Readers React to Poetry Written By Artificial Intelligence

Can an AI chatbot write good poetry? I asked that question to a chatbot and it gave me a reasonably honest answer.

"While AI chatbots can technically write poetry, it's generally considered that they cannot produce truly "good" poetry in the sense of being deeply creative, emotionally resonant, or exhibiting the nuanced understanding of the human experience that is often associated with great poetry; however, they can generate poems that appear well-structured and follow traditional forms, particularly when given specific prompts and stylistic guidelines."

I have been reading several articles about experiments with having people read poems written by AI and ones written by actual poets - famous and not well known - and reporting their likes and dislikes.

The researchers told different groups different things (all poems are from humans; all poems are AI; they could be either), and that, as a friend pointed out, opens the experiment up to confirmation biases. That some preferred AI poems to human poems is not surprising depending on which poems they were shown. A Shakespeare sonnet is not a favorite of many people and the language is off-putting to modern readers, so a simply written poem by AI might get the thumbs up.

What do you think of this short poem?

Oh, how I revel in this world, this life that we are given,
This tapestry of experiences, that shapes us into living,
And though I may depart, my spirit will still sing,
The song of life eternal, that flows through everything.

AI or human? 

That’s ChatGPT writing in the style of Walt Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric.” It sounds Whitmanesque, though the rhyme is rather awkward. 

AI follows poems that exist out there and have been gobble up in their databases. I don't think AI could do much better than this famous Whitman passage from his continually revised Leaves of Grass.

That you are here — that life exists,
That the powerful play goes on,
and you may contribute a verse.
     - Leaves of Grass (1892)

Some researchers asked ChatGPT to create five poems in the style of 10 different English language poets, all white. Then, they asked more than 1,600 people to read five real poems by one of the poets, alongside the five AI-generated poems. People were bad at predicting which poems were written by AI and which were human, Maybe they should have asked some poets to compare.

As AI-generated text continues to evolve, distinguishing it from human-authored content has become increasingly difficult, and one study found that AI-generated poems were rated more favorably in qualities such as rhythm and beauty, and that this contributed to their mistaken identification as human-authored. They theorized that AI-generated poetry was preferred by readers because it was simpler and more accessible. They posit that general readers may have misinterpreted the complexity of human-written poems as garble generated by AI.

But AI poetry has some issues. AI lacks lived experience, a personal perspective, and uman emotion. Because AI generates text by identifying patterns in large datasets, which can lead to predictable and repetitive phrasing in poems. Metaphors and symbolism often require a deeper understanding of language and human experience than most AI models currently possess.

An AI's strength in writing poetry improves as it learns poetic structures and experiments with different rhyme schemes and forms to generate variations.

I find that AI used for brainstorming ideas and getting inspiration for a poem by prompting with a theme or concept is interesting. It can also be used for educational purposes, such as demonstrating how language can be manipulated to create poetic effects.

MORE AT

phys.org/news/2024-11-shakespeare-chatgpt-people-ai-real.html 

theconversation.com/new-research-shows-people-cant-tell-the-difference-between-human-and-ai-poetry-and-even-prefer-the-latter

washingtonpost.com/science/2024/11/14/chatgpt-ai-poetry-study-creative

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

This Is Your Brain On Poetry

It seems that researchers will use fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) for almost anything these days. Some of them decided to see how the human brain reacts to poetry. 

Compared to ordinary speech and prose, poetry activates specific areas of the brain that recognize its rhymes and rhythms and contemplate its imagery and the multiple meanings of words and figurative language. That fits very nicely with the poems in our May issue on multiple meanings.

Does this help us to interpret our everyday reality? It appears that it does.

You can read a bit more about this on howstuffworks.com but here are two more takeaways.

The brain's reaction to poetry indicates a deep, intuitive connection to verse, suggesting that appreciation of poetry is within our neurological structure. We are built for poetry.

Reading or listening to poetry not only stimulates emotional and aesthetic responses but also enhances cognitive functions like flexible thinking and the capacity to understand complex, multiple meanings, which can be beneficial in everyday decision-making.

Poetry is good for you. I think poets already knew this, but some scientific evidence is still nice.

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Podcasts and Poetry

An NPR story talks about how "Podcasts Are Providing A New Way Into Poetry" for listeners.  I have been listening to podcasts since 2005 when iTunes made them more accessible via subscriptions in their software.

Today, there are more ways to subscribe and listen. iTunes still works and many podcasts are available on a website. I prefer listening and downloading ones to listen to later using Stitcher on my phone or tablet. It's a free app and almost all podcasts are also free.

