or not. Eventhe clothing we wear expresses something about us, and we do littlemore than purchase the clothes we like and put them on.

Although poets employ the same words used every day to buy bread,to communicate with a postal worker, to order a pizza over the phone,the uses to which poets put language, the tests to which they subjecttheir words, are radically different. In his essay ‘The Poet in an Age ofDistraction’, Sven Birkerts notes that ‘it’s the poet’s job to make surethere is bullion behind the currency we use each day’.2 For Birkerts,poets reinvigorate the common currency of language, combining wordsin unexpected ways. We apply the term prosy to creative writing thatfails to test language’s elasticity or challenge words to take surprisingleaps. With this term, we do not intend to derogate prose, but to interro-gate easy, unselfconscious adoptions of ordinary word usage. Becauseof the sheer amounts of prose we all digest daily (street signs, newsbroadcasts, internet chat rooms, biology texts), training our minds tobe responsive to the poetic can take time. To begin, try to notice whenlanguage seems to take risks and not merely lie down in the orderlyprose of commerce. Look, for example, at the following excerpts – thefirst from established poet Bruce Bond (whose half dozen books includeBlind Rain, Cinder, and Radiography), the second from student JesseBishop (whose first published poem, ‘The Postman Will Not Do forMother’, appeared in Pebble Lake Review):

. . . the whole scene resolves to a sizzleof flies, that and the careless twitch you seein sleeping things, as if the kudu were stillbreathing in their minds3

. . . She shuddersat licking stamps but seals the fate of a floweras she marries it to an envelope, that nine-by-fiveroom with its cellophane window4

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 12


Bond and Bishop know that language must be tested, stretched, madeto perform. In fact, ‘language in performance’ seems an apt descriptionof poetry. Such a definition may not be as gorgeously visceral as EmilyDickinson’s (‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were takenoff, I know that is poetry’5) or as terse as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s(‘the best words in the best order’6), but the idea of ‘language in per-formance’ does signal the energetic, non-prosaic nature of the writingprocess. This definition also allows for helpful comparisons to otherart forms. Just as musicians and singers may talk of cadence, rhythm,and volume, we may speak of a poem’s musical qualities. Just as visualartists, painters, and photographers may talk of composition – the spa-tial placement of the shapes in a work – so, too, may we discuss thepoem’s appearance on the page. We might also consider, as sculptorsand architects would, a poem’s form and structure. And, of course, inthinking about ‘performance’ and craft, we can compare writing to act-ing, which involves physical movements and verbal expressions on astage (or, in the case of poetry, a ‘page’).

Downplaying the vertical

Along with poesy and the prosy, poets sometimes face a third roadblock:approaching the composition process from a ‘vertical’ perspective. Bythat, we mean a tendency to confuse the movement and shape of thereading process (which runs vertically down the page in chronologi-cal sequence, one line after the next) with the movement and shapeof writing. While reading is predominantly a vertical and linear act,the process of making poems tends to be non- or extra-linear, wherepoets let in random material and embrace the recursive, haphazardquests for anything potentially poetic – especially in the early stages ofproduction. In reading, one starts at the beginning of a text and fol-lows its logic to the conclusion, but in writing, poets do not typicallyproceed from start to finish with clear-cut beginnings, middles, andends. Some poems, of course, are born this way, but these tend to beexceptions. More frequently, strong poems are pieced together fromdisparate parts.

We hardly intend, however, to undermine the value of reading, sincepractising poets must become voracious readers – particularly butnot exclusively of contemporary verse. Sustained reading is absolutelynecessary for the internalization of complex tones, structures, andmovements of poems. Yet, while there is no substitute for deep andeclectic reading, it is crucial to see differences between the finished

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 13


products that are poems and the kinds of extra-linear uses of languageinvolved in their making. The vertical approach typically forces theprocess to occur too quickly, in an overly sequential and predictablemanner. It dangerously encourages the poet to ‘write down the page’towards a finished product. Part of a practising poet’s job involveslearning not to be duped by the readable finished products of pub-lished poems. In a way, poems are con artists, magicians that keeptheir processes secret. One look at any veteran poet’s notebook revealsthe unruly histories of individual poems. Observe what renownedAmerican poet B. H. Fairchild confides in an interview conducted bystudent Melissa Stubbs and published in our campus literary journal,the Eclectic:

I have worked on and off on the same poem, in some cases, for tenyears. I have many times even gone through an entire legal pad inorder to produce a one-page poem. In other cases, I’ve spent only acouple of days, but that’s rare. For me, the old adage is true that apoem is never finished, only abandoned.7

The births of poems tend to be messy affairs, and we do well to dwellin disorder much longer than we might expect to.

Since free association and imaginative leaps are necessary, practisingpoets take care to produce – as in the case of a painter – a palette ofcolours from which to work. This ‘painterly’ approach to writing helpsto minimize verticality and linearity in the composition process. We canhardly imagine a painter starting from the top of a canvas and proceed-ing downward to completion in an unbroken act. For starters, then,try to focus less on vertical order and the denotative meanings of lan-guage. Pay more attention to images – their ‘textures’ and ‘colours’ – anddon’t fret about failing to create order or to make perfect sense. WilliamStafford, author of numerous volumes of poetry as well as the instruc-tion book Writing the Australian Crawl, argues for a largely intuitiveapproach. For Stafford, a practising writer trusts his or her imagination,and is prepared (even eager) to write poorly, to take risks, to allow roomfor mistakes.8 The first concern is to write often and voluminously, ifonly to provide an initial palette of linguistic colours and textures.

