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Craig White's Literature Courses Critical Sources
Making or Reinforcing |
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A few students may be like us, yearning to find and hear a voice and words that spoke to them of all that mattered.
But most students think poetry's for someone else either long ago or they'll never meet anyway except in English class.
"I don’t get it."
"What’s the use or reward?"
Young people highly social—If they say or indicate the attitudes above, few of their peers will argue and most will feel confirmed.
Easy out most people take, same as religion and politics: the safe and respectable option is to wait quietly for whoever or whatever it is to shut up and go away. Do the minimum required so you don’t have to do it again
Even older people: “That’s interesting, but please don’t tell me about it.”
Since young people are social creatures, find poetry alive in social contexts.
How do you make the strangeness of poetry familiar?
How do you associate it with what you or an even younger person might care for?
Discuss it in terms of associations they may like.
For students who never again go into poetry, there’ll be something they remembered liking.
For students who stay with literature, you'll defend and reinforce their inclinations.
Song lyrics as lyric poetry
"Lyrics" to songs
use same techniques as poetry
Song lyrics are usually somewhat rawer, cruder, or more obvious, but no problem if the music propels them through rough spots
Song lyrics don't have to carry themselves, and most song lyrics don't work as well on the written page.
Written poems tend to be more complex, subtle—not hurried by music, though sometimes faster. Poets may assume a more sophisticated audience.
Movies + literature
Romeo & Juliet
Dead Poets' Society (1989)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) > W.H. Auden, "Funeral Blues"
Basketball Diaries (1995)
Walkabout (1971) + Housman poem
Poetry and visual art
Charismatic poets:
Sylvia Plath
Lord Byron
Shelley
Maya Angelou
Hip-hop:
Tupac Shakur
Corridos and variations
Mexican border ballads
Hymns, prayers
Mystical poetry sounds like prayer:
Psalms of David, Christ’s Beatitudes and Parables, St. Francis,
Rumi, Hafez (Muslim)
Tagore (Bengali Hindu)
Spiritual and Devotional Poets
Social media?
Plenty of creative writers share online, but like real-space writing groups they form, break up, re-form.
Flash poetry
Flash fiction
Performative poems—search YouTube
Poetry slam: competitive art of performance poetry (poets’ equivalent of sf cons)
Narrative poems: http://www.blackcatpoems.com/n/narrative_poems.html
The Face on the Ballroom Floor (cowboy competitions)
Lord Byron