New Year's Greetings!

Left: Photo taken at Colonial Williamsburg, December 2006)





Owing to the fact that the class in which I am currently enrolled does not require student blogs, this site will only be used for the occasional class-related entry. The subject for Winter Session is Poetry and, as I am not going to post any original poetry here (for reasons both many and obvious), I will post some related bits of writing.

For example, we've been reading a bit on quatrains this week and today I posted the following on Bb concerning some assigned reading in Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry and in Joseph Kelly's Seagull Reader: Poems:


"The section in Williams on quatrains was interesting. It's probably the type of poetry we're most accustomed to in the English language and there's a surprising amount of variety.

As for the poems themselves: I was somewhat shocked to realize that I still remember most of the verses of "Sir Patrick Spens" from fifth grade. I actually remember a lot of poems from fifth grade. We had a teacher who was convinced that memorizing a poem made it "yours".

To some extent, that may be true. Just as with song lyrics, the patterns of verse seem to make it fairly easy to memorize. Even something that's as nonsensical as "Jabberwocky" is hard to forget once learned.

Having learned some of these poems by heart as a girl and knowing them like old friends, it's refreshing to have this opportunity to look at them more closely for their formal attributes. The rhyme scheme in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" for example. I frankly never noticed the rhyme scheme.

A similar thing can be said for Emily Dickinson. I had to commit 50 lines of Dickinson to memory for that teacher and memorized them by skipping rope. Still, I don't believe that I ever have really looked at examples of her poems that reflect her original punctuation. The versions in my schoolbooks were much tidier and I always thought her work a bit flat. Given the less tidy versions, I now see that her punctuation is a little like my own. I also get a much greater sense of animation and vitality from her work."


I guess that the reason that I learned the Emily Dickinson while jumping rope was that I had not yet been introduced to the theory that most of her poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas".