One and the Same.

My semester of literary studies is quickly coming to an end. My class has studied everything from poetry, to plays, to literature online, and everything in between. We’ve sort of gone through everything in our quest to learn about the importance of literature both classically and digitally. This class was my first class I’ve taken that is actually required for being an English major, and some days it really made me question my life decisions concerning being in this major.

The beginning of the class started with jumping from different forms of literature each week. Nonfiction, fiction, poetry, plays, etc.. – you name it, we did it. And all the while we were beginning our journey into using and finding this literature online. There were two big pieces of work that really stood out to me. The really big one was when we read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. We spent a lot of time on this one, and I think it sticks out to me so much because of the amount of time I personally spent with it. I had to fully read and analyze this book, and it was very difficult for me to get into. This was sort of my gateway book into online literature though, as the difficulty of it and the analysis I had to make of it took me right into the heart of the Internet for help. It was during my studies of this book that I first really entered into Goodreads and discovered how reviews work and how a book can connect me with other people. In fact, there was a particular review that really stood out to me and helped me understand why this book matters. When I read that review, I decided to follow the man who wrote it, and since I’ve become so enraptured by his other reviews and have become in new books simply because of his high opinions of them. It was because of this section that my ideas began to form for my chapters about both reviews and Goodreads for my class’ semester ebook we would soon be writing.

My other big work of literature that really stood out to me during this class was during our poetry unit. This was in the beginning of the semester before we had really delved into the online world. So while I was finding and reading poetry online, I was also focusing on the more traditional poetry such as Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. This poem showed me the ways of traditional literature analyses and how to compare the ways in which an analysis must be made. This was quite a challenge for me as I hadn’t before done a formal analysis in this way. We also had to write our own sonnet during this portion of our studies. While struggling with my rhythm and wording of my own poem, I began to feel a connection with these other poems I had been trying so hard to understand. I found beauty in them that before I hadn’t seen, and I developed a deeper appreciation for the authors and the pains they went through to bring us their words.

I could probably go on forever about what works I used and how they helped and frustrated me, but that would get old quite fast. This semester and the class ebook project have taught me so much about the importance of classic literature as well as its introduction into the digital age. Classic literary analysis is still valid, and I would hate to ever lose that part of literature or understanding. But after this semester, I do believe that working with the more social and online aspects of literature are now becoming just as important as the classic. It opens more doors and ideas than before, and allows people to actually connect to these books and people and authors in ways that have never been seen before. It's becoming almost impossible to have literature without including the digital in some way. They're becoming one and the same.

Literature is changing. And to keep it alive it must be allowed to change and grow as the world continues to change and grow.

Holy Hades!

You've crossed the Styx, and paid your dues, your life

no more is yours to claim. Time to move on,

make your way, just one last kiss from your wife.

For now your body's gone into the dawn,

The dark, it comes round cold and flat. The sky

it shines no more in here. The world's new 

and damp and dead. "Lost is my soul!" You cry.

Your world is now a much far darker hue. 

Cerberus the mighty beast, is apt to 

chase and chomp and feast. You look back up escape

planned out, and yet you see there's no way through.

Trapped as Persephone after her rape.

For then his chariot rides round with ease,

Ever stealing souls, the mighty Hades!

Tada!

But seriously. Writing a sonnet is a lot more difficult than I anticipated. I mean, this poem actually started out as a fun and sarcastic poem, and well, it kind of took a turn to the darker side. It's interesting the way sometimes words just sort of take off with an idea of their own until there's something totally different than the original thought.

Who knows, maybe one day I'll create my own sonnets that are so rad that they'll create a style called the Saren Sonnet. I think that sounds like a pretty great idea. And then no one can criticize my poor iambic pentameter because I'll be the rule breaker and famous so it will be okay.

Mythical Royalty

When we were given the assignment to write a sonnet, at first I was a little intimidated. I doubted myself for a moment and thought back had I ever written a sonnet? Maybe I had written a sonnet in one of my high school English classes, but I am almost positive it was nothing note-worthy.

However, when I started researching to write my sonnet I was quite excited to start writing! So here’s my sonnet! I am excited to get feedback on it. I feel pretty new at all of this, but you have to start somewhere right?

Sonnet 1

From a Father’s ached forehead I sprang, formed.

Yet with Father beside, I couldn’t fear;

For I his gift, shields and bolts I adorned.

No strength did derive from a mother dear.