Flow theory and committed detachment

Earlier, we spoke of children at play as a model of process orientation.Now we want to approach play from a more critical perspective. Mihaly

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 14


Csikszentmihalyi, the founder of ‘flow theory’, believes that writing(along with painting, sculpture, dance, music, and other art forms)needs to be practised and understood initially as an end in itself. ForCsikszentmihalyi, great artists master the art of ‘flow’ by becoming‘completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away.Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitablyfrom the previous one, like playing jazz’.9 We have found that numerousbenefits accrue when poets read and apply some of the basic tenets offlow theory. When they begin the process by writing lines and passagesnot for the sake of any specific message to be conveyed, but for thesheer thrill of the process itself, they tend to tap more fully into theirlinguistic, visual, oral, and auditory imaginations.

The concept of autotelic flow – of giving over to the free play oflanguage, imagery, and sound – can be a powerful way to stimulatesurprise. We invite students to let the poem dictate where it goes, ratherthan having any pre-formed idea of where the text should end up andhow it should arrive at its destination. Instead of waiting for an ideato form, or beginning the writing process with a preconceived notionor goal, the poet allows words and images to help her ‘stumble into’ atext. If a writer begins with too many answers before the process takeshold, she might impede the potential for flow. Flow helps to overthrowthe product-centred approach that hinders many poetic apprentice-ships, while also setting the stage for discussions about attachmentand detachment. Practising poets tend not to become overly attachedto their improvisational or flow-generated pieces of writing, whichteaches them to keep some necessary distance from their words. Com-mitting too early to an idea or to a particular piece of writing mayprove dangerous. Rather, we encourage writers to remain ‘committedlydetached’ – in an inductive, experimental mode, refusing to force pre-mature conclusions, and avoiding attachment until much later in theprocess.

Novelist E. M. Forster, in a particularly compressed piece of wis-dom, prompts one of his characters to wonder: ‘How do I knowwhat I want to say until I’ve said it?’10 This kind of attitude gen-erally leads to more surprise and less frustration, for the momenta writer becomes emotionally invested in a preliminary idea, thechance for change and improvement diminishes greatly. When we talkwith students about ‘committed detachment’, we ask them to followForster’s rather indirect advice: to commit to the process of unfold-ing language, following sound, and discovering rather than impartingmeaning.

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 15


Defamiliarization

Remaining committedly detached might be as simple as avoiding anyovert narrativity at the outset of the writing process. Often, poems seemto compile inventories more than tell stories, even after countless draftsand revisions. As an example of this cataloguing impulse, let’s take alook at a poem by a seasoned professional, the award-winning Britishpoet and critic Craig Raine:

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wingsand some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to meltor the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, butsometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flightand rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookishlike engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside –a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a filmto watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wristor kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry itto their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it updeliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to sufferopenly. Adults go to a punishment room

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 16


with water but nothing to eat.They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exemptand everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –in colour, with their eyelids shut.11

In this work, Raine catalogues a Martian’s wonder at the humblest ofearthling artefacts. A book, for example, transforms into a ‘mechan-ical bird with many wings’ in the hands of the poem’s speaker – anintergalactic alien who calls books ‘Caxtons’, after the fifteenth-centuryEnglish printer. Even a bathroom – that lowliest of earthly domains –transforms into the gulag image of ‘a punishment room // with waterbut nothing to eat’, a place where ‘everyone’s pain has a different smell’.Clearly, Raine’s poem adopts an alien perspective – at turns perceptive,comic, even horrific – on everyday objects. Over time, through habit,we stop seeing the things of our world as imbued with uniqueness,freshness, even sentience. By assuming the role of alien observer, thepoet intervenes in this predicament, sewing wings, as it were, ontoobjects that have become ‘invisible’ to us through constant familiarity.

The Russian Formalists of the early twentieth century referred tothis literary practice as one of deliberate ‘defamiliarization’ or ‘mak-ing strange’. Critics such as Viktor Shklovsky, Roman Jakobson, andBoris Eichenbaum argued that creative writing seeks to shake read-ers out of their culturally shaped complacencies and to revitalize theirsense of existential particulars. These theorists prescribed linguisticand imagistic strangeness as an antidote to ‘automatism’, the roboti-cizing of perception. In ‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’, Raineseems to extend the Russian Formalist argument by suggesting thatdefamiliarization is in part a kind of radical refamiliarization. Booksas objects appear to have lost their distinct personality and peculiarity.So Raine reconstitutes them by seeing anew through a Martian lens,an act that prevents the object from slipping further into abstractionand transparency. Raine’s project is one of reclamation and preserva-tion; the book must be saved before it dissolves into the nothingness of‘automated’ consciousness, habituated experience. Through the alien’sstrange perspective, we are refamiliarized with the book (the sacredobject of poets, no less).