Besides my daily doses of news and many interview programs that I am listening to all week, I subscribe to a variety of programs devoted to poetry. You can do a search for them in whatever app you decide to use.

Here are my current top 5 favorites.

1. The Slowdown - Former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith does this on weekdays. She opens with a personal essay and then reads someone's poem that relates to that topic. Highly recommended.
2. Poetry Off the Shelf – poets, poems, poetry topics from The Poetry Foundation
3. The New Yorker: Poetry - Hosted by poetry editor Kevin Young. A guest poet selects and reads a poem from the magazine by someone else and also one of their own.
4. The Poetry Magazine Podcast - Poetry magazine's editors go inside the new issue and talk to poets who read their contributions.
5. The Writer's Almanac - I start each day with this 5-minute podcast hosted by Garrison Keillor who reviews events that occurred on this day in history - some literary, some not - and then reads a poem. 

Poetry Rx

Poetry Rx, as in a poetry "prescription," is a column the The Paris Review. Readers write in with a specific emotion, and resident poets—Sarah Kay, Kaveh Akbar, and Claire Schwartz—take turns prescribing poems for them. Once a weekly feature, it now monthly.

For May, the topic was "Then the Letting Go," One reader wrote in asking for a poem because she had come out to her parents and gotten a bad reaction.

Claire Schwartz replied:

"I'm sorry your family did not respond with the affirmation you deserve. Your queerness doesn’t need to be validated. It is valid because it is. You need—you deserve—to find a way to enter the truths of yourself regardless of how other people see you. That is difficult, beautiful work. I want to offer you a poem I hold very close because it stabilizes me to do just that: Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck.” 

In another column, when a reader asks for an encouraging poem for her job-hunting partner, Sarah Kay suggest one that isn't about job hunting biut about "loving someone exactly as they are, and wanting them to know that they are enough. It is a poem called “Ordinary Sex,” by Ellen Bass, which begins:"

If no swan descends

in a blinding glare of plumage,

drumming the air with deafening wings,

if the earth doesn’t tremble

and rivers don’t tumble uphill,

if my mother’s crystal

vase doesn’t shatter

and no extinct species are sighted anew

and leaves of the city trees don’t applaud

as you zing me to the moon, starry tesserae

cascading down my shoulders,

if we stay right here

on our aging Simmons Beautyrest,

dumped into the sag in the middle,

that’s okay...

Prompt: Poetry in School

Most of us were introduced to poetry in school. As a teacher, I hope it was a kind introduction, but there are many people whose introduction to poetry in school seems to have been unpleasant.

Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry" is one that is often used to make a point about poetry in the classroom. The teacher asks the students to "take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide / or press an ear against its hive." Though the teacher wants the students to simply enjoy the poem - "to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author's name on the shore" - the students have been trained in school about how to read a poem, so they want to "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means."

You may have more pleasant memories of your introduction to poetry or a good classroom encounter with poetry in a classroom. I can recall how Mrs. Cavico read and spoke about Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" with such love and appreciation - and how she recognized that I "got it" while most of the class looked out the window at kids in gym class.

Having met her and heard her read and talk about writing, I imagine poet Naomi Shihab Nye would be a great teacher to have for poetry. In one of her poems, "The Young Poets of Winnipeg,"
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase…
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
encouraged them to stretch, wouldn’t let their parents
attend the reading because parents might criticize

These very confident young poets had not been taught to tie down a poem or beat it.

They knew their poems
were glorious, that second-graders could write better
than third or fourth, because of what happened
on down the road, the measuring sticks
that came out of nowhere, poking and channeling
the view

For our September, back-to-school prompt, write a poem about poetry in school. I'm guessing we have positive and negative tales to tell, from our own experiences as students and teachers or from imagined classrooms.

Submission guidelines.        Submission deadline September 30, 2018

         

More People Are Reading Poetry

I like finding surveys that say that more people are reading poetry. 28 million American adults read poetry this year according to a survey of arts participation conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau. That is the highest percentage of poetry readership in more than 15 years.

“We’ve never seen an increase in poetry reading. If anything there had been a decline — a pretty sharp decline — since about 2002 at least,” said Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis."

The full arts participation report won’t be released until later this year, but they thought the results were too significant not to share early.