I catch commonalities of the owl,

Endlessly perfect, snowy white, clever

Defending my nest against all prowlers.

Patient, perching, and spiraling, I ever

Soar, yet standing safe as an olive tree.

Pure branches stretch from my extremities,

Resilience in my roots. I can’t foresee,

A loss able to swipe my entities.

Behold, I Athena, Goddess of War,

Protect my home and live forever more!

So I picked to write about Greek Mythical Goddess Athena for many reasons…First of all I was unsure which myth to write about, and when I came across the Greek Gods my love for them was rekindled! I have always especially loved Athena. She is strong, compassionate and loves her family. She is also pure and confident; everything a woman could be!

It was a fun to research and write a little about her. Let me know what you think!

The Internet: Bringing you things you never knew you would love.

One of the things that I most often read on the internet is the phrase "I didn't know I needed this in my life until just now." What an interesting sentence that is!

That's what the internet does for us in this day and age. We find ourselves going out and looking at things and ending up in strange places that we never thought we would end up in. Sometimes we find new hobbies that we are dying to try out. Sometimes we find something hilarious that we will share with our friends. Sometimes we find something beautiful that needs to be shared.

Just in the last two weeks I was introduced to several new games that I want to try, the whole lore system of Warhammer 40,000 which is phenomenal, several books that I want to read, a new web series that I want to watch, a web tool that helps me do assigned readings faster, and several more websites.

So in this discussion of the internet and poetry, and in keeping with my theme, I want to share a piece of poetry that I found in a very unusual way. Not in a book, not even on a poetry website. In fact, I wasn't searching for poetry at all.

Technology Links

I mentioned in my last post that one of my favorite ways to discover and share poetry I liked was through the social networking sight Tumblr. Unfortunately, I had not yet ventured much further than Tumblr in the past to discover new poetry, but today was a turning point! Although I love poetry, it honestly just never crossed my mind that there were so many resources to find such a vast amount of incredible poetry.

To broaden my poetry spectrum I started with a simple search on Instagram. I had been under the misconception that Instagram was only used to take pictures of food, and for girls to post selfies that filtered out any flaw! I WAS WRONG!

I was surprised to find many simple poems with few words, but many of them expressed deep emotions. I find it so wonderful that we have so many mediums to convey what we feel, and to discover the similarities through the internet.

Instagram, and Tumblr, and Youtube! Oh, My!

Social media is like a Russian Matryoshka doll. At first look, it’s a pretty hand-painted wooden doll, but then you open it. Surprise, another pretty hand-painted wooden doll! And another and another. And the last one is so cute because it’s so tiny! (Oh, the joy of tiny things.) Every link we click is like opening that doll and finding something new.

Russian Matryoshka Doll
Image: link to {http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll}

Original Thought Zone

I have a good friend who told me that when he was growing up he and his siblings were not allowed to quote movies or TV shows at the dinner table or in the car. These times were called "Original Thought Zones." Apparently, their conversations had become so saturated with quotes that their mom was worried that they were going to lose their ability to produce their own thoughts completely.

Caution. Entering Original Thought Zone

I kept thinking about the Original Thought Zone as I explored the comments feature on my Kindle. I had been plugging away, reading poems (some sinking in deeper than others), and doing a little bit of highlighting when I decided to see what other people thought about the book "100 Best Loved Poems." And what did I find?

Not a single original thought anywhere!

The only comments made were just quotes from the poems in the book. At first I was disappointed. I decided that all these people should have grown up in homes with an "Original Thought Zone." But I think these comments exemplify exactly what we have been discussing in our class: that we use poetry as a way to express things that we just don't have the capability to express on our own.

I think when we do that we come to "own" those inexpressible experiences and feelings more. They become ours. These people had powerful experiences with these lines and they felt like they needed to repeat them so that they could make them apart of themselves, so that they could be "theirs."

 Along with sharing a line from the poem  "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman I also decided though that I would add a comment of my own! Here are the lines that grabbed me:

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, 
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else."

My comment ties into what I was saying earlier about possession. I said:
"No matter what our place in life is, it is ours. It may seem dull or meaningless to someone else, but it belongs to us. And that matters."

New Doesn't Mean Bad

Trying new things can be scary. Especially when it involves something that's expressed from your soul.

So I decided to try an experiment. I posted something I wrote in a couple of different areas on our dear internet. I tried once anonymously on a poetry site, and once on the ever so popular Facebook.
It's interesting to see the response between the two, and obviously time will tell a little better the way the experiment will turn out.

