SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 4: William Butler Yeats

Read the poetry available at the hyperlinks below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.

..... ..... .....

http://bartleby.com/146/9.html

http://bartleby.com/146/36.html

http://bartleby.com/148/1.html

http://www.kalliope.org/digt.pl?longdid=yeats2002021483

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1483/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1468/

“To write a poem like [‘Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment’], you might start by thinking of some characters (human or not). The characters could be invented by you or by someone else. They could be from the movies, from a fairy tale, from a comic strip or a myth. If you write a dialogue poem, you can, like Yeats, make one character great and powerful and the other rather ordinary or helpless. Your made-up person might talk to the wind or to a mountain or the sky or George Washington or Napoleon. Let the conversation be about something everybody is always wondering about--like beauty, love, friendship, death--but try making it a strange and unlikely conversation. If you like, let the characters bring in impossible and fantastic ideas--the idea that time is gone, that space is gone, that time goes backward, that all people are one person, that animals rule people, that the sun makes it dark, and so on. Remember, you don’t have to understand why your characters say what they say, and you don’t have to agree with them. A refrain, like the repeated lines ‘And that is what Jane said’ and ‘”That’s certainly the case,” said he,’ may be inspiring to use. You might like to include, as Yeats does, one or more of the characters’ names in your title.

“You could also write a fantastic fairy tale-like poem, like ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus.’ Don’t think of making it mean something; rather, think of making it as mysterious as Yeats’ poem is. Put in colorful and strange and impossible details. However strange your poem is, it will probably reflect your feelings and concerns in one way or another, as even your craziest dreams do.”

--from the William Butler Yeats chapter of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Sleeping on the Wing (Vintage, 1981).

SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 3: Gerard Manley Hopkins

Read the poetry available at the hyperlinks below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.

..... ..... .....

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Pied_Beauty

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Heaven%E2%80%94Haven

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/God%E2%80%99s_Grandeur

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Felix_Randal

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Spring_and_Fall

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Leaden_Echo_and_the_Golden_Echo

“Write a poem in which you say how much you like a whole lot of different things of a particular kind. You could praise round things, whatever’s blue or orange or purple, sparkling things, flat things, things that are triangular or heavy or new. Begin with one thing--say, an icy window if you’re writing about cold things or square things or white ones--and then just go on naming others as you think of them. When you mention each thing, think of some particular time you’ve seen it, and try to get the way it looked at that time into what you say. One way to do this is to make up a word combination--a combination of words that is so particular, that gets the color and shape and movement of things so exactly, that it could perhaps be used only once, only to describe what you see at that one second in your life--‘skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.’ You can try alliteration, too, if you like, and rhymes that are inside of lines.”

--from the Gerard Manley Hopkins chapter of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Sleeping on the Wing (Vintage, 1981).

SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 2: Emily Dickinson

Read the poetry available at the hyperlinks below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.

..... ..... .....

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_heard_a_Fly_buzz_%E2%80%94_when_I_died_%E2%80%94

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wind_took_up_the_Northern_Things

http://www.poems.md/emily-dickinson/bee-im-expecting-you-3679.html

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/11052

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Crickets_sang

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Because_I_could_not_stop_for_Death_%E2%80%94

“Write a poem that is written in somewhat the same way as ‘I Heard a Fly Buzz’; that is, write about something that is terribly significant to you--the end of the world, the beginning of the world, your death, your birth--and in the same poem write about something that is very insignificant--a leaf dropping, the sound of a footstep, the telephone ringing, combing your hair. Don‘t say what your emotions are, and don’t try to make an obvious connection between what is important and what isn’t. Let them simply be happening at the same time: ‘I heard something drop when the world began.’ It may help if you think of it all as having happened a long time ago--if you’re thinking of another century, you can probably calmly and objectively imagine both a rose blooming and a volcano erupting. Great distances of time and space make everything begin to even out.

“Try using very short lines and very simple words. Use dashes and extra capital letters if they seem inspiring.”

--from the Emily Dickinson chapter of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Sleeping on the Wing (Vintage, 1981).

SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 1: Walt Whitman

Read the poetry available at the hyperlink below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.

..... ..... .....

http://www.blackcatpoems.com/w/song_of_myself.html

“Write a poem that is a song of yourself, a celebration of yourself. In ordinary life, we are constantly made aware of the limitations of our powers. In this poem forget the limitations. Write as if you actually are the way Whitman imagined that you are. Write as if you were all of life, as if you were everywhere and in all time and were everyone and everything--seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding, being everything that there is. It may help to begin your lines with the words ‘I am’ or ‘I see’ or ‘I hear’ or ‘I know.’ Imagine yourself in many different places, including some you’ve never really been in--on a sinking ship, walking through the desert, in a burning building, at the battle of the Alamo, floating down a river. You might try, at least for part of your poem, putting a different place in every line. Say what you see and do there. Try using long lines, lines that give you space enough to describe in detail exactly who you are and what you see and hear and know. Be boastful and bold. Try making the poem very long. Let your poem keep changing its subject as it goes along, as Whitman’s poem does. You will probably find, after you write it, that it all goes together in a way you wouldn’t have expected.”

--from Sleeping on the Wing, by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell (Vintage, 1981).