Transcript ELLB4 Prescribed Authors POETRY

ELLB4: Text Transformation
This coursework unit requires students to
choose two literary works from the selection of
prescribed authors in this powerpoint and
transform them into different genres.
This powerpoint will take you through the
prescribed authors that you can choose from.
Remember that you have to choose two texts
and that these must be from different genres.
POETRY
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Key Works (14th
Century)
-
The Canterbury
Tales
- The Parlement
of Foules
Style:
• Middle English
• Use of the
vernacular
• Frame story
narrative
• ‘Rhyme
• Royal’
Chaucer is best known as the writer of ‘The Canterbury Tales’,
which is a collection of stories told by fictional pilgrims on the
road to the cathedral at Canterbury; these tales would help to
shape English literature. The text contrasts with other
literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative, the
variety of stories the pilgrims tell and the varied characters
who are engaged in the pilgrimage. Many of the stories
narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters
and social standing, although some of the stories seem illfitting to their narrators, perhaps as a result of the incomplete
state of the work. Chaucer drew on real life for his cast of
pilgrims.
The "Parlement of Foules" (also known as the
"Parliament of Foules", "Parlement of Birddes",
"Assembly of Fowls", "Assemble of Foules", or "The
Parliament of Birds") is a poem by made up of
approximately 700 lines. The poem is in the form of a
dream vision in rhyme royal stanza and is interesting in
that it is the first reference to the idea that St Valentine’s
day was a romantic day for lovers.
Extract from The Canterbury Tales
Where can ye saye in any manere age
That hye God defended mariage
By expres word? I praye you, telleth me.
Or where commanded he virginitee?
I woot as wel as ye, it is no drede,
Th’Apostle, whan he speketh of maidenhede,
He said that precept therof hadde he noon:
Men may conseile a woman to be oon,
But conseiling nis no comandement.
He putte it in oure owene juggement.
For hadde God commanded maidenhead,
Thanne hadde he dampned wedding with the deede;
And certes, if there were no seed ysowe,
Virginitee, thane wherof sholde it growe?
Paul dorste nat comanden at the leeste
A things of which his maister yaf no heeste.
The dart is set up for virginitee:
Cacche whoso may, who renneth best lat see.
But this word is nought take of every wight,
But ther as God list yive it of his mite.
JOHN DONNE (16th-17th Century)
Style:
• Metaphysical
• Use of extended
metaphors
• Paradoxes, puns and
analogies.
• Common subjects:
love, death and
religion.
Key Poems:
- The Broken Heart
- The Flea
- Divine Meditation
- No Man is an Island
DEATH BE NOT PROUD
Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee,
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and souls deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell,
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And Death shall be no more, death thou shalt die!
JOHN DONNE (16th-17th Century)
Style:
• Metaphysical
• Use of extended
metaphors
• Paradoxes, puns and
analogies.
• Common subjects:
love, death and
religion.
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
ROBERT BROWNING (16th-17th Century)
Style:
• Dramatic
Monologues: convey
setting and action
but also reveal the
speaker's character
KEY WORKS
• Porphyria’s Lover
• My Last Duchess
• The Laboratory
• The Pied Piper of
Hamlin
"Porphyria's Lover" is Browning's first ever short dramatic ,
and also the first of his poems to examine abnormal
psychology. In the poem, a man strangles his lover –
Porphyria – with her hair; "... and all her hair / In one long
yellow string I wound / Three times her little throat around, /
And strangled her." Porphyria's lover then talks of the corpse's
blue eyes, golden hair, and describes the feeling of perfect
happiness the murder gives him. Although he winds her hair
around her throat three times to throttle her, the woman
never cries out.
Extract:
That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
Perfectly pure and good: I found
A thing to do, and all her hair
In one long yellow string I wound
Three times her little throat around,
And strangled her. No pain felt she;
I am quite sure she felt no pain.
As a shut bud that holds a bee,
I warily oped her lids: again
Laughed the blue eyes without a stain.
ROBERT BROWNING (16th-17th Century)
Style:
• Dramatic
Monologues: convey
setting and action
but also reveal the
speaker's character
KEY WORKS
• Porphyria’s Lover
• My Last Duchess
• The Laboratory
• The Pied Piper of
Hamlin
My Last Duchess: The poem is set during the late Italian
Renaissance. The speaker (presumably the Duke of Ferrara) is
giving the emissary of the family of his prospective new wife a
tour of the artworks in his home. He draws a curtain to reveal
a painting of a woman, explaining that it is a portrait of his
late wife; he invites his guest to sit and look at the painting. As
they look at the portrait of the late Duchess, the Duke
describes her happy, cheerful and flirtatious nature, which
had displeased him. Eventually, "I gave commands; then all
smiles stopped together." He now keeps her painting hidden
behind a curtain that only he is allowed to draw back,
meaning that now she only smiles for him. Throughout the
whole poem you get the sense that the Duke owns his wife.