Young adults and certain racial ethnic groups account for a large portion of the increase. U.S. poetry readers aged 18 to 24 more than doubled, jumping from 8 percent in 2012 to 17 percent in 2017. Among people of color, African Americans and Asian Americans are reading poetry at the highest rates — which more than doubled in the last five years — up 15 and 12 percent, respectively.

Other notable increased readership groups include women, rural Americans and those with only some college education.

This kind of data is of interest to the NEA’s mission of increasing participation in the arts, and they have found in other studies how reading tends to be a portal to other types of participation and other types of engagement, in the arts and outside the arts.

Poetry on Video

Poetry has from the beginning been an oral/aural art. We heard poems long before we wrote poems. And we must have seen poets perform those poems long before we saw them on a page.

Some poems have greater impact being heard. Some work better on the page. Sme poets are great readers. Some poets are great performers of their poetry. Some are not so great to see and hear read their work.

I have been helping with a project to move many years of poets reading at the Poetry Center at PCCC video online (see example below).

Poetry online at YouTube and other sites has been happening ever since video went online, but has really exploded with the advent of more ubiquitous broadband connections that allow smoother streaming, and with the dominance of smartphones.       

Video is also being used by poets and publishers to promote poetry. For a publisher, this is an intentional way to get a poet's face and vice in front of potential readers. Sure, you still need to do tours and readings and book signings, but video has greater reach.

Sometimes the promotional aspect if more accidental. In 2014, an unpublished poet from Toronto named Sabrina Benaim took the stage at the semifinals for the National Poetry Slam in California. he looked and sounded really nervous, but the nervousness played well into her poem, “Explaining My Depression to My Mother.”

I have read that this was her first time performing it aloud (though I wonder how she made it to the semi-finals). She performs it in a rush of words, short of breath. She has said that she can’t remember the performance because she was really was that nervous and panicked.

It was videotaped and put online and that performance went viral. It has currently more than 6 million views on YouTube and an estimated 50 million views across all social media platforms. You can't plan a video to go viral. It just happens.



Sabrina Benaim had no book to promote and no publisher who wanted to promote her at that time. She worked on a poetry manuscript after that performance. She also stayed in contact with people who discovered her through the video. many of them were young people dealing with depression and parents who saw something in her poem about their own child's struggle with it.

Social media is still a part of her poetry life, but she has a first book of poems. Depression and Other Magic Tricks has “Explaining My Depression to My Mother” at its heart.

The small poetry press Button Poetry shot and uploaded her video back in 2014 and released her book three years later. The video certainly played a role in the book's publication and success. Preorders on Amazon were more than 5,000 and Button Poetry had to up their first of 25,000 copies with a second run of 15,000.

Button Poetry itself started with poets sharing performance poetry videos online. It didn’t start publishing books until 2013.

Movie trailers have long been used in theaters and now are even more important online. Novels often have a trailer nowadays. Poetry collections are playing catch-up in this area of promotion, though there are lenty of poets reading onlie that act as promotion for the poet, their work or the venue where they were reading.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival has been using video since its early days. At one time that vide would get some airplay on PBS TV stations. That's a distinguished place to be, but a limited audience. They moved much of that video in recent years online and their YouTube channel offers hundreds of poems free to people who will probably never have the chance to attend the festival or even see these poets read in person.

I was at several Dodge Festivals and heard Stanley Kunitz read, but now that he is gone, I am glad that video cameras were there to preserve the readings.




Not very reading captured on video is a performance in the way that we now think about "performance poetry," but every reading is a performance of a kind.




Do you know of a poetry performance on video that you think works really well for that medium? Share the link with all of us here.

Poems Read Aloud

This spring, I am the "poet in residence" at a middle school. It is fun to be back in a classroom, especially since I am only there once a week and only for an hour. The students have sessions where we write, revise, and listen to each other's poems.

There are three "events" where they can read their best poem aloud. One is performance-oriented, but the other two are just readings and it is quite a thing to be that age and be able to stand in front of a crowd and read aloud. Some will memorize. Some will add some performance, but I'm impressed with any of them reading something they wrote aloud at that age.

My own first reading at an open mic in a bookstore happened in high school and before I read my knees were very literally shaking and I had to hold onto the podium to keep my hands still.

Having heard actors and poets read some poems on recordings, my idea of "how to read a poem aloud" was rather distorted. I knew I couldn't read like Richard Burton, but I thought that kind of reading should be my model.

Of course, you don't need celebrities to have a good reading of a poem, but actor John Lithgow put together The Poets' Corner  a collection of well-known poems and had them read by a group of celebrities. The readings are online.

