Post-1945 Poetry - English with Mrs. Lamp



Post-1945 Poetry3/25GrammarSmall Groups: Read both “My Papa’s Waltz” (by Theodore Roethke) and “Axe Handles” (by Gary Snyder). Then, compare and contrast the two poems’ portrayal of family bonds (submit a team response).HW: Read both “One Art “(by Elizabeth Bishop) and “Those Winter Sundays” (by Robert Hayden)3/26Time to finish vocab sort (10 minutes)Small Groups: Choose either “One Art or “Those Winter Sundays “& analyze how the poem reveals its meaning through specific literary devices and poetic elements (submit a team response).HW: Read either “Skunk Hour” (by Robert Lowell) or “Lady Lazarus” (by Sylvia Plath)3/27GrammarSmall Groups: Choose either “Skunk Hour” or “Lady Lazarus” & analyze how the poem’s language reveals the speaker’s state of mind (submit a team response).HW: Read both “Boy Breaking Glass “(by Gwendolyn Brooks) and “Dead Horse in a Field” (by Robert Penn Warren)3/28Vocab QuizletSmall Groups: Compare and contrast the style of “Boy Breaking Glass” to the style of “Dead Horse in a Field” (submit a team response).HW: Read either “Let America Be America Again” (by Langston Hughes) or “In the Waiting Room” (by Elizabeth Bishop)3/29GrammarSmall Groups:Choose either of last night’s poems. Make a claim regarding what the poem’s subject is and then analyze how the poem develops a certain mood toward its subject (submit a team response).HW: Read “Choices” (by Nikki Giovanni), or “Still I Rise” (by Maya Angelou), or “America” (by Allen Ginsberg). Choose one of the poems above. Write a 1-2 page poetry mon AP Exam Poetry Essay PromptsThe SpeakerHow does the poem’s language reveal the speaker’s state of mind?How does the poem use poetic techniques to characterize its speaker?imagery, diction, syntax, repetition, tone, etc.Tone & MoodHow does the poem reveal the speaker’s attitude toward ----? What tone does the speaker express toward ----, and how is this tone established?Trace the speaker’s changing attitude toward ----.imagery, diction, connotations, figurative language, rhetorical devices, allusion, syntax, repetition, pattern etc.How does the poet convey a mood (or moods)?How does the poem develop a certain mood toward ---- [the poem’s subject]?point of view, imagery, diction, repetition, pattern, sound devices, connotations, allusions, etc.ThemeHow does the poem reveal its meaning?How is/are contrasting ---- central to the meaning (theme) of the poem?Compare and contrast the themes (meaning/point) of these two poems and how each poem uses poetic devices to convey its theme.structure, organization, title, imagery, allusion, irony, point of view, repetition, pattern, symbolism, diction, imagery, etc. MiscellaneousCompare and contrast the style of these two poems.point of view, imagery, diction, structure, tone, sound devices, rhyme and rhythm, syntax, figurative languageHow does the speaker describe/portray/present ----?Compare the two poems’ portrayals of ----.imagery, diction, tone, connotations, figurative language, allusion, sound devices, irony, symbolism, titleMy Papa’s Waltz Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)The whiskey on your breath???Could make a small boy dizzy;???But I hung on like death:???Such waltzing was not easy.We romped until the pans???Slid from the kitchen shelf;???My mother’s countenance???Could not unfrown itself.The hand that held my wrist???Was battered on one knuckle;???At every step you missedMy right ear scraped a buckle.You beat time on my head???With a palm caked hard by dirt,???Then waltzed me off to bed???Still clinging to your shirt.Axe Handles Gary Snyder (1930—Present)One afternoon the last week in AprilShowing Kai how to throw a hatchetOne-half turn and it sticks in a stump.He recalls the hatchet-headWithout a handle, in the shopAnd go gets it, and wants it for his own.A broken-off axe handle behind the doorIs long enough for a hatchet,We cut it to length and take itWith the hatchet headAnd working hatchet, to the wood block.There I begin to shape the old handleWith the hatchet, and the phraseFirst learned from Ezra PoundRings in my ears!"When making an axe handle???????????????? the pattern is not far off."And I say this to Kai"Look: We'll shape the handleBy checking the handleOf the axe we cut with—"And he sees. And I hear it again:It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth centuryA.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in thePreface: "In making the handleOf an axeBy cutting wood with an axeThe model is indeed near at hand."My teacher Shih-hsiang ChenTranslated that and taught it years agoAnd I see: Pound was an axe,Chen was an axe, I am an axeAnd my son a handle, soonTo be shaping again, modelAnd tool, craft of culture,How we go on.One Art Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)The art of losing isn’t hard to master;so many things seem filled with the intentto be lost that their loss is no disaster.Lose something every day. Accept the flusterof lost door keys, the hour badly spent.The art of losing isn’t hard to master.Then practice losing farther, losing faster:places, and names, and where it was you meantto travel. None of these will bring disaster.I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, ornext-to-last, of three loved houses went.The art of losing isn’t hard to master.I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gestureI love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evidentthe art of losing’s not too hard to masterthough it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.Those Winter Sundays Robert Hayden (1913-1980)Sundays too my father got up earlyand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.When