EXTRACT:
That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said
“Frà Pandolf” by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (19th Century)
Style:
• Religious and sexual
oppression
• Meditations on
death and loss in the
Romantic tradition
KEY WORKS
• Goblin Market
• A Birthday
• Eve
• Remember
• When I Am Dead
Goblin Market: Rosetti’s most famous work. Although it is
ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins,
critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways: seeing it
as an allegory about temptation and salvation; a commentary
on Victorian gender roles and female agency; and a work
about erotic desire and social redemption.
EXTRACT:
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries; -
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (19th Century)
Style:
• Religious and sexual
oppression
• Meditations on
death and loss in the
Romantic tradition
KEY WORKS
• Goblin Market
• A Birthday
• Eve
• Remember
• When I Am Dead
When I am dead, my dearest
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
EMILY DICKINSON (19th Century)
Style:
• Extensive use of
dashes and
unconventional
capitalization
• Idiosyncratic
vocabulary and
imagery
• Ballad stanza
• Themes of
flowers/gardens,
morbidity and
Christianity
Behind Me Dips Eternity
Behind Me -- dips Eternity -Before Me -- Immortality -Myself -- the Term between -Death but the Drift of Eastern Gray,
Dissolving into Dawn away,
Before the West begin -'Tis Kingdoms -- afterward -- they say -In perfect -- pauseless Monarchy -Whose Prince -- is Son of None -Himself -- His Dateless Dynasty -Himself -- Himself diversify -In Duplicate divine -'Tis Miracle before Me -- then -'Tis Miracle behind -- between -A Crescent in the Sea -With Midnight to the North of Her -And Midnight to the South of Her -And Maelstrom -- in the Sky --
EMILY DICKINSON (19th Century)
Style:
• Extensive use of
dashes and
unconventional
capitalization
• Idiosyncratic
vocabulary and
imagery
• Ballad stanza
• Themes of
flowers/gardens,
morbidity and
Christianity
Key Poems
Hope is the Thing With
Feathers
Because I Could Not Stop
for Death
Tis So Much Joy
Behind Me Tips Eternity
Because I Could Not Stop For Death
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible.
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 'tis centuries but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
EDWARD LEAR(19th Century)
Style:
• Humour
• Verbal invention of
language
• Manipulation of the
sounds of words
• Use of neologisms
In 1846 Lear published ‘A Book of Nonsense’, a volume of
limericks that went through three editions and helped
popularize the form. In 1865 The History of the Seven Families
of the Lake Pipple-Popple was published, and in 1867 his most
famous piece of nonsense, ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’ was
written.
Extract from ‘THE QWANGLE-WANGLE’S HAT’
On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side,
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody ever could see the face
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.
WILFRED OWEN(19th- 20th Century)
WORLD WAR I poet
Style:
• Gritty realism
• Writing from experience
• Use of speech and
present tense to create
sense of urgency
• Half rhyme
• Assonance and
onomatopoeia to create
sounds of war.
Key Poems:
Strange Meeting
The Show
Dulce et Decorum Est
Mental Cases
Futility
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Anthem For Doomed Youth
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
WILFRED OWEN(19th- 20th Century)
WORLD WAR I poet
Futility
Style:
• Gritty realism
• Writing from experience
• Use of speech and
present tense to create
sense of urgency
• Half rhyme
• Assonance and
onomatopoeia to create
sounds of war.
Move him into the sun Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Key Poems:
Strange Meeting
The Show
Dulce et Decorum Est
Mental Cases
Futility
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Think how it wakes the seeds, Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
JOHN BETJEMAN (20th Century)
Style:
• Humorous
• Satirical
• Based on observations of
everyday life
• Christian influences
• Focuses on the ordinary
Poetry Collections
Mount Zion (1932)
Continual Dew (1937)
Old Lights For New Chancels
(1940)
New Bats in Old Belfries (1945)
A Few Late Chrysanthemums
(1954)
Poems in the Porch (1954)
Summoned By Bells (1960)
High and Low (1966)
A Nip in the Air (1974)
Extract from DIARY OF A CHURCH MOUSE
Here among long-discarded cassocks,
Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,
Here where the vicar never looks
I nibble through old service books.
Lean and alone I spend my days
Behind this Church of England baize.
I share my dark forgotten room
With two oil-lamps and half a broom.
The cleaner never bothers me,
So here I eat my frugal tea.
My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;
My jam is polish for the floor.
Christmas and Easter may be feasts
For congregations and for priests,
And so may Whitsun. All the same,
They do not fill my meagre frame.
GRACE NICHOLS (20th Century)
Style:
• Culture of Guyana
(Carribbean) is a key motif.