I listened to the collection and it brought back memories of poems read or heard when I was a young student discovering poetry. It includes Wallace Stevens's poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream" (read by Kathy Bates) which was a poem that grabbed me in high school with its title and language.

There are many collections of poets and others reading online. You could spend days going from one to another on YouTube alone. I share some of these with students because hearing poetry read aloud is not a commonplace event for most people. young or old.

The students read their poems too quickly. They try to memorize rather than "learn by heart" their poems - a difference that is not easy to understand or learn. Some over-dramatize. They use their "poet voice" in the way that novice Shakespearean actors drift into British accents - even when Romeo is Italian or Twelfth Night takes place in Illyria (Yugoslavia) and Hamlet and his friends are from Denmark.

It is rare to see a poet (or any writer, though non-fiction writers and novelists get more airplay) interviewed on TV - even rarer to hear poetry read. I was happily surprised when actress Helen Mirren was asked by Stephen Colbert to read the end of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” on his show. (read "Ulysses")  It is an old poem and apparently, one Colbert has great affection for.

“Death closes all: but something ere the end

Some work of noble note, may yet be done…”

That section of Tennyson's poem - hopeful that some work might still be done - reminds me of the Epilogue to Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero, a wizard and an old man, gives this final speech and I have always thought of it as Shakespeare's own farewell/retirement speech. He asks that the audience "release me from my bands, with the help of your good hands." The two times I have seen the play performed, after that line the audience did, with its applause, free him. Shakespeare's "project" - "which was to please" is finished.

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell,
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands.
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

I think that many of my young poets, like Prospero and Shakespeare, want "spirits to enforce, art to enchant."  I hope they get that, if only for a few minutes when they read and are freed by the audience's hands.

Prompt: Tools of the Trade

Early surgical tools

What is a tool every new physician needs? In Scotland, they are thinking it is a book of poetry. Medical students there receive a book of poetry intended to help them recharge and be mindful of the human aspect of their vocation.

An article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) alerted me to this program where the graduating medical students in Scotland receive a free copy of a poetry book titled Tools of the Trade: Poems for New Doctors. The pocket-size book is less than 100 pages and designed to be carried while on duty. Poems are grouped into five themes: looking after yourself, looking after others, beginnings, being with illness, and endings. The anthology was put together by the Scottish Poetry Library.

The gift is offered simply as a compassionate friendly gesture. As editors Dr Lesley Morrison and Dr John Gillies write in their introduction: "To care and be compassionate to others, we first need to be compassionate, to look after, to be kind to ourselves."

Some of the poets are or were doctors themselves, and all the poems speak in some way to the experience of being a junior doctor. Different poems will suit different situations, and readers.

“I remind students in their first week that neglect [of patients] is a real consequence of disregarding the human aspect of what we do,” says David Crossman, dean of the medical school at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland, and chief scientist for Scotland. “These poems just bring you back and help you understand who you are talking to.”

 

The article started me thinking about the kinds of poems I might include in anthologies for other trades and professions. Every job has its tools. Poetry is usually not one of them.

An artist has tools of the trade. The backyard gardener has tools. I wonder what poems we would give them to help in their work?

Our writing prompt for March is to write a poem intended for someone in a particular job. That might your own profession or one that you once aspired to, or something you know very little about but find interesting. It should be a poem that would help them in their work. Maybe it helps them deal with the problems that come with the job, or helps inspire them, or reminds them why they chose to do what they do. 

Submission deadline: Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Teaching Poetry

The most recent episode of the Poetry Off the Shelf podcast was a back-to-school episode. The title is what caught my attention: "Teaching Poetry in Times Like These."

Do we change what we teach because of the times we teach in? The podcast doesn't mention President Trump but it surely is alluding to the current administration as part of the turmoil of the times.

Of course, poems change - or our feelings and interpretations change - depending on the time when we read them.

I won't be in a classroom teaching this fall, but I don't know if I would be selecting reading selections based on the politics and news of the day.

What I would heartily agree with that the teacher interviewed in the program says is that teachers need to give their students choice and a voice.

The classroom is where poetry connects with young people and also where they can disconnect from poetry.

Listen to the podcast (14 minutes) online at stitcher.com/podcast/poetry-foundation/poetry-off-the-shelf/

This Is Your Brain on Metaphors

"This Is Your Brain on Metaphors" is an essay by Robert Sapolsky that I read on The New York Times’s website. Sapolsky is a professor of Biology, Neurology and Neurosurgery at Stanford University, and is a research associate at the Institute of Primate Research, National Museums of Kenya.

