10.6 Poetry - getting the "literal" meaning

Finishing the short story unit:   You posted your finished drafts for your short story. I will be reading through them the next couple of days, and hopefully I will have them (and your homework) back to you with comments by next class or shortly after.

Poetry.  We started class with some observations about how reading poetry correlates with reading fiction.  The idea here was that you could think about which of the strategies we worked with in the short story unit you might be able to bring to this unit on poetry.  You noted the following features of poetry.

uses stanza & lines/form is important

uses images

more interpretation is required

more metaphor/symbolic

language can have special meanings

sound of the language more of a focus

can have  empahsis on emotional/felt response

shorter=>meaning more condensed

So poetry seems like it is more intense/condensed in its meaning making, more connected to the sound/music of language, and more likely to work at multiple levels of meaning making. At the same time, when we took a close look at short stories - the form and language were absolutely important to the story's effect.

How poems mean.  The poem I was trying to remember about how poems "mean" was by Archibald Macleish - and here it is - with the punchline being "a poem should not mean but be."  Which raises questions about why we spent most of class practicing/thinking about strategies for finding the "literal meaning" of a poem as a starting place for creating an interpretation/exploration of its possibilities.   In defense of the suggestion offered by your text book - and our current approach - we aren't really finding a literal meaning, but doing a line by line analysis of the possibilities raised by the sounds, language, allusions and associations the poem brings to us as we read it.  After this close reading we are able to talk about what the poem does and says in a way that will allow us to think about it as a whole.  

We spent most of class talking about The Second Coming. Some of the strategies we used as we read line by line were as follows.

• Paying attention to the title (which persents a preview/overview of the poem)
• Listening to assonance or repetitions - which can make connections between words, syllables and phrases (falcon=> falconer); or create emphasis (turning and turning)
• Listening to the rhythm of the words- phrases that went slowly word by word ('things fall apart' or 'what rough beast') add emphasis and draw attention to themselves
• Associating to particular words/phrases for cultural significance 
• Thinking about the poet's larger body of work/beliefs/the time when s/he wrote
• Wondering why the poet chose particular words or phrases ("troubles my sight," "pitiless," "stony sleep" "vexed to nightmare")
• Wondering about meanings and connections  ("blood-dimmed tide" =>"ceremony of innocence is drowned")
• Connections to larger cultural beliefs, religion, interpretations of history (the concept of the Second Coming from Chritianity, the Book of Revelations, the idea of the Anti-Christ. . .)

We then worked on coming up with a sentence or two (or several different sets of sentences!) to give us a starting place for what we thought the poem was "about" => keeping in mind that it was about MANY things, and that if we could reduce it simply to one sentence we were probably missing something.

We took about 2 minutes at the end of a class to analyze a poem which on the surface seems to report more concrete events.  Hanging Fire  seemed to be a description of a series of events which always ended with the phrase referring to the narrator's mother in the bedroom.  But - like the short stories - it has an urgent aboutness created through the repetition of the question about dying coupled with the mother behind the door of the bedroom and the idea of "hanging fire" that the structure and language and feel  of the poem creates, and this meaning is more than the words.  (And clearlyone thing we needed to do was look up "hanging fire"!)

So - for next class you will be reading about persona and tone, and each of your peer groups is going to take a poem from the "sample" poems in the chapter so you can be the "expert" on the possible meanings.  

Poems by group are as follows.

Jayshawn, Jeen, Melannie, Krystal: Sins of the Father

Maddie, Sarah, Alycia, Melissa: My Fathers Waltz

Cynthia, Rute, Justin, Krysten: The Ruined Maid

Julia,  Chante, Zulema, Stephanie: The Rose poems at the end

We decided you would each write up a line by line analysis, similar to what we did in class for The Second Coming, and post it, and that we would take a minute at the beginning of class for you to pull together what you would say about your poem.  You are not responsible for the analysis of persona and tone and how it shapes the reader's response.  We will talk about that in class.

For next class:
Read:  Chapter 13: Writing about Persona & Tone, 492. 

Write: do a line by line analysis to establish the "literal" meaning for your group’s poem

In class we will begin with the group explorations of the poems - and then talk specifically about how persona and tone contribut to the way the poem evokes a response from the reader.