Robert Burns, "A Red, Red Rose"

Stumbled on this just now:



I love teaching Burns, not least because I love to read aloud wi' an accent. (It's not ham acting, it's estrangement--you know, all that Russian Formalist stuff.)

This and this are pleasures too.

For All You Ronald Johnson Fans...

Joe Brainard has discovered the long-lost Elegy for Princess Di by Ron Johnson, my favorite poet!

It's not my favorite poem by Ron, not by a long shot, but the timing couldn't be better, as I spent yesterday morning printing out the galleys of the long-lost (well, long-awaited) Ronald Johnson: Life and Works collection. One more set of galleys to print, and it's off to be indexed.

So, without further ado, the elegy, which Brainard found in "Word of Mouth, this excellent anthology of Gay American Poetry edited by Timothy Liu and published by Talisman House (God bless you, Ed Foster!)" Bear with it--the final stanza works quite well, and I suspect that RJ would have pruned it down to 8 or 12 lines eventually.

August 31st - September 5th

doomed princess
pursued by paparazzi
smashed flashbulbed
into infinity

candle in the wind
buried bright day
all London lines
polite the streets

lie softly, ghost
aghast at the actual
limbs dumb as trees
slippered in lead

round earth no more
would Saturn's rings
each proximity pull
to pale the whole

interred Isle du Lac
but for helicopters
safe in autumn sod
England's green hills

Diana, huntress
brought down herself
relentless chase
turned into marble

On Recitation

Just ran across this, from the scholar and editor Jerome McGann:

As we know, students—most ordinary and intelligent people, for that matter—imagine poems are difficult, full of deep meanings that have to be deciphered. It’s our fault that this dismal and quite mistaken view prevails. We’ve imagined that our proud schools of criticism have more to show us than the poetry itself. Above every poem we "teachers" have inscribed a hellish warning: Abandon hope, all you who enter here.

As Gertrude Stein would say, we've got to begin again at the beginning, which is where poetry always locates itself anyway.

***

The poem is a musical score written in our mother tongue. Our bodies are the instruments it was made for. Perform:

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is. . . . Be thou me, impetuous one.

The poem will obey if you pay attention to what you’re doing. Its mechanisms aren't difficult, even if they are amazingly flexible. They are as natural to us as speaking and singing. We learned them before we knew them, on the banks of the Derwent, in our mother’s or our nurse’s arms.

The basic structure is like a double helix—one strand is linguistic—a syntax and a semantics—the other is prosodic, made of rhythmical and acoustic units (metre and rhyme). We practice to discover their synchrony. The two play off each other, and while every poem permits a personal inflection of its elements, your freedom is constrained. That constraint is telling you to pay attention to what you're doing.

When you set out to perform a poem, you don’t proceed willy-nilly. You try it out and test its possibilities. There will always be multiple possibilities. Eventually, in the act itself, you’ll have to make a performance decision. When you do that you'll have something else to look at and think about. What was good about what you did, what wasn't. And so you can begin again.

As Gertrude Stein says, beginning again and again.

Postlapsarian Note: In my experience, many difficulties of meaning disappear when students begin to construct and perform recitations. Indeed, only then do many other significant difficulties of meaning begin to reveal themselves. (Perhaps in poetry we're always working to find those beginnings.) Recitation compels you to give a specific shape to the text's linguistic and prosodic relations. They can't speak the words until your mouth, your lungs, and—indeed—your whole body understands how to give them articulate shape so that someone else will also understand. It's not hard to do but it does take practice. And you have to pay attention. And the more you do it, the better you get.

Terms for Tones

Often my students enter my class with a very small palette of tone-terms to work with. As a result, they talk about poems as though they were composed in primary colors: happy, sad, angry, sarcastic, and maybe one or two more.

If your students have that problem, they might find this useful: a handy-dandy Tone Vocabulary List. If you spot any missing useful terms, let me know & I'll add them. For an assignment that uses this list--a fully developed "class plan," actually--go here and click on the pdf called "The Tone Map."

Terms for Tones

abashed

abrasive

abusive

acquiescent

accepting

acerbic

admiring

adoring

affectionate

aghast

allusive

amused

angry

anxious

apologetic

apprehensive

approving

arch

ardent

argumentative

audacious

awe-struck

bantering

bemused

benevolent

biting

bitter

blithe

boastful

bored

brisk

bristling

brusque

calm

candid

caressing

caustic

cavalier

childish

child-like

clipped

cold

complementary

condescending

confident

confused

coy

confused

contemptuous

conversational

critical

curt

cutting

cynical

defamatory

denunciatory

detached

despairing

detatched

devil-may-care

didactic

disbelieving

discouraged

disdainful

disparaging

disrespectful

doubtful

dramatic

dreamy

dry

ecstatic

entranced

enthusiastic

eulogistic

exhilarated

exultant

facetious

fanciful

fearful

flippant

fond

forceful

frightened

frivolous

ghoulish

giddy

gleeful

glum

grim

guarded

guilty

happy

harsh

haughty

heavy-hearted

hollow

horrific

humorous

hypercritical

indifferent

indignant

indulgent

ironic

irreverent

joking

joyful

languorous

languid

laudatory

light-hearted

lingering

loving

marveling

melancholy

mistrustful

mocking

mocking

mysterious

naïve

neutral

nostalgic

objective

peaceful

pessimistic

pitiful

playful

poignant

pragmatic

proud

provocative

questioning

reflective

reminiscing

reproachful

resigned

respectful

restrained

reticent

reverent

rueful

sad

sarcastic

sardonic

satirical

satisfied

seductive

self-critical

self-dramatizing

self-justifying

self-mocking

self-pitying

self-satisfied

sentimental

serious

severe

sharp

shocked

silly

sly

smug

somber

stern

straightforward

stentorian

strident

stunned

subdued

swaggering

sweet

sympathetic

taunting

tense

thoughtful

threatening

tired

touchy

trenchant

uncertain

understated

upset

urgent

vexed

vibrant

whimsical

withering

wry

zealous