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 Poetry: January 13, 2010 Issue [#3499] |
  Poetry This issue's editor: northernwrites More Newsletters By This Editor   1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions  Greetings from northernwrites, your editor for today's Poetry newsletter. Meter, rhyme, and form are not the only tools available for creating structure in poetry. Everyday things that you have been learning since you were a toddler and ideas cross-pollinated among the arts and sciences can enrich the creative experience and expand the possibilities for discovery. The best thing about them is that it doesn't matter whether you're writing free verse or traditional poetry. Today's newsletter will discuss a cross-pollination between Sesame Street and poetry.    Sesame Street and Shakespeare In the movie Renaissance Man (1994), unemployed Detroit ad executive Bill Rago (Danny Devito) gets stuck with a six-week assignment to teach language comprehension. His students are an unmotivated group of soldiers who are flunking out of Drill Sergeant Cass's (Gregory Hines) basic training because they are only semi-literate. Rago finally captures their interest with Hamlet, and then moves on to Henry V. The archaic language is a challenge for these barely literate readers, but they persevere because they are motivated by finding their "life in the raw" reflected in the universal themes of the content. At the climax of the movie, during a night exercise in the rain Cass challenges one of the soldiers to show he's learned something -- anything! -- and the soldier recites the king's St. Crispin's Day speech from memory, with appropriate and meaningful expression. All Rago did was have the class read the Shakespearean plays and discuss what the words meant and how the situations related to real life as his students knew it. He wasn't even an English professor or an English teacher. Why did this work? "Whoever said that Shakespeare is hard to read is not remembering that Shakespeare started out as drama for the masses, not for the literati of his day." -- tzefirah, review of Renaissance Man, Amazon. Back in the olden days before publishers printed more titles in a year than anyone could read in a lifetime, the members of the public who could read, read from the same set of classics. Poets could write poems that referred to other classic works, and their audience understood what they were talking about because they shared the same experiences. A reader didn't just skim through a book and move on to the next. Books were relatively rare so a book had to be made to last, both for entertainment value and intellectual stimulation. It would be chewed over. It would be discussed and argued with other people. The ideas would be tested against experience. Favorite bits would be memorized and recited in company for entertainment and to generate more discussion and in commenting on real life happenings. People talked about the meaning of what they read. Today the classic poems of the past have to be footnoted because nobody recognizes the references to the other classics. Another reason for footnotes is that some of the words have gone out of style, and people today don't know what they mean without consulting a very large dictionary. Sometimes references to the culture and life-style of the time have to be footnoted because they no longer exist. But other than that, the reading public today has the same skills available to them as the reading public of the past, and the same ability to understand the meaning of today's poetry that has been written for an audience -- even the post-modern stuff that "makes no sense" -- without having a professor tell them what it means. My literature professor for the Great Books in Literature series never told the class what he thought a passage meant. He asked questions and made us come up with the answers ourselves. His lectures never mentioned the reading assignments. They were full of background information about the times and cultures of the authors. Most of the students decided that this meant that the reading assignments were optional. They studied what he had said in the lectures, and flunked the final because it was all essay questions about the books -- more coming up with your own answers. They complained that he had mislead them when his teaching style had actually been the best preparation possible for his tests. The skills that the reading public needs to know to be able to understand a poem are not explained in grade school because they have already been taught in preschool. These skills are so basic and so second-nature that there is no need to write them down. The first part of the skill set is our innate human habit of looking for sense in chaos -- in particular, our habit of insisting that the past is relevant, and our habit of sorting information into categories: "This reminds me of that." The literature name for this process is connotation. It means all the baggage that a word or phrase carries along with it, composed of previous relationships it has had with other words and ideas. The second skill comes from the Sesame Street activity-song, "One