In-Class: Writing Exercise - Pathetic Fallacy
PART I: Write for 5-7 minutes
Imagine a house at the end of a long treelined driveway. You have just been dropped of to see a special someone - perhaps, a significant other. You have traveled a great distance and it's been a long time since you last saw this person. Again, imagine means use your imagination: this person can be fictional.
Describe the weather and the nature that surrounds you. Use your senses.
G = gustatory (taste)
O = organic (internal sensation)
A = auditory (sound)
T = tactile (touch)
V = visual
O = olfactory (smell)
K = kinesthetic (movement)
Create a narrative. Be conscious of the tone, mood, and atmosphere.
Feel free to write prose or verse. Consider this a brainstorming, pre-writing exercise to one of your possible future poems.
PART II: Write for another 5-7 minutes; however, this time, your significant other no longer wishes to see you - and never see you again. Why? That's your story.
Again, focus on the weather and nature as you take the same walk from the front door to the end of the drive. What do you notice now? Connect your feelings, thoughts, and emotions to your surroundings. How do you see your environment differently?
Notice how the tone, mood, and atmosphere changes.
Great Resource:
Literary Devices - Definition and Examples of Literary Terms
HOMEWORK:
POEM of the Week: Marianne
Moore’s “Poetry”
For Tonight: Annotate Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” - Steps 1-3.
Due Friday: Paragraph about Moore's poem - Step 4.
Overview:
1. Read the poem first to enjoy it. Read it straight on through, preferably
aloud.
2. Then read it again (and again), looking for any of the
following literary devices or features:
- Language:
tone, style, diction (word choice)
- Conventions:
punctuation, grammar, poetic forms
- Devices:
Imagery, metaphor, symbols, repetition....Allusions and References
- Design:
Structure, organization of content (e.g., stanzas, enjambment, past to present)
- Themes:
Central ideas that run throughout the poem.
Connections: How does this poem relate to your personal feelings about poetry?
Purpose:
What is the poet trying to explain? Persuade? What, why, and how do
they do this?
3. The poem must show evidence of close reading – e.g.,
underlined words, comments, questions, connections, suspected patterns.
4. Your written response should
be typed (12 point font) - one perfectly written paragraph (not a loosely written journal-type
response) with a clear assertion, supporting details, and examples or
quotations from the poem. Your paragraph must include quotations from
the poem with analysis.
These quotations must be embedded, not left to stand alone.
Born near St. Louis, Missouri, on November
15, 1887, Marianne Moore was raised in the home of her grandfather, a
Presbyterian pastor. After her grandfather's death, in 1894, Moore and her
family stayed with other relatives, and in 1896 they moved to Carlisle,
Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College and received her B.A. in 1909.
Following graduation, Moore studied typing at Carlisle Commercial College, and
from 1911 to 1915 she was employed as a school teacher at the Carlisle Indian
School. In 1918, Moore and her mother moved to New York City, and in 1921, she
became an assistant at the New York Public Library. She began to meet other
poets, such as
William Carlos Williams
and
Wallace Stevens, and to contribute
to the
Dial, a prestigious literary magazine. She served as acting
editor of the
Dial from 1925 to 1929. Along with the work of such other
members of the Imagist movement as
Ezra
Pound, Williams, and
H. D., Moore's
poems were published in the
Egoist, an English magazine, beginning in
1915. In 1921, H.D. published Moore's first book,
Poems, without her
knowledge.
Moore was widely recognized for her work;
among her many honors were the Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and
the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other
modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text,
yet her use of language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise,
capable of suggesting a variety of ideas and associations within a single,
compact image. In his 1925 essay "Marianne Moore," William Carlos
Williams wrote about Moore's signature mode, the vastness of the particular:
"So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl
of great events." She was particularly fond of animals, and much of her
imagery is drawn from the natural world. She was also a great fan of
professional baseball and an admirer of Muhammed Ali, for whom she wrote the
liner notes to his record,
I Am the Greatest! Deeply attached to her
mother, she lived with her until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947. Marianne Moore
died in New York City in 1972.
Print the following poem and annotate:
Poetry
I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this
fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they
are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a
flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician--
nor is it valid
to discriminate against 'business documents and
school-books'; all these phenomena are important. One must make a
distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is
not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
'literalists of
the imagination'—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', shall we
have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.
- Marianne Moore 1919. 1951
P.S. Today's exercise reminded me of a poem I read earlier in the year... (not part of the homework).
Waiting
by Raymond Carver
Left off the highway and
down the hill. At the
bottom, hang another left.
Keep bearing left. The road
will make a Y. Left again.
There's a creek on the left.
Keep going. Just before
the road ends, there'll be
another road. Take it
and no other. Otherwise,
your life will be ruined
forever. There's a log house
with a shake roof, on the left.
It's not that house. It's
the next house, just over
a rise. The house
where trees are laden with
fruit. Where phlox, forsythia,
and marigold grow. It's
the house where the woman
stands in the doorway
wearing the sun in her hair. The one
who's been waiting
all this time.
The woman who loves you.
The one who can say,
"What's kept you?"