the rooms were warm, he’d call,and slowly I would rise and dress,fearing the chronic angers of that house,Speaking indifferently to him,who had driven out the coldand polished my good shoes as well.What did I know, what did I knowof love’s austere and lonely offices?Skunk Hour Robert Lowell (1917-1977)(For Elizabeth Bishop)Nautilus Island’s hermitheiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;her sheep still graze above the sea.Her son’s a bishop. Her farmeris first selectman in our village;she’s in her dotage.Thirsting forthe hierarchic privacyof Queen Victoria’s century,she buys up allthe eyesores facing her shore,and lets them fall.The season’s ill—we’ve lost our summer millionaire,who seemed to leap from an L. L. Beancatalogue. His nine-knot yawlwas auctioned off to lobstermen.A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.And now our fairydecorator brightens his shop for fall;his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;there is no money in his work,he’d rather marry.One dark night,my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,they lay together, hull to hull,where the graveyard shelves on the town…My mind’s not right.A car radio bleats,“Love, O careless Love…” I hearmy ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,as if my hand were at its throat…I myself am hell;nobody’s here—only skunks, that searchin the moonlight for a bite to eat.They march on their soles up Main Street:white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fireunder the chalk-dry and spar spireof the Trinitarian Church.I stand on topof our back steps and breathe the rich air—a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pailShe jabs her wedge-head in a cupof sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,and will not scare.Lady Lazarus Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)I have done it again.???One year in every ten???I manage it——A sort of walking miracle, my skin???Bright as a Nazi lampshade,???My right footA paperweight,My face a featureless, fine???Jew linen.Peel off the napkin???O my enemy.???Do I terrify?——The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth????The sour breathWill vanish in a day.Soon, soon the fleshThe grave cave ate will be???At home on meAnd I a smiling woman.???I am only thirty.And like the cat I have nine times to die.This is Number Three.???What a trashTo annihilate each decade.What a million filaments.???The peanut-crunching crowd???Shoves in to seeThem unwrap me hand and foot——The big strip tease.???Gentlemen, ladiesThese are my hands???My knees.I may be skin and bone,Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.???The first time it happened I was ten.???It was an accident.The second time I meantTo last it out and not come back at all.???I rocked shutAs a seashell.They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.DyingIs an art, like everything else.???I do it exceptionally well.I do it so it feels like hell.???I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I’ve a call.It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.???It’s the theatricalComeback in broad dayTo the same place, the same face, the same brute???Amused shout:‘A miracle!’That knocks me out.???There is a chargeFor the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge???For the hearing of my heart——It really goes.And there is a charge, a very large charge???For a word or a touch???Or a bit of bloodOr a piece of my hair or my clothes.???So, so, Herr Doktor.???So, Herr Enemy.I am your opus,I am your valuable,???The pure gold babyThat melts to a shriek.???I turn and burn.Do not think I underestimate your great concern.Ash, ash—You poke and stir.Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——A cake of soap,???A wedding ring,???A gold filling.Herr God, Herr Lucifer???BewareBeware.Out of the ashI rise with my red hair???And I eat men like air.Boy Breaking Glass Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)Whose broken window is a cry of art???(success, that winks awareas elegance, as a treasonable faith)is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.???Our barbarous and metal little man.“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.???If not an overture, a desecration.”Full of pepper and lightand Salt and night and cargoes.“Don’t go down the plankif you see there’s no extension.???Each to his grief, each tohis loneliness and fidgety revenge.Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”The only sanity is a cup of tea.???The music is in minors.Each one otheris having different weather.“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!???And this is everything I have for me.”Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,???the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,???runs. A sloppy amalgamation.A mistake.A cliff.A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.Dead Horse in a FieldRobert Penn Warren (1905-1989)In the last, far field, half-buriedIn barberry bushes red-fruited, the thoroughbredLies dead, left foreleg shattered below knee,A .30-30 in heart. In distance,I now see gorged crows rise ragged in wind. The dayAfter death I had gone for farewell, and the eyesWere already gone—thatThe beneficent work of crows. Eyes gone,The two-year-old could, of course, more readily seeDown the track of pure and eternal darkness.A week later I couldn’t get close. The sweet stinkHad begun. That damned wagon mudholeHidden by leaves as we galloped—I found it.Spat on it. As a child would. Next dayThe buzzards. How beautiful in air!