of these things is not like the others." This activity teaches children to deduce a general rule of belonging (aka set theory in mathematics) from a grouping (aka juxtaposition in literature) of four different objects, three of which fit the general rule and one of which does not. The third skill comes from another similar learning activity for preschoolers where they use their life experiences to arrange a series of four pictures into their proper time-line and/or cause-effect sequence to "Tell me a story." Understanding literature (any kind, not just poetry) is a process of discovering relationships that the writer has built into the work to communicate the meaning. That's what it means to rewrite for an audience. That's part of how you grab the reader and don't let go. It's not that the reading public can't do it on their own. It's that they're out of practice, and have forgotten that they know how. Like the experts say, "Use it or lose it." Today's writers of poetry and literature have to compete with media and the internet as well as with everything else people do these days. People can barely find the time to read, let alone find enough common time to discuss a book with someone else who has read the same thing. With all the choices of things to read, finding someone else who has read the same book can be a big problem. While the internet offers the chance to find such people, it taketh away with the left hand at the same time it giveth with the right. Online "discussion" tends to be a matter of each person just stating their opinion (whether they have read the material and/or thought about it or not) in a drive-by posting. And that's too bad. Last time I checked, the results of a popularity poll were not binding as a means of discovering real-life truth. In-person discussions still have a greater chance of being interactive, ongoing, synergistic, mildly challenging of the holes in each other's thinking, and focused on figuring out the right question in order to bootstrap one plus one into five. And getting to five? It's better than chocolate. 
Today's poems are about winter -- beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I'm beholding plenty of the white stuff these days --
Submit an item for consideration in this newsletter! http://www.Writing.Com/main/newsletters.php?action=nli_form  Have an opinion on what you've read here today? Then send the Editor feedback! Find an item that you think would be perfect for showcasing here? Submit it for consideration in the newsletter! http://www.Writing.Com/main/newsletters.php?action=nli_form Don't forget to support our sponsor! InstantPublisher.Com: Self publishing made easy and affordable. All file types accepted with many options. Starting at $100 for 25 copies in 7-10 days! Visit us today!  These comments were submitted in response to my previous editorial in "Poetry Newsletter (December 16, 2009)" on Spiritual Poetry, on the principle of including enough detail for recognition. I appreciate all those who took the time to write in:redridinghoo Submitted Comment: Excellent newsletter, as usual, Northernwrites  NW: Thank you! brainiac01 Submitted Comment: Though I am not an avid reader nor writer of spiritual poetry, this newsletter is one of the most detailed explorations of a genre of poetry that I have ever seen. You don't do yourself proper justice as these are examples to live by in all poetry. I have learned a lot and look forward to more of your newsletters. :) -Rae NW: Thanks! I'm pleased you found it useful. Glad to have another learner among our readership! katya Submitted Comment: I like your international newsletter! NW: I'm pleased to hear it! copenator Submitted Comment: Totally impressed with the caliber of writers and poetry you featured in this Newsletter. You are appreciated and may the writer allowed to wish you a very Merry Christmas and wishes for a prosperous and Happy New Year! Copenator out! NW: Thanks! And the same to you. scottmcilroy Submitted Comment: Wow, you really analyzed it deeply. Backing up to see the trees if you can, I write them occasionally, and often times if a spiritual poem is coerced or forced, instead of from inspiration, it seems you can sense that, it's hard to "produce, or churn" our an amazing inspired piece......of mimic an intense experience spiritual "space" the person is in. One thing that hit me as you had the words separate in red, it really stood out, I love it too, about Psalm 23, is it's full of action verbs, yet is a "Calm Psalm." That successful contrast is really quite miraculous. NW: Thank you! . . . Maybe that tells us two things: 1) spiritual things can't be counterfeited effectively, and 2) perhaps for the reader there is more impact from a calm poem than from an intense poem. The successful contrast, however, is a technique that can be honestly copied. Thanks for sharing! Until our paths cross again, keep writing! northernwrites  To stop receiving this newsletter, go into your account and remove the check from the box beside the specific topic. Be sure to click "Complete Edit" or it will not save your changes. |
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