How to Establish Trust With Your Reader

used: poem was just have to do with two things——rhyme and meter

?which provide predictability and stability-so-readers're kind of oriented for the rest part

?sound pleasures-can still have them-but in a less concentrated, in a less predictable way

now:such as Walt Whitman-as a liberator

take rhyme and meter away and put Sth. in

several devices:

?anaphora——the lines begin the same way

eg.<Crossing Brooklyn Ferry>

?internal rhyme-musical pleasures do not come up in a predictable way

?speech rthyms-read aloud and listen to other's sound

Playing a Visible Game

If not rhyming, that's one way you can try.

For the predictbility

eg.<Bestiary for the Fingers of My Right Hand> _Charles Simic

<13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird> _Wallace Stevens

<Questions About Angels>

A point: you gonna run out of questions, how can you get out of it-find the perfect place of settlment

The purpose of the poem was to discover its own ending.

"The beauty of the poem can be measured by the silence it creates."

Turning a Poem

Sth. you may think of while writing a poem,

cause it's that swerving away that is the ability and the flexbility can best represent the flexbility of poetry.

kinds: chronological turn, change the space, change your addressee

eg.<Baloney> _Louis Jenkins

-you can trust your association, because you are the one to write it, you have a lot of room for including associations that otherwise might seem crazy.

It's a good crazy house.

<Monday>_Billy Collins

-writers of fiction and plays: standing outside people's houses and spying on them

-of poetry: inside that house,looking out of the window and telling his readers what he saw.

being playful with your reader-

<Wan Chu's Wife in Bed> _Richard Jones

<eight count> _Charles Bukowski

<What the Living Do>

_Marie Howe

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.

And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous,

and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still have't called.

This is the everyday we spoke of.

It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room wondows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.

For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do.

And yesterday, hurrying along those wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk,

spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush:This is it.

Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold.

What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and winter to pass. We want

whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss-we want more and more and than more of it

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,

say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

I am living. I remember you.

(?kind of all round in time, but there are moments

?a combination of the every day

?last line: you are not here, but you in me, I remember you. I carry you.

<The Death of the Hat>

_Billy Collins

Once every man wore a hat.

In the ashen newsreels,

the avenued of cities

are broad rivers flowing with hats.

The ballparks swelled

with thousands of straw hats,

brims and bands,

rows of men smoking

and cheering in shirtsleeves.

Hats were the law.

They went without saying.

You noticed a man without a hat in a crowd.

You bought them from Adams or Dobbs

who branded your initials in gold

on the inside band.

Trolleys crisscrossed the city.

Steamships sailed in and out of the harbor.

Men with hats gathered on the docks.

There was a person to block your hat

and a hatcheck girl to mind it

while you had a drink

or ate a steak with peas and a baked potato.

In your office stood a hat rack.

The day war was declared

everyone in the street was wearing a hat.

And they were wearing hats

when a ship loaded with men sank in the icy sea.

My father wore one to work every day

and returned home

carrying the evening paper,

the winter chill radiating from his overcoat.

But today we go bareheaded

into the winter streets,

stand hatless on frozen platforms.

Today the mailboxes on the roadside

and the spruce trees behind the house

wear cold white hats of snow.

Mice scurry from the stone walls at night

in their thin fur hats

to eat the birdseed that has spilled.

And now my father, after a life of work,

wears a hat of earth,

and on top of that,

a lighter one of cloud and sky-a hat of wind.

(?the hat here act as a keyhole into a small thing that lead to this much larger thing

Finding Your Voice: Influences

Key point:

Your voice does not lie within you, it lies on the shelves of the library or Sth. like that.

Your voice is in the voices of other poets.

And you will develop your voice by imitating from some of these other poets.

eg.For me

?Whitman: intimacy

?Emily Dickinson: elliptical writing (get rid of the connectives)

?Frost：gradually play out the meaning

the craft of rhyme and meter

Experiencing Literary Jealousy:

-socalled literary influence

To advance behind the state of jealousy, you should take the poets you seem to be envying and one of his or her poems and read it over and over again.

-positively learn from others' poem

eg. for me

<The Mover> -Philip Larkin

(Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind

While there is still time.

?the sudden death of the hedgehog brings to mind the fragility of life-seize the day

<This Lime-tree Bower my Prison> _Coleridge

(Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,

This lime-tree bower my prison!

?start with what's around you and describe your surrondings and then start moving the reverie moves forward.

Finding Your Voice:

Create a Persona

Many issues about how to write the poem are solved once you have a persona.

--cause the way you write and the style you write in are just the mannerisms of your persona

persona: ?actually a character, one is enough.

?is a voice of yours,and you feel that you own that

(feel that no one else could have written that but you

--so calls for a lot of reading)

?You may draw from others', but you don't want to get lost. Ideally, you come out with a voice that you feel very comfortable with expressing yourself. Your page is always by the candle of the past, all those writers.