—carvingThe slow, concentric, downward pattern of vortex, wing-glintOn wing-glint. From the house,Now with glasses, I seeThe squabble and pushing, the waggle of wattle-red heads.At evening I watch the buzzards, the crows,Arise. They swing black in nature’s flow and perfection,High in sad carmine of sunset. ForgivenessIs not indicated. It is superfluous. They areWhat they are.How long before I go back to seeThat intricate piece ofModern sculpture, white now,Assuming in stasisNew beauty! Then,A year later, I’ll seeThe green twine of vine, each leafHeart-shaped, soft as velvet, beginningIts benediction.It thinks it is God.Can you think of some ground on which that may be gainsaid?Let America Be America AgainLangston Hughes (1902-1967)Let America be America again.Let it be the dream it used to be.Let it be the pioneer on the plainSeeking a home where he himself is free.(America never was America to me.)5Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—Let it be that great strong land of loveWhere never kings connive nor tyrants schemeThat any man be crushed by one above.(It never was America to me.)10O, let my land be a land where LibertyIs crowned with no false patriotic wreath,But opportunity is real, and life is free,Equality is in the air we breathe.(There's never been equality for me,15Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.20I am the red man driven from the land,I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—And finding only the same old stupid planOf dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.I am the young man, full of strength and hope,25Tangled in that ancient endless chainOf profit, power, gain, of grab the land!Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!Of work the men! Of take the pay!Of owning everything for one's own greed!30I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.I am the worker sold to the machine.I am the Negro, servant to you all.I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—Hungry yet today despite the dream.35Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!I am the man who never got ahead,The poorest worker bartered through the years.Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dreamIn the Old World while still a serf of kings,40Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,That even yet its mighty daring singsIn every brick and stone, in every furrow turnedThat's made America the land it has become.O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas45In search of what I meant to be my home—For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,And torn from Black Africa's strand I cameTo build a "homeland of the free."50The free?Who said the free? Not me?Surely not me? The millions on relief today?The millions shot down when we strike?The millions who have nothing for our pay?55For all the dreams we've dreamedAnd all the songs we've sungAnd all the hopes we've heldAnd all the flags we've hung,The millions who have nothing for our pay—60Except the dream that's almost dead today.O, let America be America again—The land that never has been yet—And yet must be—the land where every man is free.The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—65Who made America,Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,Must bring back our mighty dream again.Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—70The steel of freedom does not stain.From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,We must take back our land again,America!O, yes,75I say it plain,America never was America to me,And yet I swear this oath—America will be!Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,80The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,We, the people, must redeemThe land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.The mountains and the endless plain—All, all the stretch of these great green states—85And make America again!In the Waiting RoomElizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)In Worcester, Massachusetts,I went with Aunt Consueloto keep her dentist's appointmentand sat and waited for herin the dentist's waiting room.It was winter. It got darkearly. The waiting roomwas full of grown-up people,arctics and overcoats,lamps and magazines.My aunt was insidewhat seemed like a long timeand while I waited I readthe National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs:the inside of a volcano,black, and full of ashes;then it was spilling overin rivulets of fire.Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches,laced boots, and pith helmets.A dead man slung on a pole--"Long Pig," the caption said.Babies with pointed headswound round and round with string;black, naked women with neckswound round and round with wirelike the necks of light bulbs.Their breasts were horrifying.I read it right straight through.I was too shy to stop.And then I looked at the cover:the yellow margins, the date.Suddenly, from inside,came an oh! of pain--Aunt Consuelo's voice--not very loud or long.I wasn't at all surprised;even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman.I might have been embarrassed,but wasn't. What took mecompletely by surprisewas that it was me:my voice, in my mouth.Without thinking at allI was my foolish aunt,I--we--were falling, falling,our eyes glued to the coverof the National Geographic,February, 1918.I said to myself: three daysand you'll be seven years old.I was saying it to stopthe sensation of falling offthe round, turning world.into cold, blue-black space.But I felt: you are an I,you are an Elizabeth,you are one of them.Why should you be one, too?I scarcely dared to lookto see what it was I was.I gave a sidelong glance--I couldn't look any higher--at shadowy gray knees,trousers