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 17


The de/refamiliarization argument doesn’t just apply to objects ofthe world but extends to words themselves. In daily, ‘automatic’ use,words become simple conveyors of practical meaning; they serve astransparent bartering tools, intermediaries in the pragmatic realm ofcommunicative exchange (the ‘prosiness’ we described earlier). Poetsinterrupt that easy commerce. They defamiliarize our sense of lan-guage and simultaneously refamiliarize us with the palpable nature oflanguage – the physicality of its sounds, the sensory facts of its shapeson the page. Remember that poetry, among all the literary genres, priv-ileges the shape of language. Sentences do not simply run in straight,block progression, like the ones you are now reading. Instead, the wordsin poems acquire curves; they assume unique forms; they dance; they‘perform’. They may look like lengthy train lines, as in a Whitman poem,or resemble cramped boxes, as in a Dickinson piece. They might evenscatter like flocks of startled birds, as in the poetry of Susan Howe.Poems view and re-view language as material.

Ultimately, then, Raine’s defamiliarizing eye directs its gaze not onlyon books but also on the words that constitute them. His poem sug-gests that poets must become foreigners in their own countries, alienspeakers of their mother tongue. It takes an outsider to see strangelyand to reanimate the habits of sight that dull the world of phenomena.Consider again how Raine’s Martian interprets the dream state of thehumans he observes:

At night when all the colours die,they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Even the colours assume animate traits. (They are now capable ofdeath.) A largely static world becomes completely dynamic. Thehumans he studies do not merely sleep but ‘hide’; they do not justdream but ‘read about themselves – / in colour’. Who else has thoughtto describe the REM state of sleep in such a startling and pleasurably‘strange’ way?

The concrete versus the abstract

You may also notice that concrete specificity, sensory detail, and image-building language reign supreme in Raine’s poem: ‘mechanical birds’,

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 18


‘wings’, ‘markings’, ‘shriek’, ‘perch on the hand’, ‘mist’, ‘engravings undertissue paper’, ‘Model T’, ‘ticking’, ‘snores’, ‘tickling with a finger’, ‘eyelidsshut’, and so forth. Raine’s general avoidance of abstraction, and hisdrive toward a foreign vantage capable of reanimating the everyday,represent primary gateways to exceptional writing. Often, as a class-room exercise, we ask students to generate a list of twenty abstractterms. (Note: If you can’t point to it in the phenomenal world, thenit must be an abstraction.) These lists include emotions such as love,anger, jealousy, fear, or concepts such as liberty, reality, and oppres-sion. Armed with a sizable list, students then generate five concreteimages as stand-ins for the abstractions, as physical representations ofthe concept or emotion. For instance, under fear, one student wrote‘white knuckles’, which definitely concretizes the abstract emotion. Weask for five images, however, so that each student must work throughand beyond the more available images in search of the unexpected. Forinstance, another student generated the image of a bird in a closet forfear. Such concretizing work remains a key function of language in theworld of poetry.

The choices, needless to say, are myriad. Since English has inher-ited its lexicon from various root and sister languages, it provides thepoet with a dizzying array of verbal possibilities. Some linguists suggestthat English contains over 500,000 words. In comparison, a romancelanguage such as Italian consists of closer to 200,000. This is not tosuggest that English is in any way superior (for each of us, in any case,uses only a tiny fraction of our language’s potential vocabulary). Suchobservations merely describe the specific context for a poet writing inEnglish. Because of that rather large lexicon, the poet usually has atleast a few linguistic choices for every concept or object represented.And those choices often come as the direct result of linguistic borrow-ings and cross-fertilizations that have occurred over thousands of yearsof cultural contact. Each word-choice connotes differently, though.‘Skull’, for example, signifies differently than ‘cranium’, even thoughdenotatively they are practically identical. ‘Heart’, to cite another exam-ple, derives from the Germanic side of English linguistic history. (InGerman, ‘heart’ is Herz.) When translated into the Latinate side ofour language, however, we have the root word ‘cardio.’ What’s thedifference, we might ask? Imagine walking into your doctor’s office, sit-ting down, explaining that you have recently experienced chest pain,and then listening, anxiously, as the doctor says, ‘You’ve got a bumheart’, or ‘Your ticker’s busted.’ We expect something along the lines of,‘There seems to be some degree of cardiac difficulty here,’ or ‘You are

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 19


suffering from mild cardiac trauma.’ The difference lies in connotation,which largely derives from the root language of the words employed.‘Heart’ and other terms such as ‘ticker’ signal commonness, directness,straightforward honesty. More often than not, the Germanic side ofEnglish (including all the words we have borrowed from Scandinavianlanguages, as well) tends to be more forceful, more bodily. Partly, thisdirectness pertains to syllable count. Germanic words in English arelargely monosyllabic. ‘Cut’, ‘slice’, ‘drag’, ‘shoot’, ‘poke’, ‘axe’, ‘slap’, ‘eat’,‘bite’, and thousands of other English words have Germanic roots and,as a result, retain rough-hewn or sharp-edged exteriors.

By contrast, words borrowed from Latin (and, later, French) possessmore malleable, less defined contours and qualities. Even the words wejust employed (‘possess’, ‘malleable’, ‘defined’, ‘contours’, ‘qualities’) areultimately Latinate in origin. What’s more, all of these words are multi-syllabic and consequently capture reality in less direct, less concreteways. Latinate language is the basis for many congressional debates,doctor–patient dialogues, and legal hearings. We do not usually say‘fight’, ‘feud’, ‘bout’, or ‘war’ in reference to a lawsuit. We say ‘litigation’.Notice how the Latinate word dissipates emotional heat. ‘War’ soundspainful, packing its emotion into one forceful syllable. It performs inminiature the noise of a brutal confrontation. On the other hand, syn-onyms such as ‘altercation’ and ‘confrontation’ spread emotion overmany syllables, thereby softening the effect of any one sound. Lati-nate words, in most cases then, seem more clinical, legal, lawyerly,sanitized, and thus, cool and devoid of emotion.

