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Explore the Craft of Writing Poetry 1940s Poetic Movements The Black Mountain Poets are a school of poetry from the 1940's centered at Black Mountain College North Carolina which promoted open form and was spawned in an environment attempting to create the ideal community. Also call projectivist poets, they based the frame of their poetry on the line, referred to as an utterance or a breath. Poetry Guide Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov were a few of the Black Mountain Poets. Passage Over Water by Robert Duncan We have gone out in boats upon the sea at night, lost, and the vast waters close traps of fear about us. The boats are driven apart, and we are alone at last under the incalculable sky, listless, diseased with stars. Let the oars be idle, my love, and forget at this time our love like a knife between us defining the boundaries that we can never cross nor destroy as we drift into the heart of our dream, cutting the silence, slyly, the bitter rain in our mouths and the dark wound closed in behind us. Forget depth-bombs, death and promises we made, gardens laid waste, and, over the wastelands westward, the rooms where we had come together bombed. But even as we leave, your love turns back. I feel your absence like the ringing of bells silenced. And salt over your eyes and the scales of salt between us. Now, you pass with ease into the destructive world. There is a dry crash of cement. The light fails, falls into the ruins of cities upon the distant shore and within the indestructible night I am alone. Ciaro Poets were a group of poets based in North Africa during World War II. Kieth Douglas and Lawence Durrell were part of the group. Cairo Jag by Keith Douglas Shall I get drunk or cut myself a piece of cake, a pasty Syrian with a few words of English or the Turk who says she is a princess--she dances apparently by levitation? Or Marcelle, Parisienne always preoccupied with her dull dead lover: she has all the photographs and his letters tied in a bundle and stamped Decede in mauve ink. All this takes place in a stink of jasmine. But there are the streets dedicated to sleep stenches and the sour smells, the sour cries do not disturb their application to slumber all day, scattered on the pavement like rags afflicted with fatalism and hashish. The women offering their children brown-paper breasts dry and twisted, elongated like the skull, Holbein's signature. But his stained white town is something in accordance with mundane conventions- Marcelle drops her Gallic airs and tragedy suddenly shrieks in Arabic about the fare with the cabman, links herself so with the somnambulists and legless beggars: it is all one, all as you have heard. But by a day's travelling you reach a new world the vegetation is of iron dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery the metal brambles have no flowers or berries and there are all sorts of manure, you can imagine the dead themselves, their boots, clothes and possessions clinging to the ground, a man with no head has a packet of chocolate and a souvenir of Tripoli. New Apocalypse Poets were a group of 1940s poets who rejected the classicism of Auden. "Their work was wild, turbulent and surrealist." (Poet's Graveyard) Some of the poets were Dylan Thomas, James Findlay Hendry, George Barker, Henry Treece and G.S.Fraser. They were in direct opposition with the Movement poets. The Waiting Watchers by Henry Treece They shall come in the black weathers From the heart of the dead embers, Walking one and two over the hill. And they shall be with you, never farther Than your bedside. At their will The smell of putrefaction lingers And floor is carpeted with rotting hair; Or sheets are torn to shreds By the beaks of dead dry birds And the red blood clots in your cup. Put up your swords! What steel can cut the throat of next year's dream, What tongue is tunes to speak last night's quick scream? Go alone by darkness; Burn the clippings of your nail; Donate a thousand candles. But do as you will, When sun is blind and lamps are lit once more, Two and one, they shall be standing At your door. Objectivists was more a 20th century community of poets than a movement. This group of poets were inspired by Ezra Pound, WC Williams, and the Imagist Movement. Zukofsky who founded this group defined objectivism as sincerity and objectification. Some of the poets were Basil Bunting, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky. From Odes: Chorus of Furies by Basil Bunting Let us come upon him first as if in a dream, anonymous triple presence, memory made substance and tally of heart's rot: then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem sole aspect of being's essence, coffin to the living touch, self's Iscariot. Then he will loath the year's recurrent long caress without hope of divorce, envying idiocy's apathy or the stress of definite remorse. He will lapse into a half-life lest the taut force of the mind's eagerness recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse his excessive distress. He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough self aware the last skin of the flayed: despair. He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain even of death's solace, impotent to outpace dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.

