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| Haikus are easy But sometimes they don't make sense. Refrigerator |
Friday, June 26, 2009
11 comments:
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titan saturnae said...
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Somehow, it should have ended with "Burma Shave".
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6/26/09, 11:25 AM
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ET said...
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After a few weeks' discussion, I asked [a dual-enrollment English IV class] for a lengthy paper (around 1200 to 1600 words) on the origins, uses, types, and features of poetry. They were invited to share their personal reactions to poetry as long as nothing they said would be outlawed by their own grandmothers at the Sunday dinner table. Here are some of their remarks:
- Poetry is when you read something that doesn't make sense, but you know you
should. [Handicapped. Critically wounded in grammar crossfire in 9th grade]
- Poetry can work for people who can't even understand it because it appeals to
their common senses. [We shot two deer, three rolls of film, and the moon]
- Poetry was invented by some guy named Homer.
- Poetry is anything that can be sung to music, and a few that can't.
- Poetry, like many other things, originated during the Renaissance.
- Poetry is easy to distinguish from prose, it goes from margin to margin and
doesn't fill up the page. [His left brain hemisphere was killed in a grammar jihad]
- Poetry was designed as a memory tool to pass history and culture from
generation to generation because it was easier to remember than facts, or
dates, or historical events, or speeches, or writings.
- Poetry teaches us a lot about the atmosphere. [cultural milieu? beats me]
- Poetry can be defined differently each time with different poems, depending on
who reads it, and what grade he's in.
- Many Elvis fans . . . over look the fact that everything He sang was lyrics.
[Elvisolatry is alive and well: "He"]
- When a poem gets too long it turns into a epic.
- Folk ballads are different than lyrical ballads because people liked to dance to
them. Lyrical ballads, on the other hands, primarily depends on words to tell
something. [On the Ad Hoc to legalize pot]
- Any poem with fourteen lines is iambic. [If it walks like a duck . . .]
- The meter is the length of a traditional line of verse measured in feet.
[True, but it hangs around and rattles in the ear phrased that way.]
- Lyrical Ballast is a small book by Wordsworth and Cooleridge which serves
as a bookmark for the Romantics. ["But I RAN the spellchecker!"]
- An urn [from Keats' "Ode"] is where you store creamated [sic] ashes.
- John Donne, one of the megaphysical poets, tells us "Send not to know for
whom the bell told it for. It told thee." [megaphysical?]
- Pope was only 4'6" tall. He suffered from a tubular spine and never quite
became a grownup. He wrote "Rape of the Lock" about a young girl whose
hair is raped by an English fop. [There's gotta be a movie in this!]
- Pope's "Rape of the Lock" tells about a young girl who is raped while she is
playing cards and having her hair cut. [I didn't know that!!]
- Poetry written by English poets who wrote poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries
concerned just the nobility. Other people couldn't read, and even if they could,
they didn't have books.
- Most English poets who wrote poetry in the 17th and 18th centuries were born
rich and able to read and write. [Born literate! Great head-start program there.]
And from one of my terminally average young minds who apparently had trouble reading her own notes, I got this unpolished pearl:
A patrician, or Italian sonnet sets up a situation in its octet. Then the problem is
resolved in the sestave. The Shakespear, or English sonnet has three identical
quartrains which set up a problem of "if" in the first, "if" in the second, and "then"
in the third. A rhyming couple then answers the basic question posed in the
quardratic procession above. -
6/26/09, 12:53 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Teaching pigs to sing isn't that rewarding, if you expect it to end well.
Casca -
6/26/09, 2:07 PM
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ET said...
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According to my grandfather, all it accomplishes is to upset the pig.
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6/26/09, 2:25 PM
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Chuck Martel said...
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"I have a Rendezvous with Death" ~ Alan Seeger
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6/26/09, 2:59 PM
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first class finnegan said...
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"Poetry is what gets lost in translation" -- Robert Frost
And ET: that was just painful. Those kids went on to assume responsible positions in society. -
6/26/09, 3:30 PM
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ET said...
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finnegan -- The real tragedy is that they were AP & Honors students, the only way kids could get into the dual enrollment program in those days.
Stuff I got from the standard classes was often so badly mangled as to make one mourn the passing of Western culture.
I wrote a series of lengthy articles a la Ledere's *World According To Student Bloopers* for the *Florida English Journal* (teachers' periodical). They published 4 or 5 of them . . . but never sent me any money for 'em. -
6/26/09, 3:39 PM
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JMcD said...
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"Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense.
Refrigerator"..........So, uh, then what did Refrigerator say? -
6/26/09, 5:52 PM
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Kristopher said...
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"Poetry is when the words don't go all the way to the end of the page."
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6/26/09, 6:13 PM
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Anonymous said...
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Kristopher--love the definition. It explains poetry perfectly to my obsessive-compulsive disorder.
mary -
6/26/09, 6:57 PM
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Guy S said...
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"I have a Rendezvous with Darth" - L. Skywalker
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6/26/09, 8:57 PM
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