It doesn't sound like the CV for someone to discuss metaphors.

He starts by talking about why humans beat out gophers and fruit flies even though
under a microscope they look the same. Neurons are the same basic building blocks in both species.

So where’s the difference? It’s numbers — humans have roughly one million neurons for each one in a fly. And out of a human’s 100 billion neurons emerge some pretty remarkable things. With enough quantity, you generate quality.

So, we can understand symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, synecdoche, figures of speech and all the stuff of poetry.

We understand that a captain wants more than just hands when he orders all of them on deck. We understand that Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” isn’t really about a cockroach. If we are of a certain theological ilk, we see bread and wine intertwined with body and blood. We grasp that the right piece of cloth can represent a nation and its values, and that setting fire to such a flag is a highly charged act. We can learn that a certain combination of sounds put together by Tchaikovsky represents Napoleon getting his butt kicked just outside Moscow. And that the name “Napoleon,” in this case, represents thousands and thousands of soldiers dying cold and hungry, far from home.

He cites a number of studies. I like this example of how the brain links the literal and the metaphorical. It was a study by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh where volunteers would meet one of the experimenters, believing that they would be starting the experiment shortly. Actually, the meeting itself was the experiment. They asked the volunteer to briefly hold their coffee cup - a cup that was hot or iced. The subjects then read a description of some individual, and those who had held the warmer cup tended to rate the individual as having a warmer personality, with no change in ratings of other attributes.

I'm not sure how all this science will help you finish that poem that you last started, but maybe...

Books by Robert Sapolsky

• Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers
• Monkeyluv: And Other Essays 
• A Primate's Memoir: A Neuroscientist's Unconventional Life Among the Baboons
• Our Lives as Animals
• The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament
• Junk Food Monkeys and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament
• Stress, the Aging Brain, and the Mechanisms of Neuron Death

A Poetry Newsletter

In addition to her Blogalicious poetry blog, poet Diane Lockward is now doing a free monthly poetry newsletter.

The first one offered a poem and a prompt, useful links (journals that read during the summer and print journals that accept online submissions), a book recommendation (The Working Poet: 75 Writing Exercises and a Poetry Anthology, edited by Scott Minar). There was also Molly Fisk's Poem-A-Day project for August.

You can can sign up for her newsletter at her blog.

Diane's own books of poetry are Eve's Red Dress, What Feeds Us and her newest collection, Temptation by Water.

Invictus

I'm happy for any attention that the media can bring to poetry. The new film, Invictus, gets its title from a poem that inspired Nelson Mandela.

"Invictus" is a poem by the English poet William Ernest Henley. It was a poem that gave strength and courage to Mandela while he was incarcerated.

Henley, at the age of 12, was a victim of tuberculosis of the bone. The tuberculosis attacked his foot and caused his leg to be amputated below the knee. He was told by his physician that amputating the leg was the only way to save his life. While hospitalized, he wrote "Invictus." He lived nearly 30 years after his release from the hospital.

...It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Invictus: Nelson Mandela and the Game That Made a Nation by John Carlin

Do women write "female" poetry?

I didn't ask the question. It was posted by Jo Shapcott today on guardian.co.uk.

A related question has been knocking around in my head for the past few weeks: "Do women genuinely write different poems from men and, if so, what could be said to characterise the 'female' poem?" The occasion which prompted the question happened yesterday, when the Aldeburgh poetry festival and the Poetry Society combined to host an event called The Female Poem, which I chaired, and which boasted a distinguished panel of writers: Maureen Duffy, Annie Freud and Pascal Petit. It was so popular that it sold out in minutes and had to be moved to a larger hall, which suggests the subject is urgent – and not just to women; our audience was mixed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/09/do-women-write-female-poetry

What's your answer to that question?

Live Free and Write: A New Hampshire Getaway for Poets & Writers

Live Free and Write: A New Hampshire Getaway for Poets & Writers is a poetry and creative non-fiction workshop in New Hampshire. The event will be held November 6-8 at Dexter's Inn, in Sunapee.

Leading the poetry workshop will be poet Peter E. Murphy. Mimi Schwartz will lead the creative non-fiction group.

Peter E. Murphy was born in Wales and grew up in New York City where he operated heavy equipment, managed a night club and drove a cab. He is the author of Stubborn Child a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize, and a chapbook of poems, Thorough & Efficient both from Jane Street Press. In addition to receiving a 2009 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, he has received awards and fellowships from The Atlantic Center for the Arts, Yaddo, The Folger Shakespeare Library, and the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. He directs the annual Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway in Cape May and other programs for poets, writers and teachers.