Explore the Craft of Writing Poetry The Frame II. Couplet Construction Interchangeable couplets when the right conditions occur. The repetition of content herein is deliberate for clarity of division. A Closed Couplet is any Complete Couplet in which meter and syntax are sealed at the end. The frame is end-stopped. When the lines are written in iambic pentameter and linked by rhyme it is also a Heroic Couplet. Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, The proper study of Mankind is Man. --- Pope's Essay on Man (note: this is also a Complete Couplet because it expresses a complete thought and a Heroic Couplet because it is written in iambic pentameter and is rhymed.) Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed Spring approaches - - - ---William Carlos Williams Spring and All? (note: This is a Closed Couplet because it is end-stopped and a Complete Couplet because it is a complete thought, but because of the lack of rhyme and the prescribed meter it is not a Heroic Couplet. ) The Complete Couplet is a poetic unit of 2 lines that express a complete thought within itself. Meter and rhyme are at the poet's discretion. It need not be end-stopped to be complete. What is an epigram: a dwarfish whole, Its body brevity, and wit it soul. --Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834 (note: Because the meter and syntax are end-stopped this is also a closed couplet. Because this example is written in iambic pentameter and linked with rhyme the couplet is also a Heroic Couplet.) Like my daughter I play shy ---A.K. Ramanujan Extended Family (note: Because of the lack of rhyme and meter this is not a Heroic couplet and because of the lack of end stop it is not a Closed Couplet. The syntax makes it complete within itself and the spacing around the couplet sets it apart. A Closed Couplet must be complete but a Complete Couplet need not be closed.) The Heroic Couplet is a complete poetic thought unit of 2 iambic pentameter lines linked by rhyme. It is also a complete couplet and a closed couplet but it is the meter and linking rhyme that sets it apart as a "heroic couplet". Shakespeare popularized the declamatory Heroic Couplet. "But if thou live remembered not to be, Die single and thine image dies with thee." --- William Shakespeare, Sonnet 2 (note: a complete couplet and a closed couplet are only heroic couplets when they are written in iambic pentameter and are linked by rhyme.)

Explore the Craft of Writing American Verse The Triversen, (triple verse sentence), is a sentence broken into three lines. It has also been referred to as a "verset", a surge of language in one breath. The Triversen was originated by William Carlos Williams as a "native American" poetic form of the 20th century. According to Lewis Turco in his Book of Forms, it is "one of the most innovative things done to modern free-verse." It introduced the "variable foot" to free verse. As best as I can understand, the "variable foot" is a phrase or portion of a sentence contained within a line. The elements of the Triversen are: accentual. The rhythm of normal speech, employing 1 to 4 strong stresses per line. stanzaic, written in any number of tercets. Each tercet is a sentence broken into 3 uneven lines, each an independant clause. grammatical. The sentence is broken by line phrasing or lineating or sense units. There should be 3 units. L1 is a statement of fact or observation, L2 and L3 should set the tone, imply a condition or associated idea, or carry a metaphor for the original statement. unrhymed. alliterated. Alliteration accentuates stress. Eventide by Judi Van Gorder 8-20-05 Sunset silence interrupted by a cursory "rib-it". Diminishing sun slides behind the horizon. Twilight arrives with a hic-up and a wink. On Gay Wallpaper by William Carlos Williams The green-blue ground is ruled with silver lines to say the sun is shining. And on this moral sea of grass or dreams like flowers or baskets of desires Heaven knows what they are between cerulean shapes" laid regularly round. Mat roses and tridentate leaves of gold threes, threes, and threes. Three roses and three stems the basket floating standing in the horns of blue. Repeated to the ceiling to the windows where the day Blow in the scalloped curtains to the sound of rain.

Explore the Craft of Writing American Verse The wheelbarrow is an invented form sometimes used by educators as an exercise in focus, intensity, concentration and emphasis. Donald Hall's How to Read a Poem ends the first chapter with this exercise. The verse form is patterned after the structure of the red wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams; Hall calls it "the wheelbarrow". so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens -----William Carlos Williams 1938 William Carlos Williams was a part of the "Imagist" movement. Imagism focuses on the concrete image using only adjectives which will enhance the image. Most imagist poems are under 20 lines, written without rhyme, and express emotion through the image. The elements of the wheelbarrow are: a single sentence in 8 lines, broken into 4 stanzas, each stanza has 2 lines. syllabic. L1 of each stanza has 3 words and a syllabic count of 3 or 4. L2 of each stanza has 1 word with 2 syllables composed with L1 making a statement of the importance, something to grab the reader and suck the reader into the poem. That word in Williams' poem is "depends" then the next line "upon" hangs the preposition from the verb... moving the reader on. written with "focus, intensity, concentration, and emphasis". composed with concrete images. the emotion is disclosed through the image. evening azimuth by Judi Van Gorder all eyes focus watching a setting sun mimic a fiery flare falling into a sizzling ocean the reader by Judi Van Gorder the mindful care given to a simple poem will bring new measure to the poetry within