poetry – Page 2 – Montessori Muddle

What a Sonnet Might Look Like

The one rotated piece represents the volta of the sonnet, the moment at which the poem pivots from exploring a dilemma to developing a resolution. Volta translates from Italian to turn in English so the physical translation of that structural device is quite literally done.

— Bert Geyer (2011).

sonnet-01 — Bert Geyer's visual representation of the form of a sonnet. (Photo by Bert Geyer).

Last year, my middle school class spent a fair amount of time looking at sonnets: pulling them apart; comparing similarities and differences; discovering their poetic form; and then each creating their own.

Bert Geyer took this type of analysis to the next step. He created a visual translation of a Petrarchan sonet using color and shape to represent the patterns of the sonnet.

sonnet-02 — An excerpt. Image by Bert Geyer.

The artist’s description of the piece is quite fascinating.

The varying stains at the ends of the lines indicate rhyme scheme. I chose to use the Petrarchan format–abbaabbacdcdee. Overall, every feature of the piece takes precedent from the composite structure of a sonnet (not any specific sonnet). But the piece isn’t an exact analog. My aim through this piece is to observe the nuances and complexities of translating from one medium to another. How certain features may be reproduced in another medium, albeit differently. And how translation to a new medium has limitations and new opportunities.

— Bert Geyer (2011).

I particularly appreciate that the statement so clearly demonstrates the care and effort that went into the details of the piece. The illustration that the creation of art requires just as much thought and energy as in any other field.

This should make an excellent, spark-the-imagination, addition to any discussion of sonnets. Indeed, it can also serve as a template for how to analyze different types of poetry to look for their forms. And the meaning of all the different parts should just jump out to Montessori (and any other) students who’ve used geometric symbols to diagram sentences.

Resorting to Poetry

We’re off to the Heifer International farm near Little Rock for a week. I have not been there before, but I suspect I’ll be disconnected, loosing contact with the part of my brain that has all the details.

I could program during some of my downtime, but all the reference documentation is online. I could do some reading about pedagogy – I’ve been meaning to get to the book about homework – but I suspect it would be extremely frustrating to not be able to look up the references and follow thoughts with some online research. And I can’t really blog.

I’m not even sure I’ll have phone service.

So instead I’ve brought a book of poetry. It’s the same one I used to take on long trips before I was so fully committed to the internet. I’ve read it through a number of times, but there’s always something new to discover.

And it should provide the time I need to finish memorizing a few favorites. At one point I could recall the first three parts of the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, but I think I’m back down to one now.

At any rate, there might be some slow blogging for the next week. I’ve scheduled a few posts but not enough to cover the time I’m gone, so this might be the first significant break for a couple years. We’ll see how it goes.

Storm: Life is Precious

I try not to post things with anything approaching obscene language, but sometimes, as in this piece, called “Storm” by Tim Minchin, it’s a small part in the service of a much bigger, more significant idea. Anyway, this one might not be for the kids.

At the Closing of the Year

‘Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land.
But take it: if the smack is sour,
The better for the embittered hour;
It should do good to heart and head
When your soul is in my soul’s stead;
And I will friend you, if I may,
In the dark and cloudy day.

— Alfred Housman (1896): from A Shropshire Lad via USCC.

And Poetry Soothes the Savage Beast

Poetry can be disjointed, illogical and irrational. Sam Tanenhaus argues that that is why poetry helps us make sense of catastrophes and disasters.

One of the enduring paradoxes of great apocalyptic writing is that it consoles even as it alarms.

This has been, in fact, one of the enduring “social” functions of literature — specifically, of poetry. Narrative prose is less well suited to the task. This isn’t surprising: narrative implies continuity and order — events that flow forth in comprehensible sequence, driven by motive forces of cause and effect. …

But catastrophe defies logic. It faces us with disruption and discontinuity, with the breakdown of order. The same can often be said of poetry itself. It operates outside the realm of “logic.” Rather, it obeys the logic of dreams, of the unconscious. This is especially the case with lyric poetry, with its suggestion of vision and prophecy.

— Tanenhaus (2011): The Poetry of Catastrophe, on the New York Times’ Arts Beat Blog.

Andrew Sullivan, on the Daily Dish, highlights W. B. Yeat’s “The Second Coming,” as being quite apt to the topic. It was written just after World War I (Poem of the Week).

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— Yeats (1919): The Second Coming, (via Poets.org).

Counting syllables

If you need a little help finding how many syllables are in a word so you can use it in your haiku, there’s the How Many Syl.la.bles website.

It also suggests related words if you need a differently-syllabic synonym.

Where disciplines meet
creativity emerges
from the shaking chrysalis

How to memorize a poem

My students are working on poetry this cycle and I’m having them each memorize and present each of the different types of poems we’re covering.

Jim Holt suggests memorizing poems slowly over time:

… the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits.
— Holt (2009): Got Poetry?

But I very much like John Hollander’s advice to use the rhythm of the poem to help with memory:

It is partly like memorizing a song whose tune is that of the words themselves.
–Hollander (1995): Committed to Memory

Another approach, which worked for Michael Weiss, was to type out pairs of lines in a word processing program.

It may take about ten repetitions before a couplet is committed to memory, but as you gain experience, they’ll come faster than that.
–Weiss (2009): How to memorize a poem

All of the essays cited above also make persuasive arguments for why anyone should memorize poems. Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that poems in memory are readily available for reflection. You get a feel for the rhythm and musicality, and you get to look at the words in different ways as you turn them around in your mind, playing with their meanings.

Finally, my students have become pretty good at presenting poetry, partly because they’ve seen Shake the Dust, but mainly because of our doing poetry every morning. Good presentations in the past have ratcheted up the quality of the presentations we’ve been seeing.

We’ve already started on haikus, but next week my students will be presenting sonnets. So far, things look promising.