My persona: a person of leisure

--doesn't have a job or doesn't admit to having a job; an aesthete; has tastes in music and art; has a high level of curiosoty; not very ambitious

So I try to establish that tone of a person who has all the time in the world in most of my poems.

I envy his freedom from many everyday concerns, so it's enjoyable to play him in these poems.

eg.<Three Blind Mice>

Humor As a Serious Strategy

When I first started writing poetry, I believed that poetry was serious, dead serious.

I was funny, but I didn't let that into my poems.

Interestingly, when I look back, it seems that humor is a part of you and you can hide it.

You are funny or you are not, you can't pretend.

I changed my thought because:

There is always a place for humor in the English poetry.

—Chaucer's tales; Shakespeare' comedies;Ogden Nash' light poetrys;Kenneth Koch…

They told me, it's OK.

You can use humor for serious intentions.

When you laugh at Sth., you feel broadened.

(Use in short measure, for a laughing fit will physically takes you.)

Not funny to amuse, but funny to engage.

<The Swan at Edgewater Park>

_Ruth L.Schwartz

Isn't one of your prissy richpeoples' swans

Wouldn't be at home on some pristine pond

Chooses the whole stinking shoreline, candy wrappers, condoms in its tidal fringe

Prefers to curve its muscular, slightly grubby neck into the body of a Great Lake,

Swilling whatever it is swans swill,

Chardonnay of algae with bouquet of crud,

While Clevelanders walk by saying Look at that big duck!

Beauty isn't the point here; of course the swan is beautiful,

But not like Lorie at 16, when

Everything was possible—no

More like Lorie at 27

Smoking away her days off in her dirty kitchen,

Her kid with asthma watching TV,

The boyfriend who doesn't know yet she's gonna

Leave him, washing his car out back—and

He's a runty little guy, and drinks too much, and

It's not his kid anyway, but he loves her, he

Really does, he loves them both—

That's the kind of swan this is.

(? a positioned joke, to have fun with you, and the fun is over very quickly

? the end filp the whole thing, very tricky

? this poem is a defination of an emotion

My (Muslim) Father Seizes the Thing on My Nightstand

_Sarah Iqbal

Before he hit me

he looked for something

with which to hit me and I didn't

know until after

what it was before he hit me I was looking

I imagined him looking

for something to hit me with

I maybe expected heavy I'm saying

I didn't imagine Bible I'm saying

I didn't imagine Jesus to be so heavily

bruising I'm saying I never imagined

for Him to be used like that

and my mother lighting candles didn't hear

like a brick you build houses with

(? make use of spacing:

writer-develop the poem a little more physical

Billy-create quite a bit of tension, cause there's no flow.

? hesitation: show the speaker actually doesn't know what's coming, so it gets more suspenseful.

? ironies(Jesus;Bible): add to the shock

? repetitions(I'm saying): have a kind of numbing

? use mother to draw an end: this room is isolated

(<My Papa's Waltz> _Theodore Roethke）

The Crash

_Paul Epland

In a moment it was over-

the astounding silent thrash of metal

replaced by the bludgeoned motor,

clicking down in circles.

It seems the little green sedan was unaware of the tree.

A comet stopped in verdant careen,

it sent a shower of fresh dirt into the air

as the turf rose up to accommodate its tilting.

Everywhere was covered with earthworms and glass.

And I just sat, letting the oily white

mayonnaise drip from my spinach and tomato

sandwich, my body stuck to a bench

planted in that ringing soil.

Suddenly, it had always been there:

the smoldering thing with its creased aluminum

pricking the air, its roof folded inwards

and squinting.

No, never mind. Not like an eye;

flinching-like a loose fist because it's closes.

They didn't want to see the shape it took,

its chasse thrust out over narrow

unbending hips, now disallowed their turn.

"Best to dance while Rome burns," he said,

"since it must burn."

The figure, a man wrenched from the heap,

was hardly a specter in the black smoke.

It flew away, flew away--

the firemen held up

a thin white sheet and it became a shadow play.

I moved into the space that opened then,

as the stretcher slid into the unlit ambulance.

The air was uncreated. A door swung open into clear.

They'd have dragged me onto the pavement

by my shoulders and starched shirt,

my light having gone out already.

The construction men would wear yellow vests,

lean on their trucks parked in the wet August grass,

and as my heart jumped itself dead they would

spit brown juices to the hot cement.

At home my book is still lying open by the window.

Where the pale afternoon light comes in to churn up the dust.

The cat doesn't seem to care, and no one

says a word; A door slams somewhere.

(? the cat: kind of resolves

? correction: seem like talking to the reader

? big turn: replace the victim-speaker imagines himself in that position

? one question: the reader may not be able to make those jump with you

so maybe-back at home

<The Accident> _Carl Shapiro