Mimi Schwartz, a veteran teacher and writer for over 35 years, has published five books including Good Neighbors, Bad Times - Echoes of My Father's German Village (University of Nebraska Press), soon to be out in paperback. Other recent books include Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed and Writing True and the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction (with Sondra Perl), used in writing programs nationwide. She is Professor Emerita at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey and teaches at writer conferences, libraries and teacher institutes across this country and abroad.

This event is limited to 12 poets & 10 writers and both programs fill quickly. Register today online and save $25 by registering before October 5.

Endorsed by New Hampshire Writers' Project, this opportunity will also allow you a relaxing writing getaway which will energize and inspire you.

Teachers can earn 15 hours of professional development credit during this which occurs concurrent with the "NJEA Teachers Convention Weekend."

$275 Tuition ($300 after October 5) with Meal & Room Packages starting at $200

Contact: Amanda, 888-887-2105 or info@murphywriting.com

murphywriting.com

Glum High School Poetry Teacher

I just read a review of a new movie, World's Greatest Dad, with Robin Williams, and what hit me right away was the line at the top: "Robin Williams stars as a glum high school poetry teacher in this surrealist fable."

I taught secondary school for 25 years and I never met a teacher who could claim to be a high school poetry teacher. I may have to watch the film just to see what kind of high school has an English teacher who only teaches poetry. (All of you high school poetry teachers out there, feel free to post a comment below.)

The "glum" adjective didn't make me flinch. Teachers are a pretty glum lot, English teachers more so and poets are always moody. At least, that's what I have been told. I actually enjoyed teaching and especially enjoyed teaching poetry, but there's no movie script in that story.

I guess Mr. Clayton is partially glum because he's a writer who has never published anything.

That's it for this blog reaction - the rest of my preview is here.


Watch the film's trailer

New Jersey Writers Exchange Contest

Poets & Writers is now welcoming submissions for the 2010 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award. Initiated in 1984, the Writers Exchange Contest was created to introduce emerging poets and fiction writers to literary communities outside of their home state, and provide them with a network for professional advancement. To date, 78 writers from 31 states have participated.

One poet and one fiction writer from New Jersey will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City, where they will meet with agents, editors, and prominent writers, and give a public reading of their work. The winners will be selected by Sophie Cabot Black (poetry) and Nahid Rachlin (fiction).

The contest is open to poets and fiction writers who:

• Have never published a book, or
• Have published no more than one full-length book in the genre in which they are applying, and
• Have resided in New Jersey for at least two consecutive years prior to the date they submit their manuscripts.
  

An application must accompany all manuscripts and be postmarked no later than December 1, 2009.

For complete guidelines and an application, please visit:
http://www.pw.org/files/WEXApplication09.pdf.

Escape to the Library

I'm passing this information from my colleague and friend, Dana Maloney, who is coordinating this year's NJ Council of Teachers of English 2008 High School Writing Contest. She would like to reach as many teachers and students in New Jersey as possible, so I offered to post about it on several of my blogs.

It's a NJcentric contest, but the rest of you may be curious about the personal essay prompt and our model. It sent me back to a childhood memory that may be one you share.

The contest categories are: poetry, short story, and personal essay. More contest details at the end of this post. The personal essay submissions must respond to this year’s prompt.

Where do you live? Use descriptive language to give the reader a virtual experience of your world. As you do this, let us hear your voice. Share the thoughts, feelings, questions and concerns that arise out of your view of the world around you. Bring your space – your town, your school, your home, your room, your web - to life for your reader. Where you live can be interpreted in many ways, including both literal and metaphorical ways, and we encourage you to take liberty with interpretation.

Of course, you could use that for poetry too. As a model of a personal essay, Dana suggested an essay by another friend, teacher and poet BJ Ward. You might want to read his essay about his youthful home-away-from-home at his local library - it is available online. Escaping to books is probably something that many readers of this post can admit to from their youth.