Becoming sensitive to etymological differences is not merely aca-demic hair-splitting, either, for such differences in language often carryhuge political weight. Comedian George Carlin constructed an entireroutine around the discrepancy of emotion in the terms ‘shell shock’and ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’.12 He argued that both terms referessentially to the same condition but noted that the connotations differsignificantly. ‘Shell shock’ sounds violent, invasive, dangerous. Soldierssuffering from shell shock during and after the First World War stooda better chance of receiving attention, because the term itself calledon our pathos. We could better feel that experience. We were closerto it because the language allowed, even forced, access. With ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’, we let the blood out of the term. The Latinatesyllables work subtly to temper the condition and mitigate its horrors.It suddenly sounds treatable and impermanent.

Poets, like comedians, learn to sensitize themselves to these sub-tle contours and connotations of language. Without this awareness,

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 20


writers hinder their ability to weigh and measure the various qualitiesof each word in a poem. We are not suggesting, however, that poetsshould use only Germanic words. Linguistic modulation – the use ofvarious colours and registers – is critical. Take, for instance, the fol-lowing stanza from Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’, where the speakerdescribes an elderly heiress amid a declining town:

Thirsting forthe hierarchic privacyof Queen Victoria’s century,she buys up allthe eyesores facing her shore,and lets them fall.13

The words and lines move toward increasing length and syllable count –from‘thirsting’ to‘hierarchic privacy’ to‘QueenVictoria’s century’ – andthen erode into almost complete monosyllables, the only two poly-syllabic words being the compound ‘eyesore’ and ‘facing’ (merely thegerund form of ‘face’). The poet, in other words, enacts the elderlywoman’s anxieties about a culture in decline by erecting the first halfof the stanza on stilts, as it were – difficult, precarious combinationsof Latinate, polysyllabic words – and then undermining it in the sec-ond half with a barrage of largely Germanic monosyllables. And thefact that Lowell cleverly plays with rhyme further adds to the meaning-making combination of the Latinate and Germanic. Lowell’s rhymingseems to suggest that the power inherent in his Germanic choices onlyoccurs in relation to his Latinate selections. They each depend on oneanother for effect, and successful poets study these subtle modulationswith great concentration. In so doing, they learn when best to employthe polysyllabic, clinical slipperiness of the Latinate side, and when toadopt the gut-punching directness of the Germanic.

‘Improv’-ing and journaling

Now that you have read some commentary on the making of poems,let’s put some practical strategies to the test. First, we suggest ‘improv’-ing (improvising) or riffing. Like a jazz musician or improvisationalactor, your goal is to interact playfully with a set of givens. Pull out oneof your poetry collections or anthologies (or look at the poems printedin this textbook) and copy out five passages from one or more published

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 21


works. Then try to ‘riff’ on the published lines. Play with reversals ofimagery, echoes of specific sounds, translations of concepts to othercontexts, and so on. You might also approach each passage as a promptor springboard. In so doing, you pretend that the published writing isyour own and then try to extend the piece, developing alternative logics,moving in directions other than those taken by the original author –all the while remaining detached from any governing idea or sense offinality. Your simple objective is the assembly of language. You want tostart creating a ‘junkyard’ replete with unexpected images, sounds, andphrases that can be mined throughout the writing process. As in jazz,where an underlying melody may form a musical foundation on topof which improvisation occurs, the published passage roots the poetin strong language, and then asks for embellishments, elaborations,enlargements, retractions, and so forth. Play with – and off of – theoriginal.

Below is an ‘improv’ composed in a poetry workshop by studentJaney Keene. The ‘base’ professional writing, from Edward Hirsch’s‘I Need Help’, runs as follows: ‘I admit I’m desperate, I know / that thelegs in my legs are trembling / and the skeleton wants out of my body.’14

During an in-class improv session, Janey composed a catalogue of riffsthat included the following passages:

Light in a cage of glass

we warm our hands by fires caged in glass

radiance trapped by the bulb

radiance trapped inside the tulip bulb I bury

I warm my hands by lighttrapped inside the tulipbulb I bury.

The fires folding their arms at dusk

I hear the crackle of distant fires.

I fear the gaping cracks between night’s distant fires.

I ride black rivers running over stars.

If we speculated about the thought processes underlying these riffs, wemight suggest that the first line appears to play on Hirsch’s conceptof imprisonment, where bones caged inside the body long to escape.

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 22


Janey transfers Hirsch’s notion into the sphere of light, imaginingradiance trapped inside a light bulb. From there, she plays on the word‘bulb’ and takes a leap from light bulb to flowers. After this, the flow ofimagination seems to return Janey to the concept of fire, and graduallythe imagery moves from the terrestrial to the celestial realm, as well asto images of fire and water.

