ENH 110 Introduction to Poetry

1. ENH 110 Introduction to Poetry

2. Suggestions for reading a poem 1.Find a quiet space without distractions (ipods, cell phones, tv, etc). Read the syntax literally: read the poem straight through without expectations: It is best to read it aloud first; then read it silently. Perhaps even jot down a “first impression.” Some poems are complex. Take in as much as you can.

3. Suggestions for reading a poem 2. Focus on the title: try to articulate its significance, especially after having read it carefully, perhaps twice. “Jabberwocky” “A Martian sends a Postcard Home” “Out, Out--” “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”

4. Suggestions for reading a poem 3. Identify the poem’s situation: What is going on? Who is the voice? What is the tone? Is someone being spoken to? Is a story being told? Pay attention to particular sound patterns: alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, and figures of speech: simile, metaphor, personification

5. Suggestions for reading a poem 4. Use a dictionary, other reference books, and/or reliable web sites. Also pay attention to the poet’s use of diction, syntax, and punctuation (or lack thereof)

6. Suggestions for reading a poem 5. Remember: poems exist in time and times change. Reference the time it was written; research the poet. Poets.org Poetry Foundation.org

7. Suggestions for reading a poem 6. Take a poem on its own terms. Live with it, and try not to get frustrated. It is supposed to bring you pleasure, not make you run for the Prozac.

8. Suggestions for reading a poem 7. Be willing to be surprised. You Fit Into Me you fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye

9. Suggestions for reading a poem 8. Assume there is a reason for everything.

10. Suggestions for reading a poem 9. Argue: jot down your varied thoughts about its thematic value.

11. Suggestions for reading a poem 10. Paraphrase the content: interpret what you think the poem means, the poet’s purpose.

12. What is poetry?

13. What is poetry? Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting. ~Robert Frost

14. What is poetry? One demands two things of a poem. Firstly, it must be a well-made verbal object that does honor to the language in which it is written. Secondly, it must say something significant about a reality common to us all, but perceived from a unique perspective. What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he or she has said it, readers will recognize its validity for themselves. - W. H. Auden

15. What is poetry? Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar. - Percy Bysshe Shelley

16. What is poetry? Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture. - Simonides

17. What is poetry? I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. - Pablo Neruda

18. What is poetry? Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. - Carl Sandburg

19. What is poetry? Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal, which the reader recognizes as his own. - Salvatore Quasimodo

20. What is poetry? Write drunk, revise sober. - Miller Williams

21. What is poetry? Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild ... - Boris Pasternak

22. What is poetry? Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. - Edward R. Murrow

23. What is poetry? Poets are soldiers that liberate words from the steadfast possession of definition. - Eli Khamarov

24. What is poetry? A poet's work is to name the unnamable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it from going to sleep. - Salman Rushdie

25. What is poetry? A poet is a person who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times. - Randall Jarell

26. What is poetry? Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. - Don Marquis

27. What is poetry? The poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; and, as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives airy nothing a local habitation and a name. - William Shakespeare

28. What is poetry? Poetry allows us to delicately unravel the fabric of its being to see the beauty of form and function, truth, and the infinite manifestations of humanity’s emotions. Poetry is the evocation of innumerable truths through the artistic arrangement of emotive words. Professor Robert Mugford