"During the internet-less, video-game-less, and seemingly endless summers of my childhood, I could ride my bike to the Washington Borough Public Library and within one minute be transported to the world of Dr. Doolittle; The Hardy Boys; and Babe Ruth, All-American Hero. Each book was a planet with a spine. The librarian was an organizing star, keeping all those spheres in their places for future explorers to discover. The library itself was a universe—a macrocosm between paint-chipped walls, below a roof paid for by bake sales, sandwiched between a tattoo parlor and halfway house. It was the most fecund place I knew—a greenhouse for my imagination, where fluorescence had to do with my mind’s branches spreading. O the joyful fire in the astronaut’s skull when divination led to apprehension. "

I was one of those people who had a corner of the children's section of my public library that I considered to be mine. A big, fat, old leather chair in a corner with a dirty window and a wall of books for protection. When they built the new town library - a bigger, brighter, glass-walled
version - I never found a special place there. (The modern chairs discouraged getting comfortable anyway.) Of course, by then I was out of the children's section which almost always is the more inviting part of a library anyway.

I had ventured a few times to the "big library" in my part of New Jersey - the Newark Public Library. It was impressive. Too impressive. I felt lost. Too many echoes in the halls, though I did like seeing in pop up in books like in Phillip Roth's Goodbye Columbus that I was reading. (My own hometown, Irvington, had shown up in some stories and in Portnoy's Complaint and I rode that same bus as

Perhaps, some student will write an essay for the contest about some private place of escape in their world. Do kids still escape to the library? My office is within a college library and it seems to be the place to study and use computers, but escape...?

BJ Ward's poem "Filling in the New Address Book" was featured on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. (listen to Garrison Keillor reading it). His latest collection of poetry is Gravedigger's Birthday. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Warren County Community College in New Jersey.

CONTEST DETAILS

• Each participating teacher may submit up to 10 entries in each category. Submissions must be accompanied by a signed entry form.
• Entrants must submit four paper copies and one electronic copy of each submission.
• Download the entry form which contains information on where to submit the entry.
• The student’s name must not appear on the submission itself – only on the entry form.
• Postmark and Electronic Submission Deadline: December 15, 2008
• At least one student from every participating school will receive an award. Award categories are “Outstanding,” “Prize-worthy” or “Certificate of Merit.” Students in grades 10, 11 or 12 who are named “Outstanding” winners may be eligible for a New Jersey Governor’s Award in Arts Education.
• Winners will be announced by April 15, 2009.

Tales of Stubborn Children

For July, we are looking at Peter Murphy's poem "The Stubborn Child" from his book Stubborn Child which was a finalist for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. The poem has its inspiration in a fairy tale of the same name from the Brothers Grimm.

I never liked fairy tales as a kid. They scared me. I don't like them much now either. I still find them creepy, and I never felt they were stories well told. Someone gave my son a book of Grimm's tales when he was very small and I read a few looking for ones I might read him at night.

That was one of the few books in my life that I threw out. I didn't even want to give it to a used book sale.

Try reading this one to a kid before he goes to sleep. This is the Grimm Brothers' version of "The Stubborn Child."

Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do. The dear Lord, therefore, did not look kindly upon him and let him become sick.

No doctor could cure him, and in a short time, he lay on his deathbed.

After he was lowered into his grave and was covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air. They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help. The little arm kept popping out.

So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch. After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

from The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Jack Zipes, translator, 1987

The puns on Grimm and grim are just too easy.

The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807 and produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. It wasn't an academic undertaking and there has been some highly critical re-assessments about their sources and methods. That doesn't affect us in our reading. Actually, I like that their collecting was not so different from someone today collecting the campfire horror stories of kids. That's what some of the Grimm's tales seem like to me anyway.

Sometimes the title of this particular little tale is translated as the "willful" child. I realize that willful is basically the same obstinate child, but I think the Murphy poem might be the willful rather than just the stubborn child.

In his version, the child emerges from the grave, lives on and has a daughter to pray over and protect. He resurrects the willful child who is more than stubborn, and who still loves his mother who he knows loves him.

Of Peter's book, Stephen Dunn has said: "Stubborn Child unflinchingly enacts and examines his own painful childhood, then moves to the often damaged and compromised lives of the high school students he teaches. Like the best delineators of unhappiness, he also brings humor to his task, the dark humor of a survivor. And indeed this is a survivor's book, both transforming and transformative — in the end, Murphy the man able to love and affirm, Murphy the poet able to raise the unruly and the tawdry to the level of art."

Transformation is a key word for this prompt.