There are innumerable ways to riff, and you will rapidly become pro-ficient in letting language and imagination lead the way during improvsessions. Some of the lines cited above certainly deserve preservationin the student’s notebook or ‘junkyard’, and, interestingly, the last oneappears to have fallen into iambic pentameter. In fact, as your writingdevelops, you may want to complicate your improv lines by apply-ing formal restraints in later drafts. For now, though, strive to liberateyourself from a product orientation, and cultivate flow.

Simply freewriting in a journal proves another valuable way to gen-erate usable poetic material – a fact evidenced by the career of AllenGinsberg. In his biography of Ginsberg, Barry Miles writes:

Allen went back through his old journals, which had many . . .

straightforward sketches of what he saw before him, written in a clear,detailed style, with no attempt to be poetic or ‘break everybody’smind open’. He took a couple of paragraphs containing word pic-tures out of the journals and arranged them on the page in lines like[William Carlos] Williams’s. Sometimes he arranged them by count-ing the syllables, sometimes by the breath lengths, and sometimeshe just balanced the lines visually on the page. . . .

In January 1952, he dug out the poems and sent a group ofthem to Williams, because ‘I had nothing else to send and feltwashed up as a writer’. He told Williams they were ‘Fragmentarynotes I picked out of a journal and put in lines just as experimentabout a year ago’. [In his response] Williams wrote, ‘Wonderful! . . .

How many of such poems as these do you own? You must have abook, I shall see that you get it. Don’t throw anything away. Theseare it’.15

Notice that, for Williams, the poetry of Ginsberg had arisen out of thenoise and specific details of his journal entries. Merely concretizingthem on the page, letting them resonate off one another, set poetryin motion. We often forget that poetry resides as much in the quip,or in the haiku-like faithfulness to image, as it does in the epic orsequence. And what, after all, are epics and sequences but longer

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 23


chains of Ginsbergian fragments? Powerful, compressed, image-ladenlanguage forms the DNA of a poem, and shapes its eventual life.

Showing versus telling

Writers frequently discuss the importance of showing rather thantelling – of presenting rather than commenting on reality. This remainssound advice. But how do we ‘show’? What are the mechanisms gov-erning it? And how do we downplay ‘telling’? First, let’s return to whatwe already know about the nature of language in poetry: that we oftenprivilege the concrete over the abstract. With that in mind, observe thefollowing prose examples of how to show rather than tell:

Telling: The coach was angry.Showing: Mr Jones spat in the dirt, cursed the ump, and slumped

in the dugout for the next three innings.

Telling: My aunt got depressed after her favorite vase broke.Showing: Aunt Jane swept up the pieces of her shattered vase,

dumped them in the trash, then sat at the kitchen table,staring out the window in silence.

Telling: I expected to be very close with all the guys in myfraternity.

Showing: I imagined chucking a football on the frat-house lawnand lounging on grungy couches.

Telling: All of my family members and even some of our friendshelped us get ready for our long trip.

Showing: My cousin Warren helped me stuff a teddy bear into mytravel bag, while Uncle Henry hauled down suitcase aftersuitcase from the second floor. The Frederickson broth-ers from across the street gave dad a hand packing thecar, while Mrs Jenkins wrapped mom’s china plates inold newspapers.

Note that an avoidance of abstractions forces the writer into the realmof the visible, the tactile, the phenomenal. Rather than tell that thecoach is angry (an abstraction), we show his fury. In order to showwell, we first must offer more specificity. Often, we ask students toclimb a virtual ‘ladder of specificity’. Notice how much more specificwe become in the example, with the more general ‘coach’ transforming

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 24


into ‘Mr Jones’. Still, we could climb much further up the ladder ofspecificity:

First rung: the coachSecond rung: Mr JonesThird rung: pot-bellied Mr JonesFourth rung: pot-bellied Mr Jones in his red-and-white rugby

jersey

While many writers believe that leaving language broad and genericwill afford their readers more space in which to ‘relate’ and colour thescene in their own ways, we suggest that only through specificity doreaders understand general concepts. Give us the specific, from whichwe will construct the general, but in poetry specificity almost alwayswins out. In addition, the examples above transform everyday, trans-parent verbs (to be, to have, to become, to get) into active, filmic verbs(to spit, to curse, to lounge, to stuff, to haul down, and so on). The movetowards more active, sensory verbs is yet another form of specificity.

Recently, one of our poetry-writing students, a native of Romania,submitted a draft that described her homeland in generalities suchas ‘a beautiful country with many colorful plants and peoples’. Thiskind of language tends toward the impalpable, the disembodied. It haslittle image-building or sensory power. Climbing the ladder of speci-ficity, however, compels writers to stick to the physical and the precise.Forcing this kind of generalized language up the ladder – where everyrung demands a new level of precision in terms of names, numbers,sensory detail, cinematic imagery, illustrative examples, and so on –lifts it out of the discursive and into the lyrical. In fact, in a surprisinglyshort time, the aforementioned student succeeded in revising ‘beauti-ful country with many colorful plants and peoples’ to ‘I am Romania. Iam rose juice in Buni’s garden in Lugoj’.

