Poetry - AND Poultry
Poetry does not suck (new findings have come in and they tell us that you actually like poetry)
Analysing is interesting
reading poetry is not an exercise in historical white man studies
What is a poem all about?
Remember the brain?
your poor little brain doesn’t see an objective reality
it makes a subjective
poetry is an exercise in messing with this
The way we can look at poetry is through the lens of a “child’s mind”.
What is the difference between what we actually perceive and what we think we perceive?
Remember the brain?
YOU ARE NOT LOOKING AT A REAL WORLD!
it is all your own invention
We are so tied up in our invention and the associations and the assumptions and the imagery that we think, we forget to actually observe and participate in reality.
The way we can look at poetry is through the lens of a “child’s mind”.
What is the difference between what we THINK and what we actually SEE?
Comedy uses this all the time.
Jerry Seinfeld - “scroll contact list like a gay french king”
recontextualized an action we all know - he’s invested a new association in it and that is the reason it is a “joke”
poetry does the same thing - it recontextualizes - it;s building a new way of looking at things that we always assume without actually observing (or it could be)
Good poetry is like good comedy - it recontextualizes, it makes us reconsider the things we take for granted, it can be a way of rediscovering what’s being “discussed” in the poem
it tries to show the angles and aspects that we miss - it zooms on some things and enhances them
I Met A Genius
I met a genius on the train
today
about 6 years old,
he sat beside me
and as the train
ran down along the coast
we came to the ocean
and then he looked at me
and said,
it's not pretty.
it was the first time I'd
realized
that.
there is something freaky about breaking away from the assumptions
We are comfortable if we “believe the lie”
Poetry is one approach to trying to show what things are like with description and using the senses without always resorting to the assumption
Assignment - A Creative Description of something that you take for granted
ONLY look at the descriptive aspects - what does it REALLY look like?
Things have a formal aspect - the way it is
why does your hand stop growing, but your fingernails don’t?
We suffer from Magical Thinking
For this part of Poetry Analysis, we need to try and think about only the formal elements of things we see.
The Dress Thing - this IS THE SAME THING!
The “there is no history of the colour blue” is in the same area -
What is this area?
Words and thoughts are pretty much the same.
Our brain uses a language to talk to itself.
We are manipulating, and being manipulated by the very thing that we use to think about manipulating things.
Poetry can be a way of boiling some of this “stuff” down into a few words
Textbook - page 2 - “Poetry” by Pablo Neruda
Read this poem.
Read it again.
Get into a team of ANY sort.
Answer questions from page 14 - #1, 2, 6
(number six is considering some of the formal elements of some other activity and describing them in a sense of your feelings)
What would you do analyst this poem? What pieces might you look at? What approach would you take? Consider how you’ve been taught prior.
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
This poem appears to be autobiographical
Neruda started writing poetry very young and was famous for it very young
This poem appears to be about that actual moment when he became a poet - it's about a powerful EPIPHANY that hit him and “opened up the universe”
What does that mean?
How does that happen?
How does he address it with poetry?
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