English 2208
Poetry

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack of what is found there."

William Carlos Williams

English 2208 introduces you to the literary form of poetry. Our focus this semester will be to study both how a poem works and what a poem might suggest. The poems we will read range in date from the medieval ages through to the present day, but each brings its own unique set of themes shaped by where the action takes place, including issues of freedom, love, innocence, justice, beauty, and goodness.  We'll want to look at each poem's form, diction, rhythms, and images to see how these are, as poet John Ciardi suggests, not just things but presences.

We are conducting our course under unusual circumstances. For one, this course will be offered completely online when I had no intention of doing so. Obviously Covid-19 changed those plans.  But, I have included a time on the course schedule (Tuesdays from 11:00 am to 12:15pm) that I will use to set up some Zoom meetings where we can meet together for 45 minutes to an hour and discuss the assignments, progress, and goals as we go. These won't be every Tuesday, but I should expect about 10 session would work. Please make your best effort to be there for these. 

Now, while this is an introductory course, I'd really like for you to develop your skills as a careful reader of poetry. You should think of our class as an ongoing dialogue.  This means that I will consider myself responsible for organizing the course and keeping it moving along, but that you all will be expected to participate with questions and comments about our poems in our online discussion groups and in Zoom sessions.

Please know that this is a course in reading poetry, not writing poetry. You will not be asked to write any poetry and I will not use any exercises that do so. The reading of good poetry is a skill all unto itself and will require the entire semester to master it. That will be enough. Be advised that we have to walk a thin line between good analytical conversation and tedious analysis! Billy Collins shows how that line can be crossed: Introduction to Poetry.

The course syllabus is our blueprint for the semester.  Sometimes changes have to be made to our schedule, so look for updates to our syllabus on this website and on D2L.

I will use a list of terms as we proceed through our G&K text. As a tool for studying, this website might be useful (printing out the list before exams). Our G&K text includes probably over one hundred terms, but I think it's a tad too ambitious to have everyone know all that they share in our text. So what I think we should know will be kept on this website. I might update this website during the semester, so always check back prior to exams to be sure you know what the complete list contains.

An article by poet Peter Meinke, found in The Writer magazine from 1999, offered six criteria for judging a poem to be "good."  Here's a synopsis of his list:

  1. A good poem withholds something from us at first, yielding its secrets slowly, like a lover.  Poems don't "tell" or supply answers--they're not lectures or sermons.

  2. A good poem surprises and satisfies. But after the surprise, the good poem often seems inevitable. (Meinke says we react this way: "I knew that, but I didn't know I knew that.")

  3. A good poem sounds special--either melodious like T.S. Eliot or Dylan Thomas, or homespun like Robert Frost, or jumpy like William Carlos Williams, or playful like e.e. cummings.

  4. A good poem is memorable. Are there lines you can recite from memory? "For God's sake hold your tongue and let me love," "Batter my heart three-personed God," and "Come with me and be my love" have the ring of eternity in their saying.

  5. A good poem speaks to the unanswerable questions. It can do so mostly by using images rather than logical constructions. Part of why we know this is because we use poetry to mark the major turnings of our lives: birth, death, love, and celebration.

  6. A good poem fulfills its promises. What it sets out to do--musically, visually, emotionally--it accomplishes. 

Finally, an article published in the Atlantic Monthly by one of our anthology editors--Dana Gioia--discusses the state of poetry in the last decade of the twentieth century. It's called "Can Poetry Matter" and, while lengthy, is worthwhile reading. Here is a collection of introductory examples to get us started.

�2020 Steven Beste
Questions or comments? Contact steven.beste@anokaramsey.edu

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