• Lyrical
• Comment on issues of race
• Repeated stanza structure
• Oral story-telling tradition
Poems and Poetry Collections
• Praise Song for my Mother
• Hurricane Hits England
• I Is a Long Memoried
Woman (1983)
• Picasso, I Want My Face
Back (2009)
• Startling the Flying Fish
(2006)
Extract from ‘Hurricane Hits England’
It took a hurricane, to bring her closer
To the landscape
Half the night she lay awake,
The howling ship of the wind,
Its gathering rage,
Like some dark ancestral spectre,
Fearful and reassuring:
Talk to me Huracan
Talk to me Oya
Talk to me Shango
And Hattie,
My sweeping, back-home cousin.
Tell me why you visit.
An English coast?
What is the meaning
Of old tongues
Reaping havoc
In new places?
The blinding illumination,
Even as you shortCircuit us
Into further darkness?
SEAMUS HEANEY (20th Century)
Style:
• Saw poetry as ‘an engine
for personal and cultural
change’- wrote particularly
on the ‘troubles’ in Ireland
• Concerned with the past
• Largely focused on rural
life
• Focused on real-life detail
• Tries to emulate natural
speech- concerned with
the sound of language.
Some of Heaney’s Poetry
Collections
• Death of a Naturalist
• Door into the Dark
• District and Circle
• Human Chain
Extract from ‘Death of a Naturalist’
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimbleSwimming tadpoles.
U.A.FANTHORPE(20th Century)
Extract from ‘Case History: Alison (head injury)’
Style:
• Some use of monologues
• Juxtaposition
• Concentrates on minor
characters
• Tenderness and dignity
with difficult content of
some poems e.g. the
collection Side Effects was
influenced by her working
in a psychiatric hospital.
Some of Fanthorpe’s Poetry
Collections
Side Effects (1978)
Standing to (1982)
Voices off. (1984)
Neck-verse (1992)
Safe as House (1995)
Consequences (2000)
I would like to have known
My husband's wife, my mother's only daughter.
A bright girl she was.
Enmeshed in comforting
Fat, I wonder at her delicate angles.
Her autocratic knee
Like a Degas dancer's
Adjusts to the observer with airy poise,
That now lugs me upstairs
Hardly. Her face, broken
By nothing sharper than smiles, holds in its smiles
What I have forgotten.
She knows my father's dead,
And grieves for it, and smiles. She has digested
Mourning. Her smile shows it.
I, who need reminding
Every morning, shall never get over what
I do not remember.
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH (20th Century)
Style:
• Poetry strongly influenced
by Jamaican music and
literature
• Political poet
• Use of dialect to influence
language choices
• Use of questions
Zephaniah’s Poetry
Collections
Pen Rhythm (1980)
The Dread Affair: Collected
Poems (1985) C
City Psalms (1992)
Inna Liverpool (1992)
Talking Turkeys (1995)
Propa Propaganda (1996)
White Comedy
Wicked World! (2000)
Too Black, Too Strong (2001)
No Problem
I am not de problem
But I bare de brunt
Of silly playground taunts
An racist stunts,
I am not de problem
I am a born academic
But dey got me on de run
Now I am branded athletic,
I am not de problem
If yu give I a chance
I can teach yu of Timbuktu
I can do more dan dance,
I am not de problem
I greet yu wid a smile
Yu put me in a pigeon hole
But I a versatile.
These conditions may affect me
As I get older,
An I am positively sure
I have no chips on me shoulders,
Black is not de problem
Mother country get it right,
An just for de record,
Sum of me best friends are white
ALFRED TENNYSON (19th Century)
Style:
• Poetry strongly influenced
by classical mythology
• Domestic situations and
references to nature
• Onomatopoeia, alliteration
and assonance
• Victorian in terms of order
and morality
• Themes of grief, loss and
melancholy.
Key poems:
• The Lady of Shalott
• In Memoriam
• The Charge of the Light
Brigade
• Crossing the Bar
An extract from ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!’ he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Someone had blunder’d:
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d and thunder’d
CAROL ANN DUFFY (20th-21st Century)
Style:
• Unconventional attitudes
to topics
• Often unconventional
forms used
• Love is often at the centre
of her poetry
• Myth and fairytale
references often used
• Form of dramatic
monologue often used
Poetry collections:
• Rapture (2005)
• The World’s Wife (1999)
ORIGINALLY
We came from our own country in a red room
which fell through the fields, our mother singing
our father’s name to the turn of the wheels.
My brothers cried, one of them bawling, Home,
Home, as the miles rushed back to the city,
the street, the house, the vacant rooms
where we didn’t live any more. I stared
at the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.
All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,
leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenue
where no one you know stays. Others are sudden.
Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,
leading to unimagined pebble-dashed estates, big boys
eating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.
My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose tooth
in my head. I want our own country, I said.
