L1 Lit.: Week 6 poetry/prose

If you would like to write a preparation for this week, you can choose one of the following questions. You can also do a practice commentary following one of the models I gave in class on Tuesday, February 9th. Remember, your preparations are to be between 250 and 500 words and that you are concentrating heavily on how the poet's language creates certain effects in the poem. If at all possible, I would prefer you type your responses. Remember that this is the last week to turn in a reaction on poetry.

Until now, we have looked at poems that follow traditional patterns in their rhymes, rhythms, and stanza forms. In week 6 we will examine three writers who stretch the barriers between poetry and prose: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, and Virginia Woolf.

1. Walt Whitman's Song of Myself marks a break from traditional poetic forms. Whitman wrote this autobiographical poem in free verse which means there is no regular meter or rhyme. If you'd like to write on Whitman, discuss the use of this more open, flexible form and what it might imply to write about one's "self" in such a way.

1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

...

51

The past and present wilt--I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?


2. For Howl by Ginsberg read the following excerpts from the beginning and the end of the poem. If you would like to write on Ginsberg, analyze the way he uses free verse to talk about the "madness" that he and his friends lived through in the Beatnik culture of the 40's and 50's in the U.S.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear,
burning their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,
alcohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind;...

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs!
Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

You can listen to Ginsberg reading the poem here.

3. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is a novel that incorporates a highly poetic language into the story it tells. If you would like to write on Woolf, read the passage I distributed in class on Tuesday, February 23. Then identify several elements of the language that you could consider poetic and comment on how Woolf uses them to tell a story. To give you the context, this passage comes at the end of the first section of the novel. In that first section, Woolf describes a day during vacation at the Ramsay family's summer home. Here you are inside the mind of Mrs. Ramsay as she knits, reads, and looks at her husband after a big dinner with all her guests.