As an aid to memory, you might think about building in specificityand sensory evocativeness by ‘Minding Your Ps & Qs’. We have bor-rowed this phrase from the early days of printing, when it was easy formanual typesetters to confuse the lower-case letters ‘p’ and ‘q’, sincethese individual pieces of type looked very much alike when one or theother was turned upside down. Typesetters were constantly remindedto ‘mind’ – or pay close attention to – their ps and qs. In creative writing,journalism, and critical prose, ‘MindingYour Ps & Qs’ can help you over-come sweeping generalizations, avoid lifeless word choices, sidestepneedless repetitions, and steer clear of other weakening agents. Here

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 25


is a helpful chart, followed by illustrative examples from the poetry ofMarianne Moore:

Mind Your Ps & Qs

Proper Nouns & Quantitiesnames of people, places and amounts, numbers,things; precise terms calculations, etc.

Physical Senses & Qualitiessight, sound, touch, taste, shapes, sizes, colours,smell textures, etc.

Proofs & Quotationsevidence, examples, noteworthy facts, expertillustrations, proven testimony, citations ofdata, etc. text, etc.

Questions & Postulationswho, what, where, theories, explanations,when, how, and why? philosophical comments,

reasonings, etc.

Marianne Moore Minding Her Ps & Qs

Proper Nouns & QuantitiesThe modern / ox does not The church portico haslook like the Augsburg four fluted / columns,ox’s / portrait. Yes, / the great each a single piece of stoneextinct wild Aurochs from ‘The Steeple-Jack’17

was a beast / to paintfrom ‘The Buffalo’16

Physical Senses & Qualitieshe draws / away from ink- / bespattered jelly-fish,danger unpugnaciously, / crabs like green / lilieswith no sound but a from ‘The Fish’19

harmless hissfrom ‘The Pangolin’18

Proofs & Quotationsa collection of little ‘In America’, began / theobjects – / sapphires lecturer, ‘everyone mustset with emeralds, and have a / degree . . .’pearls with a moonstone from ‘The Student’21

from ‘Those VariousScalpels’20

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 26


Questions & PostulationsWhat is the good To have misapprehendedof hypocrisy? the matter is to have

from ‘Peter’22 confessed that / onehas not looked far enough.

from ‘England’23

Now let’s try an exercise that will call on your knowledge of specificity,active verbs, and the ps and qs of good writing. Read the followingpassages and supply words to fill in the blanks. Then check the ‘key’below, to see how these three professional poets deployed specificity ininteresting and unexpected ways.

from Susan Prospere:

1. the morning glories, / open like ______2. the lightning bugs open their ______ / to fly3. The calves ______ from their mothers’ wombs

from Kathleen Jaime:

4. Wild means ______ barely / clothed in flesh5. you lone, / vaguely _____ jellyfish / – whom I almost envy6. kids’ bikes / ______ on the grass

from Ian Duhig:

7. this poisoned lowland air is ______ through my face8. The ______ of smoke slowly lifts itself higher9. ugly ______ of music / Tortured from cheap fiddles and zithers

Key : 1. a showroom of Victrolas (from ‘Sophronia and the Wild Turkey’)24

2. topcoats (from ‘Ode to the Lightning Bug’)25 3. unfold (from ‘Farm Life’)26

4. stones (from ‘Before the Wind’)27 5. uterine (from ‘The Glass-HulledBoat’)28 6. stranded (from ‘The Tree House’)29 7. mining (from ‘Mi Ley’)30

8. trumpet (from ‘There is No Rose of Such Virtue’)31 9. figs (from ‘TheOfficer of the Jewish Watch’).32

Practising specificity in this way is like the basketball player shootingendless free-throws. We isolate certain strategies or ‘moves’ and thenpractise them repeatedly until we internalize the necessary motions.Soon, with enough practice, even your freewriting will assume morespecificity.

As a way of closing this chapter on foundational practice, we presenta poem by another student, Jonette Larrew. In this work, placed in the

PROOF

9780230_008120_03_cha01.tex 23/10/2008 11: 32 Page 27


journal Harpur Palate, Jonette imagines a famous comic-book charac-ter, The Thing, after his career as a superhero has come to an end. Payclose attention to (a) how high the poem climbs the ladder of specificity,(b) how well it minds its ps and qs, and (c) how effectively it marshalsimagistic verbs:

Ben Grimm in Retirement

My body, composed of crumbling earth. Dandelions sproutfrom my chest and belly. Members of the cabbagefamily embed my soles, curly dock roots in my scalp.

A gardener comes along to weedevery morning, tugs Bermuda shootsand scrapes mosses. Like long-delayed success at extricatinga seed hull stuck in molars,like scratching the ear canal.

Rocks and sticks, twigs,branches, pebbles, mica and quartz.I heave.They tickle. They grind. Some rocks stickfast into the ground. Rain and snow only rinsethem, like cleaning teeth.

Pill bugs and night crawlers keep me soft and arable.Beetles, ants, always scurrying through the capillariesthey’ve rebuilt. Lately, a molecricket riddles a networkof bores in my right forearm,the ache in my wrist.Earthworms will repair me in time. They always have.