But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change,
and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel only
a skelf of shame. I remember my tongue
shedding its skin like a snake, my voice
in the classroom sounding just like the rest. Do I only think
I lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first space
and the right place? Now, Where do you come from?
strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate.
SYLVIA PLATH (20th Century)
THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE
Style:
• Confessional poetry- centred
around personal emotion
• Personal and nature-based
depictions featuring, for
example, the moon, blood,
hospitals, foetuses, and skulls.
• Emotions are often passion,
anger and despair.
• Interpreted as dark in its tone
as the poems are almost
autobiographical in terms of
describing mental illness.
Poetry collections:
• The Colossus and Other Poems
(1960)
• Ariel (1965)
• Three Women: A Monologue
(1968)
• Crossing the Water (1971)
• Winter Trees (1971)
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (18-19th Century)
Style:
• Romantic poet (with a capital
R)- themes of transience,
melancholy, death and
mythology.
• Uses common everyday
language to create poetic
images
• Wrote both narrative poems
and conversational poems
Key Poems:
Narrative poems:
• The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner
• Kubla Khan
• Christabel
Conversational poems:
• Frost at Midnight
• The Eolian Harp
• The Nightingale
The Nightingale: A Conversational Poem
'Most musical, most melancholy' bird!
A melancholy bird! Oh! idle thought!
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
(And so, poor wretch! filled all things with himself,
And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale
Of his own sorrow) he, and such as he,
First named these notes a melancholy strain.
And youths and maidens most poetical,
Who lose the deepening twilights of the spring
In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still
Full of meek sympathy must heave their sighs
O’er Philomela's pity-pleading strains.
My Friend, and thou, our Sister! we have learnt
A different lore : we may not thus profane
Nature’s sweet voices, always full of love
And joyance!
JOHN KEATS (18-19th Century)
Style:
• Also a Romantic poet (with a
capital R)- themes of
transience, melancholy, death
and addiction
• Uses sensory images
• Focus on nature
• References made to Greek and
Roman mythology
• Use of exclamation marks to
show emotion
Key Poems:
Narrative poems:
• Isabella or The Pot of Basil
• The Eve of St Agnes
Conversational poems:
• Ode to a Grecian Urn
• Ode to a Nightingale
• To Autumn
Extract from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
BILLY COLLINS (20th-21st Century)
Style:
• Conversational, witty poems
• Collins stated that his poems
were: “suburban, it’s
domestic, it’s middle class, and
it’s sort of unashamedly that.”
• Use of metaphor
• Focus on the ordinary
• ‘American’ in terms of voice
Key Poems:
• Horoscopes for the Dead
(2001)
• Aimless Love (2013)
• The Art of
Drowning (1995)
• The Apple that
Astonished Paris (1988)
THE GOLDEN YEARS
All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasants to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.
I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.
RAYMOND CARVER (20thCentury)
Style:
• Minimalist poet
• Poetry influenced by ‘gritty
realism’- sadness and loss in
the everyday lives of ordinary
people—often lower-middle
class or isolated and
marginalized people.
Poetry Collections:
Near Klamath (1968)
Winter Insomnia (1970)
At Night The Salmon Move (1976)
Fires (1983)
Where Water Comes Together
With Other Water (1985)
Ultramarine (1986)
A New Path To The Waterfall
(1989)
Gravy (Unknown year)
THE OLD DAYS
It was then that I remembered
back to those days
and how telephones used to
jump when they rang.
And the people who would come
in those early-morning
hours to pound on the door in
alarm. Never mind the
alarm felt inside.
I remembered that, and gravy
dinners. Knives lying
around, waiting for trouble.
Going to bed and hoping
I wouldn't wake up.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI (20thCentury)
Style:
• Prolific underground writer
• Used his writing to depict the depravity
of urban life and the downtrodden in
American society
• His main concerns are experience,
emotion, and imagination in his work,
using direct language and violent and
sexual imagery.
• Use of free verse and declarative
sentences
A Smile to Remember
Poetry Collections:
Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail (1960)
Crucifix in a Deathhand (1965)
At Terror Street and Agony Way (1968)
You Get So Alone at Times That It Just
Makes Sense (1986)
What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk
Through the Fire. (1999)
The Night Torn Mad with Footsteps (2001)
Slouching Toward Nirvana (2005)
The Pleasures of the Damned (2007),
The Continual Condition (2009)
my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: 'Henry, smile!
why don't you ever smile?'
we had goldfish and they circled around and around
in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes
covering the picture window and
my mother, always smiling, wanting us all
to be happy, told me, 'be happy Henry!'
and she was right: it's better to be happy if you
can
but my father continued to beat her and me several times a
week while
raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't
understand what was attacking him from within.
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw
one day the goldfish died, all five of them,
they floated on the water, on their sides, their
eyes still open,
and when my father got home he threw them to the cat
there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother
smiled