I can honestly say it was more nerve wracking to post to Facebook to people I know and care about. Isn't it an interesting phenomenon to be more frightened by expressing myself to family than to express myself to strangers. One interesting aspect of posting to people I know, is it was a much more immediate response. People wondering where it came from, or what it's about, or even simply "liking" it. But after a couple of hours, it seems to have been forgotten.

However, posting anonymously to a poetry site where I could sort of tag what my poem was about about and having it in a place where thousands of people are constantly browsing, and the feedback keeps just randomly coming, and doesn't seem to stop. This is a place where poets of all stages come to look for publishing opportunities, critique, or even just to get their work out there. It also gave me a way to find other poetry and compare side to side the differences in writing and technique between the old and the new.

One other aspect that I've found to love is the poem community on Goodreads. It's fascinating to go through different poems and see what parts others love and the different viewpoints everyone has that I would have never thought about.

Overall, there's still so much I have to learn about how poetry is growing and thriving in the new world, but it's an exciting new prospect for me to try out!

Redefining the Poem

As I browsed the Web today, searching out the modern poetry of my contemporaries, I have come to the realization that poetry is nothing like I thought that it was. I mean, growing up, I was taught that poems are supposed to rhyme and be descriptive and sometimes witty and nice to read. As I surfed around a few online forums, I discovered just what poetry has come to be.

Anything you want it to be. About anything you want it to be. Really.

I sat down and read lots and lots of poems. Poems about bad dates and drugs and old books and sadness and happiness and drinking your life away. Well, I guess the content hasn't changed that much, now that I think about it.

But the form?  I found a few poems that were like, a line.  And the comments went wild!  I guess I just need a little more practice with the modern take on poetry. 

However, I did think it was pretty cool that I COULD do this.  And don’t get me wrong, I found a few gems that were truly inspiring!  As I browsed the comments, I found that the authors had linked the poems to their blogs and Youtube profiles as well.   That is a GREAT idea!  How nice to be able to connect all your work so easily and attract followers! 

This got me thinking.  What if all the present-day technology had been around when the classic poets were writing back in the old times?  It would be sweet!  I bet you’d hear people all over saying, “Oh my gosh, did you SEE what Shakespeare threw down on the forum last night?!  ‘To be or not to be…’ He’s soooo hipster!”  Wouldn’t that be great?

{Look, he has an earring.  Hipster when it was still frowned upon.}

Anyway, this experience has definitely been enlightening.  I’ve discovered new ways to find other poets, new ways to have my own work read, and new…ideas on what poetry is in and of itself.  

Poetry Unit - Objectives and Schedule

As I introduce students to the study of poetry in our time, they will need to know what poetry is and the purposes it has served. This will require some contextualizing in history and across the various media and social contexts where poetry has mattered. In order to perform analysis of poetry, students will also need some technical knowledge of literary elements, beginning with the broad concepts of genre, language, and form. As a complement to this abstract understanding of poetry, students will gain the feel of form by creating or by memorizing and reciting poetry a well-known poem. Finally, my students will have a contemporary, digitally-mediated experience with poetry by reading poetry in ebook form (via Kindle); by listening to poetry (via Audible); by watching poetry on video; and by curating and discussing poetry on Goodreads and Blogger.

All of these I have outlined more specifically in the Poetry Unit Learning Objectives (also copied below). We will follow these objectives as we spend three class periods on poetry.

January 12, 2015 (Monday)
For our first day of the poetry unit we read the following (from our course texts) and discussed these in class:

• Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, entries for "epic" and "lyric" (we also looked closely at "ballad")
• in Smith (100 Best Loved Poems) 
• Two narrative poems: 
• "Lord Randal" (p. 1 / location 53) 
• Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" (p. 55 / location 938)
• Two lyric poems:
• Rudyard Kipling, "Recessional" (p. 78 / location 1332)
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Sonnet XLIII" (p.48 / location 823)
• One dramatic poem:
• Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess" (p. 63, location 1079)

We began discussing poetry as being originally (and perhaps most powerfully) an oral and communal phenomenon, and then reviewed the three major genres of narrative, dramatic, and lyric poetry. I emphasized that each genre has subgenres, and those genres (like "ballad" or "sonnet") each have three components: 

• an historical component (they emerged at a given time or are characteristic of a given literary period); 
• a content component (genres are often associated with certain types of topics and even moods)
• a formal component (genres are partly characterized by a set of formal characteristics)

We also began discussing our experience of reading poetry in ebook form. I mentioned the poor quality of the inexpensive etexts we were reading from. We also struggled with the poor format for the otherwise very useful Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (which has no table of contents and an awkward index in its ebook format).