PROOF

9780230_008120_19_ind.tex 23/10/2008 11: 37 Page 235

I n d e x

absurd, the 104, 137Adorno, Theodore 156, 161Ai 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 56, 198

‘Respect, 1967’ 48–9, 50, 51, 52aleatory method 55alliteration 55, 131, 140American Idol 85, 86apprenticeship 14, 112, 200Asimov, Isaac 87assonance 55, 131Atwood, Margaret 1Auden, W. H. 39, 68, 136, 150, 151,

184, 193, 198‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ 184

autotelic 2, 14, 29, 111, 142

Bakken, Christopher 204‘Terra Incognita’ 204

Baraka, Amiri 166Barthes, Roland 164Basho, Matsuo 169beat poetry 70Beckett, Samuel 1, 158, 161

‘Worstward Ho’ 161Beckman, Joshua 168Beowulf 144Bernstein, Charles 56, 187

‘A State of the Art’ 187Berryman, John 168, 194Bhabha, Homi 192Bible, the 143Bigfoot 170–3, 177–82, 184, 185Birkerts, Sven 11

‘The Poet in an Age ofDistraction’ 11

Bishop, Elizabeth 39, 71, 167, 186,189, 208

‘The Sandpiper’ 189Bloom, Harold 167Bond, Bruce 11, 12Bowman, Catherine 208

‘I Want to Be Your Shoebox’ 208Breyner, Sophia de Mello 100bricoleur 191, 192, 197

Browning, Robert 126, 128, 129,130, 167, 198

‘My Last Duchess’ 126–8Buson, Yosa 90, 91Byron, Lord 157

Calder, Alexander 4, 5calisthenics (for writing) 200Camus, Albert 137Carlin, George 19Carlson, Ron 170, 171, 173, 177,

184, 185‘Bigfoot Stole My Wife’ 170,

171, 184Carlyle, Thomas 85Chaple, Katie 74, 75

‘Returning Madame Bovary ’ 74Chesterfield, Lord 60Chihuly, Dale 4, 5Coleridge, Samuel T. 12, 136collaborative writing 112, 168,

169, 201committed detachment 13, 14, 35,

198, 199confessional poetry 70, 122, 143creative-critical consciousness 111,

112, 114, 129, 130, 145Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly 2, 14,

70, 73cubism 64cummings, e.e. 58

Dante 60, 64, 167, 215Darwin, Charles 189defamiliarization 15, 16, 17, 188DeLillo, Don 159, 179, 180,Derrida, Jacques 122, 123, 156dialogical 56, 70, 93, 114, 125, 138,

143, 148, 149, 151, 154, 159, 167,168, 185, 200, 219

Dickey, James 4, 5‘Cherrylog Road’ 4

Dickinson, Emily 1, 12, 17, 78, 82,157, 167, 174–7

‘[Poem 712]’ 174–5

235

PROOF

9780230_008120_19_ind.tex 23/10/2008 11: 37 Page 236

236 I n d e x

Dinggedichte 105dramatic monologue 49, 50, 52,

81–2, 126Duhig, Ian 26

Edson, Russell 104, 105Eichenbaum, Boris 16Eisenstein, Sergei 189ekphrasis 208Eliot, T. S. 64, 120, 136, 160, 162,

163, 167, 193‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

120–1, 160, 161, 162Elshtain, Eric 124, 125

‘Early Maneuvers, ClosingMatters’ 124

enjambment 133, 135, 140, 208Estes, Angie 67, 68, 69

‘Paramour’ 67–8

Fairchild, B. H. 13, 105, 106, 107‘Cigarettes’ 105–6

Fitzgerald, F. Scott 59flow theory 13, 14, 22, 70Forster, E. M. 14Foucault, Michel 118, 125, 126, 129,

130, 156fragmentation 143, 196Franklin, Aretha 48, 52Freire, Paulo 199Frost, Robert 40, 42, 61, 62, 80, 81,

82, 84, 193‘The Vanishing Red’ 81–2

futurism 65

genius loci 179Germanic versus Latinate language

18, 19, 20Gildner, Gary 44, 46, 47, 48,

49, 52Graham, Jorie 56Gregerson, Linda 115, 116Gudding, Gabriel 165, 166

‘A Defense of Poetry’ 165Guest, Paul 102, 103

‘Questions for Godzilla’ 102–3

Hardy, Thomas 61Hemingway, Ernest 61, 193Hirsch, Edward 21, 22

‘I Need Help’ 21

Homer 64, 167, 186, 206, 207The Odyssey 206

Horace 115, 149Howe, Susan 17, 56, 158Howell, Christopher 101Hubbard, Elbert 87Hughes, Langston 79Hugo, Richard 1, 66, 69, 148,

149, 211Hume, Christine 163, 164

‘Various Readings of an IllegiblePostcard’ 163

Hummell, Austin 53–5hybridity 156, 191, 192, 194

improvisation 14, 20, 21, 22, 35, 40,94, 101, 111, 198, 208

irony 82, 114, 118, 152, 153, 156–65,166, 169, 171, 184

Jaime, Kathleen 26Janus 100, 101Jenkinson, John 153, 154

‘Why Orville and Wilbur Built anAirplane’ 153

Johnson, Dave 171, 173‘Cutting Wood with Miss Allie’

171–2Johnson, Denis 216

‘Our Sadness’ 216Johnson, Samuel 138, 149, 150, 151,

152, 169Joseph, Allison 217, 219

‘Salt’ 217–19junkyard 5, 21, 22, 28, 40, 72, 94,

111, 139Juvenal 186

Kasischke, Laura 182–4‘Barney’ 182–3

Keats, John 61, 89, 90, 157, 198, 208‘Letter to George and Thomas

Keats’ 198‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 61, 208

Kierkegaard, Søren 157

Lacan, Jacques 120, 121, 122,124, 156

Larkin, Philip 73, 74, 133, 135–8,177, 194

‘Aubade’ 133–4, 136, 137

PROOF

9780230_008120_19_ind.tex 23/10/2008 11: 37 Page 237

I n d e x 237

Lauterbach, Ann 56Levertov, Denise 56, 194, 211Lévi-Strauss, Claude 191line length 17, 20, 39, 90, 131, 140Loeffelholz, Mary 62Longenbach, James 164Lowell, Robert 20, 71, 93, 97, 122,

