OMG, I'm done!

Woo hooo!

I had a lot of fun with this project. I cant wait to try it out on my own students!

Charles Bernstein Quote

“Many readers when they first encounter a difficult poem say to themselves, "Why me?" The first reaction they often have is to think that this is an unusual problem that other readers have not faced. So the first step in dealing with the difficult poem is to recognize that this is a common problem that many other readers confront on a daily basis. You are not alone!”

—Charles Bernstein

(Charles Bernstein, Harper’s Magazine, June 2003, Volume 306, Issue 1837; ISSN: 0017-789X)

Repentends

It's so funny. Originally, when embarking on this project, I had SO many grand plans for the repentend. Poet epitaphs. Poet obituaries. Children's poems (short ones). Nursery rhymes. Song lyrics that I loved.

But now none of those seem to fit. I can't explain it, because I am not even totally sure my paper makes sense, but the ideas I had before just don't seem to match.

And then I stumbled upon advice from poets to aspiring poets. There is loads of good, valuable, interesting stuff out there! So there we go. And off I go to add them in!

I am not sure adding the repetends in at the end is a good way to do this, but then again, this entire MGRP process has felt cobbled together. I have been working like a dog on it, had a blast writing the crots, enjoyed searching for quotes and other information to include, and now I am off to repentend. But none of it has felt fluid. Maybe I am just much more of a rule follower than this paper enforces. =)

NCTE References

As Lee Odell explains in “Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work,” “[W]e continually find ourselves making value judgments about students’ work . . . . Where we run into trouble is in trying to articulate these value judgments, especially when we try to explain to students why one piece of writing meets a certain standard and another does not.

Odell, Lee. “Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work.” Evaluating Writing: The Role of Teachers’ Knowledge about Text, Learning, and Culture. Ed. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana: NCTE, 1999. 7–22.

***

Many of us wonder where we should begin poetry studies. Begin the year with poems to which students can personally relate—poems about going to school. Furthermore, rather than starting with the scary, technical elements, give students frequent exposure to poetry and personal writing experiences all year long. In considering such approaches, we might all be able to dismantle fears and poetic phobias from the first day of school.

Poetry, Schmoetry! A Potpourri of Resources to Generate Enthusiasm for the Genre
By Colleen A. Ruggiere Editor, Boardman High School, Boardman, Ohio
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 115

***

…a daily dose of poetry would be a potent elixir for students, and that genre would become a force in students’ lives if they were given the opportunity to make sense of it for themselves.

By Tamara L. C. Van Wyhe, Copper River School District, Glennallen, Alaska
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 15

As a teacher, I discovered poetry to be magic in many ways. It offered brevity, allowing a quick reading and discussion of a complete piece of text as a way to begin a class period. It offered variety, allowing students to discover a vast array of subjects and styles. It offered a myriad of companion pieces to the novels and nonfiction texts we encountered. It offered a powerful tool for teaching word choice, fluency, and the impact of conventions. It offered opportunities to investigate issues of speaker and audience. It offered questions with no answers, invitations to support assertions based on text, and it helped students understand what mood and tone and emotion really mean when it comes to writing. It offered them models to try on and wear around for a while, eventually helping them to tailor their writing styles. It offered students a genre for documenting their lives, one poetic snapshot at a time.

By Tamara L. C. Van Wyhe, Copper River School District, Glennallen, Alaska
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 15

Just Writing

Now I am just writing like a madwoman. I am not sure I am writing what I *should* be writing, but I have over 12 pages thus far. Once I finish the crots, I am going to work in repetends - advice to young poets from famous poets (in both poetic and prose form). Should be interesting!

Then I need to figure out where to apply my official sources, and hopefully I will be good to go.

This project is harder than I thought it would be. I don't know if that is because I am over-thinking it, or perhaps it is just a challenge. This is the first time during my Career Switcher inaugural semester that I am having a hard time balancing two young children, my contract work, my day-to-day life, and my school deadlines.

But nothing that's easy to get can be worth much, eh?

So get back to work!

Poetry as a Career: Advice

http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/advice.htm

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place — in this culture — to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.
— Maxine Kumin

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
— Donald Hall

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
— James Dickey

On solemn asses fall plush sinecures,
So keep a straight face and sit tight on yours.
— X. J. Kennedy, To A Young Poet

A young poet must discover who he is, he must create himself as a poet. Even a genius must do this. It's a painful process, splitting out your own skin and squeezing your soul and body out of it, even, sometimes, before you know the shape of color of the new self you are going to become.
— Daniel Hoffman

A Poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
— Robert Frost

The finest cowboy poems rarely cut it on the printed page. They must be recited the way they are written, from the noggin, with feeling. They're like fine wine. They must breathe, especially if they've been bottled up too long.
— David J. Swift

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.
— Henry David Thoreau  

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.
— Richard Hugo 

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
— Stanley Kunitz

“You should have your head filled with poems all the time, until they almost get in your way.”

--Elizabeth Bishop

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
— Robert Graves

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself—which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
— Robert Graves

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems—especially wonderful tough monosyllables like “gasp” and “cry.” Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
— Donald Hall

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world— unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

—    ee cummings

More on Martin

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81893