and skirts and bootsand different pairs of handslying under the lamps.I knew that nothing strangerhad ever happened, that nothingstranger could ever happen.Why should I be my aunt,or me, or anyone?What similarities--boots, hands, the family voiceI felt in my throat, or eventhe National Geographicand those awful hanging breasts--held us all togetheror made us all just one?How--I didn't know anyword for it--how "unlikely". . .How had I come to be here,like them, and overheara cry of pain that could havegot loud and worse but hadn't?The waiting room was brightand too hot. It was slidingbeneath a big black wave,another, and another.Then I was back in it.The War was on. Outside,in Worcester, Massachusetts,were night and slush and cold,and it was still the fifth of February, 1918.ChoicesNikki Giovanni (1943—Present)If i can't do what i want to do then my job is to not do what i don't want to doIt's not the same thing but it's the best i can doIf i can't have what i want... then my job is to want what i've got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to wantSince i can't go where i need to go... then i must... go where the signs point though always understandingparallel movement isn't lateralWhen i can't express what i really feel i practice feeling what i can express and none of it is equalI know but that's why mankind alone among the animals learns to cryStill I Rise Maya Angelou (1928-2014)You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may trod me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you?Why are you beset with gloom?’Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken?Bowed head and lowered eyes?Shoulders falling down like teardrops,Weakened by my soulful cries?Does my haughtiness offend you?Don't you take it awful hard’Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin’ in my own backyard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I’ll rise.Does my sexiness upset you?Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs?Out of the huts of history’s shameI riseUp from a past that’s rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that’s wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.America Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.???I can’t stand my own mind.America when will we end the human war?Go f*ck yourself with your atom bomb.I don’t feel good don’t bother me.I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.America when will you be angelic?When will you take off your clothes?When will you look at yourself through the grave?When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?America why are your libraries full of tears?America when will you send your eggs to India?I’m sick of your insane demands.When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.???Your machinery is too much for me.You made me want to be a saint.There must be some other way to settle this argument.???Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.???Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke????I’m trying to come to the point.I refuse to give up my obsession.America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.America the plum blossoms are falling.I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for murder.America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.America I used to be a communist when I was a kid I’m not sorry.???I smoke marijuana every chance I get.I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.???When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.???My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.You should have seen me reading Marx.My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over from Russia.I’m addressing you.Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine????I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.I read it every week.Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.???I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.???It occurs to me that I am America.I am talking to myself again.Asia is rising against me.I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.I’d better consider my national resources.My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that jetplanes 1400 miles an hour and twentyfive-thousand mental institutions.I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underprivileged who live in my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his automobiles more so they’re all different sexes.America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old stropheAmerica free Tom MooneyAmerica save the Spanish LoyalistsAmerica Sacco & Vanzetti must not dieAmerica I am the Scottsboro boys.America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother Bloor the Silk-strikers’ Ewig-Weibliche made me cry I once saw the Yiddish orator Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have been a spy.America you don’t really want to go to war.America its them bad Russians.Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.???The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take our cars from out our garages.Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. Her wants our auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.That no good. Ugh. Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black n*ggers. Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.???America this is quite serious.America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.???America is this correct?I’d better get right down to the job.It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel. ................
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