January 13 (Tuesday)

For their Tuesday blog post, I want my students to think broadly about the value of poetry (both to others and to themselves - our first learning objective in the poetry unit). They will do this by composing a blog post made up of three things:

1. Create a blog post in which you tell a story about the value of poetry either historically and generally, or else personally (in your life or that of someone else). 
2. Select a poem to memorize or a topic about which to compose a sonnet (due in class Wednesday 1/21/15; this fulfills our fourth learning objective for poetry).
3. Name some individuals or audiences with which you might share your memorized or composed poem (either in person or online), other than fellow classmates.

As models for this type of writing, read

• "The Utility of Poetry for Dentistry" (a brief account of finding how poetry has mattered to someone else)
• "Fully Empowered by Poetry" (a brief personal literary narrative showing how poetry has mattered to me personally and why I chose to memorize a given poem).

In order to select a poem to memorize, you can name your own and why you wish to memorize that poem; or, choose from among these famous sonnets. Or, if wanting to compose a sonnet instead, refer to "Compose Your Own Sonnet: A Guide." (If the latter is your choice, just indicate that this is the case in your blog post, and propose your topic).

The blog post should be about 400-500 words total.

January 14 (Wednesday)

• Select 10 poems from our anthology (Smith) and come prepared to discuss their genres, their authors, and their periods. Use the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms if you need help with any of that.
• In class we will listen to some epic poetry, and we will also review fundamentals of analyzing poetry (in preparation for the blog post analysis due on Tuesday, January 20th)

January 16 (Friday)

• Create a blog post that documents your experiments with poetry on digital or social media platforms (see the five options listed in objective 5 for the poetry unit, below). Budget time to try some of those options. You should talk about not merely what you observe in others, but how sharing poetry (in any of those ways, either your own or by others) has worked for you.

January 20 (Tuesday)

• Poetry analysis blog post due. Read this blog post, "Basic Literary Analysis: Poetry" and then compose a brief literary analysis of the poem "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley (p. 35 / location 601 in our poetry anthology). Make this a micro-analysis of one paragraph. Use the model I give in the Basic Literary Analysis post. Do not read fellow students' analyses prior to posting yours. Avoid doing any research online about this poem.  

January 21 (Wednesday)

• Come prepared to recite your memorized poem. Practice this aloud (even better, in front of a friend) and try to give this some energy and animation. The goal is not to convince us that you knew every word, but to draw us into the poem because you show interest and feeling as you recite it. If it feels like you are trying to hurry through the poem before you forget any of its words, that's not satisfactory. Consider this a performance, not just a passing-off of a requirement.

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Poetry Unit Learning Objectives

1. The Nature and Value of Poetry:
   Be able to articulate what poetry is, how it varies from other forms of discourse, and why it has been of value both generally and personally.
2. Poetry Across Time and Media:
   Read examples of poetry that exemplify different literary periods and their media contexts, including
1. spoken/performed poetry (mostly from the distant past); 
2. written or printed poetry (mostly from the Renaissance through the 20th century); and 
3. digitally mediated poetry (20th-21st centuries); 
3. Genres and Literary Form in Poetry:
1. Read examples of and know the characteristics of three basic genres of poetry: narrative poetry, dramatic poetry, and lyric poetry. 
2. Understand, identify, and begin to make interpretations of poetry based on diction (word choice); narrative point of view; rhythm and rhyme, and figurative language.
4. Creating or Memorizing Poetry:
   Become more acquainted with the feeling of form by
1. Memorizing and reciting a brief famous poem (from a set list of choices)
2. Composing a sonnet
5. Poetry on Digital-Social platforms (Amazon, Kindle, Goodreads, and Audible)
   Explore and participate on digital-social platforms in order to understand and critique contemporary poetry study. Activities will include
1. Curating texts (virtual shelf of poetry ebooks on Goodreads; online and on-device collections of ebooks for Kindle)
2. Reading, annotating, and sharing excerpts via Kindle
3. Listening to an audiobook version of poetry from Audible or Librivox
4. Watching, evaluating, and responding to video poetry (see examples in this post).
5. Participating in online discussions of poetry