Port Veritas: Day 5 (9/10th English)

Our 9/10 English students started the last day of our week with a performance by Jesse Parent titled, "To the Boy Who May One Day Date My Daughter."

Then, each student was given fifteen minutes to practice reading a poem they wrote this week.

Speaking and Listening Instructions:
1) The speaker should introduce themselves.  "My name is ____, the poem is titled____."  If it is untitled, just say so.
2) Each of the five students is given 15-minutes each.  3-5 minutes to perform, and an additional 5-10 for feedback and a second performance.
3) Read through once, get feedback, then repeat.

Here are some of the students we heard from today:

1) One student read a poem about fishing for lobsters.  Vivid descriptions about hauling traps and spending time with his grandfather added a level of authenticity to the poem that I loved.

2) Our next student read a poem titled, "Secret Soldier," which recounted the experience of going to war.  The poem ended with a fabulous line, "now, I make my departure."

3) Our third student presented a poem he'd worked on all week about his boat, speaking about the way he is abused by his owner and deals with crashing waves.

4) Our fourth presenter read a poem he'd workshopped about a baseball, using the image to describe time passing, age, and deterioration.

5) Our next student writer read her poem about a dusty, forgotten room that "would be destroyed by socialization, but it was already killed by it."

6) Our next writer read a poem about the Greek Titan Atlas, read from the perspective of the earth.  The poem told the story of Atlas from a perspective you don't normally hear.

7) The following student read a poem written from the perspective of a TV controller that wants to fight back from all of the treatment it takes.

8) Our last student presented a poem about pencils, how frequently they are disposed and

Port Veritas: Day 5 (AP English)

We began today's class by watching Neil Hilborn's performance of "OCD" (above) as a way to warm up our public speaking skills.

Then, each student was given fifteen minutes to practice reading a poem they wrote this week.

Speaking and Listening Instructions:
1) The speaker should introduce themselves.  "My name is ____, the poem is titled____."  If it is untitled, just say so.
2) Each of the five students is given 15-minutes each.  3-5 minutes to perform, and an additional 5-10 for feedback and a second performance.
3) Read through once, get feedback, then repeat.

Here are some of the poems we heard today:
1) One student read his sonnet on escaping the Maine winters for warmer climates.  When workshopping their poem with Robin yesterday, he put the poem in iambic pentameter! It was so cool! The sonnet was musical and punchy right when the student writer wanted it to be.

2) Our second student writer read his revised metaphor poem about a lemon, which became a personification of the bitter-sweetness of life.

3) Our third student read a poem she started last week using the Shakespearean sonnet.  The topic was about friends and dating, ending on the importance of the speaker's own heart.

4) Our fourth student read a poem about basketball and winning the state of Maine Class-D Girls' Basketball Championships.  Her rhymed coupled at the end showed how meaningful the championship was, ending with, "won the gold ball."

5) Our last student read her sonnet personifying the idea of time, using images of world clocks and people's reactions to time to stress how time affects us.

Some Tips: 
1) Look off your page! Be sure to look up as you say your lines to the audience.  Don't just read off the page.  Taking time to look at the audience and engage is an important part of public speaking.
2) Smile when it's appropriate.
3) If you have a line that ends with a single word, take a pause and deliver that word with gusto.
4) If you're going to deliver poetry that is personal and funny, and you're not sure how to deliver it, you can imagine a scenario that makes it work.  For example, delivering a poem as if the person you are talking about is at the back of the room.  Play around with your audience.
5) Always work on projection.
6) Stress words that you want stressed.  If you have trouble finding areas of the poem to stress, ask for help.
7) Don't rush off the stage after you finish reading! Pause and leave when it's appropriate.  If you are workshopping, you will need to stay "on stage" until you have received feedback and practiced reading your poem to the audience a second time.
8) Students with long or unruly hair, pull/push it out of your face so the audience can see you.

AP English: Discovering the Sonnet

The Sonnet: a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter (five feet of stressed and unstressed syllables).  

As we get ready for a visit from the lovely poets at Port Veritas next week, we've started to read poetry--lovely, concise, perfect poetry.  From the Greek verb poiein, meaning "to make," poetry is one of our oldest genres of literature, positioning the writer as a "maker" of rhythms, images, and verse.  In fact, many scholars surmise that poetry historically grew out of the rhythmic chanting and singing of oral traditions.  It is possible that poetry is one of our oldest modes of communication, and it is rooted in the human drive to communicate clearly, concisely, and with great feeling or meaning.

Poetry's link to oral traditions.

Yet what's really interesting about poetry is the way in which it allows the writer to use language in its most condensed form.  While it might take me 500-words to explain an idea, it might take a poet fifty or a hundred words to communicate the same thing.  Because of this compression, I have often thought that reading poetry required more work, but with greater benefit.  Poems don't always make their meaning obvious to readers, and they require a level of collaboration with the text that you don't usually see when reading a novel by Charles Dickens.

"Collaboration with the text?"

Basically, becoming involved in the creation of a poem's meaning.  By nature, reading is a passive act, but poetry doesn't allow its readers to be passive.  Readers go back, ask questions about a poem's meaning, look for repeating images, sounds, ideas, and "unpack" a text as they work their way through its short lines and intentional movements.

Here is an example of a poem our class worked with on last year, "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room" by William Wordsworth:

Wednesday's poetry explication: "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room" by William Wordsworth.

I put the poem on the board as a way to show how readers shouldn't just read a poem--they have to have a relationship with it.  This relationship is especially important because Wordsworth's poem is a sonnet, a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter with alternating end rhymes for each line of the work.

This particular example by Wordsworth is a Petrarchan Sonnet that is divided into two parts: an octave, or 8 lines, at the beginning, and a sestet, or six lines, at the end.  Usually, the octave will suggest a situation or an idea and the sestet will comment on that idea, offering a solution.  In the image above, our class identified the rhyme scheme (abba, abba, cddccd), the main idea at the beginning: nuns, hermits, students, maids, and bees are happy in their monotonous, "restricted" lives, and the solution or resolution at the end: the "speaker" believes that the "prison unto which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is" (lines 8-9).  This argument is a lovely way of contradicting the idea that nunneries/monasteries, cells, and citadels, just like the Sonnet form (line 11), are not places of restriction but opportunities to express meaning in a structured way.

Ultimately, Wordsworth is using the Petrarchan sonnet form to explain why he (or any poet) uses the sonnet form: its classical restrictions still offer modern poets (nineteenth century) the ability to express themselves.

Could our class have gotten to Wordsworth's argument without first annotating his poem?  Maybe, but not likely.  Like most poems, sonnets beg to be poured over and engaged.  It's one of the things I love about poetry and the reason for tonight's homework!

Homework 
Rough Draft: DUE Friday, March 31, 2017
Revised Draft: DUE Monday, April 3, 2017
Write a 14-line sonnet about a topic of your choice following the Shakespearean model: three quatrains (4-lines each) and a rhymed coupled (two lines at the end of the poem).  The turn in the Shakespearean sonnet occurs at the end of the third quatrain with the rhymed couplet commenting on (or resolving) the topic/issue/idea your sonnet is about.

Your sonnet can be on any topic you like, but it must be 14-lines and use the following rhyme scheme:

line 1 - a 
line 2 - b
line 3 - a
line 4 - b
line 5 - c
line 6 - d
line 7 - c
line 8 - d
line 9 - e
line 10 - f
line 11 - e
line 12 - f
line 13 - g
line 14 - g