SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 6: Ezra Pound

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

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/6649/

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3884/

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3880/

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3883/

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3869/

“Write a poem which, like ‘The River-Merchant’s Wife,’ is a letter. The person you write it to doesn’t actually have to be far away. Write it, perhaps, to a good friend, or to someone you know very little but have thought about, or to someone you imagine, or … to someone that you don’t know whether you’ll ever see again. It can even be to someone who is dead. You might try organizing the poem in somewhat the way this one is; that is, in each stanza you could talk about a different time in your life, a different age. It might be helpful to think of a certain day you remember very strongly when you were that age. Where exactly were you? And what were you doing, what did you wear, what was your hair like then? Was the person you are writing the letter to there? Instead of talking about your emotions, see whether you can suggest them by talking about what you said or saw or did. In the last part of the poem, talk about what is happening to you now. Again, talk more about the weather, and the way everything looks, and what you are doing than about what you feel. Maybe the last stanza could, as in Ezra Pound’s poem, contain a wish. This poem doesn’t begin with ‘Dear’ or end with ‘Love,’ but you may begin and end your poem that way if you like. Or you can show that it’s a letter only by its title.”

SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 5: Wallace Stevens

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

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5297/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5343/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5308/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5296/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5315/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5294/

http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/5303/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdote_of_the_Prince_of_Peacocks

http://guccipiggy.objectis.net/poetry/stevens/braveman

http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=1026


“Write a poem like ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock.” Try starting with the ordinary way things actually are--say what things people are wearing, for instance, or doing or building or carrying or saying. But make most of the poem about the way things are not. You can make the poem about the world in general or about a particular place or group of people--your school, your home, your block, your city, your state; teachers, parents, bus drivers, doctors, politicians. Write what people are not going to wear, what they’re not going to think of or talk about or dream of, what the buildings do not look like, what colors or shapes things do not have. Make this “not” part of the poem very sensuous and particular and extravagant: balloons and banners, for example, are not in the windows, policemen are not dressed in golden armor and directing traffic with bugles and gongs, classrooms are not in the shapes of stars or of hearts, houses are not being built in the clouds. Try using very beautiful or very strange-sounding words, words you’ve never used before. You might go through a dictionary and find some. Or make up some sounds like rou-cou-cou. You can use alliteration too and internal rhyme--whatever makes the sound of the poem rich and interesting.

“Another kind of poem to write is one like ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.’ In each stanza of this poem, the blackbird is different because of a different way of seeing it--it has a different place in the world, a different place in Stevens’s imagination. In the first stanza Stevens sees the blackbird as if in a black-and-white movie, with everything around it white and still--only its eye is moving. In the second stanza he sees the blackbird as part of a comparison: his three contrasting opinions are like three blackbirds. The third stanza has the blackbird whirling in the wind as if it were part of a theatrical performance, a pantomime show. In the fourth stanza it is part of a philosophical proposition; in the fifth, the subject of speculation about music; in the sixth, part of a frightening story; in the seventh, like something in the Prophets part of the Bible; in the eighth, part of a statement about psychology; in the ninth, like something in mathematics. The tenth stanza talks about the kind of music the sight of blackbirds would inspire. The eleventh stanza sounds like something from an old novel--here blackbirds are only inside someone’s feelings as part of a fear. The twelfth stanza is like nature lore, something a farmer would know. The last stanza is, again, like a black-and-white movie, but different from the first time: here the blackbird is completely still, and it is the white snow that moves.

“Write this poem about something rather ordinary--an orange, a window, clouds, fir trees, a cat, a lake, whatever. Your poem can be in three parts or five or six or ten or thirteen or fifty. Begin again with each new part, thinking about the subject in a new way--the way it is in summer, in winter, in your thoughts, in your dreams, up close, far away, in the rain, in the dark, in your memories, in China, in the desert, in outer space, moving or very still. Think of it too, perhaps, as part of some other subject you know about--maybe music or chemistry or physics. Or think of it as it would appear in a newspaper article, a story, an autobiography, a history book, an essay. Each time, imagine everything very clearly and particularly. Some parts can be shorter, some parts longer. Don’t try to make the parts go together in some way or another or try to come to some conclusion at the end. Thirteen ways of imagining a subject should be a little like having thirteen different subjects.”

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

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).