194, 215, 216‘Fall 1961’ 215, 216‘For Elizabeth Bishop 4’ 71‘Skunk Hour’ 20, 97

lyric 211, 212, 214

Mallarmé, Stéphane 55, 89manifesto 62, 111, 112Marks, Corey 209

‘Gislebertus’ 209–10Marvin, Cate 103

‘Stopping for Gas Near CheatLake’ 103–4

Matejka, Adrian 210‘Miles Runs the Voodoo Down’

210–11material realities of language 131–3McLuhan, Marshall 80Meitner, Erika 76–9

‘Rubber’ 76–8metaphor 99modernism 61, 142, 150monological 50, 114, 125, 148,

159, 219Moore, Marianne 25, 136, 167,

186, 198Morris, Errol 73Moss, Thylias 151, 152

‘Landscape with Saxophonist’151–2

Movement, the 194

narrative 67, 190, 212New Criticism 193–5Nietzsche, Friedrich 157

Olds, Sharon 79Owen, Wilfred 115, 211

Paley, Grace 49Pandemonium 187Parmenter, Chad 183–4

‘Holy Sonnet for His New Movie’183–4

Pascal, Blaise 115Peckham, Morse 70Perkins, David 73Picasso, Pablo 64Plato 152Poch, John 173–7

‘Death’ 173–4Poetry Daily 87Pope, Alexander 45, 46, 113, 114

An Essay on Man 113postmodernism 156–9, 161–4, 166,

169, 171, 196post-structuralism 161–3Pound, Ezra 47, 62, 150, 151, 167,

186, 188, 215‘A Retrospect’ 62, 150, 186, 215‘The Tree’ 62

Prospere, Susan 26

Raine, Craig 15–18‘A Martian Sends a Postcard Home’

15–16reason 25, 55, 57, 86, 89, 92, 146,

148, 150, 152, 153, 154recursivity 64–9, 101, 102, 216, 217Redding, Otis 52rhyme 20, 42, 55, 63, 64, 90, 114,

131, 135, 140, 186, 208, 215Rilke, Rainer Maria 105Roethke, Theodore 57, 58

‘I Need, I Need’ 57Rohrer, Matthew 168Roth, Matthew 107

‘Money’ 107

Sappho 167, 169self, the 48, 49, 54, 119, 120–2,

157, 162Seneca 3Sexton, Anne 63, 79, 122, 143–5, 194Shakespeare, William 135,

159–61, 167Romeo and Juliet 159, 160, 161

Shamlu, Ahmad 88–91‘I Am Still Thinking about This

Crow’ 88Shepard, Neil 190

‘Teenager: Nineteen’ 190–1Shklovsky, Viktor 16Shostakovich, Dmitri 3

PROOF

9780230_008120_19_ind.tex 23/10/2008 11: 37 Page 238

238 I n d e x

showing versus telling 23, 35,90, 154

Simpsons, The 158Singer, Sean 56, 57

‘Poem with Groucho MarxRefrains’ 56–7

Sisyphus 137, 154Stafford, William 13

Writing the Australian Crawl 13Stein, Gertrude 55–6, 64–5, 68,

123–4, 132–3, 141–5, 193Tender Buttons 55, 123‘Susie Asado’ 65, 141, 142

Stern, Gerald 72, 104Stevens, Wallace 62, 167, 193, 216

‘Sunday Morning’ 216Swift, Jonathan 60, 61Syntax 66, 69, 90, 100, 125, 141,

150, 212Szymborska, Wisława 1, 2, 3, 50, 177

‘The Poet and the World, NobelLecture 1996’ 1–2, 50

Tate, James 104

Vallejo, César 203, 204‘Black stone on white stone’ 203

Verse Daily 87

Wade, Sidney 207‘Dido in the Underworld’ 207

Walcott, Derek 79, 80, 200‘Sabbaths, W.I.’ 79–80

Whitman, Walt 17, 96, 131–2, 138,165–7

Williams, William Carlos 22, 62, 90,114, 190, 193

Wilson, Eliot Khalil 202‘From Mourning to Morning’

202–3Witek, Terri 68, 69

‘Color Fortunes’ 68–9Wordsworth, William 45–7, 62, 114,

167, 171, 173, 199‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above

Tintern Abbey’ 45–6Preface to the Second Edition of

Lyrical Ballads 45–6The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s

Mind 199Wright, James 100, 101

Yeats, W. B. 61, 62, 65, 78, 80, 115,150, 154

‘The Mask’ 80York, Jake Adam 211, 212–14

‘Consolation’ 212–14

Zagajewski, Adam 47, 75, 76, 78,79, 198

‘A River’ 47‘Watching Shoah in a Hotel Room in

America’ 75–6

PROOF · Voicetraining 52 Playing puppeteer 52 Thealeatory voice 55 Calland response 56...

Documents

Transcript of PROOF · Voicetraining 52 Playing puppeteer 52 Thealeatory voice 55 Calland response 56...