In an email to me about the poem's creation, Peter said:

"I had a deprived childhood in that I never read a fairy tale till I was in my late 30's, and when I did, I fell in love with the surreal, violent and familiar families portrayed by the Brothers Grimm. This was not Disney. This was Cinderella's evil stepsisters lopping off their heels to squeeze their fat feet into that impossibly tight glass slipper. Perverse entertainment till I came across "The Stubborn Child," perhaps the shortest Grimm tale. "Damn," I thought. "That's my childhood!" And it was, so I proceeded to write 40 or 50 drafts trying to get it right. Somewhere in this frenzy, I realized my own stubborn child was asleep in the next room, and that's when the poem found its ending and its shape, the transformation of the speaker from abused child to wounded father, trying, perhaps too hard, not to repeat the mistakes made on him.

Many stubborn children of all ages inhabit my book Stubborn Child as the poems branch away from my childhood and adolescence to the students who taught me for 30 years in Atlantic City, to other stubborn children, friends and family, who ghost the adult years of my life."

Murphy is not the first to try this self-imposed writing prompt of starting with a Grimm fairy tale. One popular anthology, The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales, is an entire collection of these poems. The poets use the themes, motifs, and characters from Grimm. (poets include Anne Sexton, Carol Ann Duffy, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Denise Duhamel, Randall Jarrell, Jane Yolen and Allen Tate. (Here is the table of contents)

Our prompt for this month is to take the story, characters, title, theme (as much as you need) from one of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and transform it for your own purposes. I would not be opposed to other fairy tales, but there's a lot of material in those strange tales from Jacob & Wilhelm.

If you want to try the prompt yourself, you can check a book of the tales, or Google a Grimm title that you know, but a good site to start with is SurLaLuneFairyTales.com. It includes tales that we are all familiar with like "Goldilocks and the 3 Bears", and ones I had never read, like "The Girl Without Hands". The tales there are all annotated, so you get some good background information that might well serve as your inspiration. There's a list of the Grimm tales on Wikipedia too.


Here are 2 links where you can read several other poems by Peter Murphy, and hear him reading online.

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Didactic, rhyming, list poems. Tall order.

This month I chose the poem "How to Live" by Charles Harper Webb as our model poem.

Charles Harper Webb was a rock guitarist for fifteen years. He's a licensed psychotherapist. He's a professor at California State University. He has written five books of poetry. He uses three names because there are so many Charles Webbs in the world. (Full disclosure: I first looked at his poems a few years ago because I thought he was the guy who wrote The Graduate.)

I stumbled upon his poem "Bombs Over Everywhere" on the Huffington Post blog and I got excited because I thought he might be a blogging poet (he's not).

I suggested that because his poem begins with an epigraph that is a line from a poem by Sharon Olds: "I don't know how to live," we can read the poem as a response to her. Advice on how to live.

It's also a list poem, a form that has often been used. It's a form that I believe many readers and writers dismiss as too easy or less "poetic." It's a form teachers use with students to get them into writing poetry because it is easy.

Then, what makes a list go beyond list to poem? It's worth noting that Webb has a book of prose poems, Hot Popsicles, and that form deals with the same question. If you read other poems by Webb, you know that it's not a question about his ability to write poetry.

The poem has a structure of 5 line stanzas, but the stanza breaks seem arbitrary. Even the line breaks seem to be controlled more by the physical length of the line than by a meter or syllabication. Do you find it full of figurative language? I don't.

There are literary moments in his advice - "Read Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Kafka, Shakespeare, Twain." - followed by "Collect Uncle Scrooge comics." One theme that does run through the advice is contrast - "Don't think TV characters talk to you; that's crazy. Don't be too sane." and "Work hard. Loaf easily."

I have long been a believer in the ars poetica all-poems-are-about-poetry school of reading. Can we look at this poem as not only advice for living but as advice to poets? Should poets try forms that go against their own sense of what is poetry?

At Poets Online, we have gone down the advice path before: advice to poets, and advice to poets in a poetic form, good advice gone bad, so we don't need to try that again.

To make it more challenging, we want it to be didactic poetry, and put in that pesky rhyme in the way of several poetic games. Ever heard of bouts-rimes (boo-REEM - literally "end rhymes") which is an 18th century parlor game. Partygoers get a list of rhyming words and then have to make a poem from the list keeping the rhymes in their original order. There's also crambo where one player gives a word or line which is matched in rhyme by the other players.

Didactic poetry gives instruction (often moral instruction), so your poem should instruct.

An example often used is Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Criticism."

Here's the opening stanza:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind,
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanced, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!

And it is a list poem we are writing. Sometimes you hear that called catalog verse - a list of persons, places, things, or abstract ideas which share a common denominator. It's an ancient form.

Your working set of rhymes (in the way of bouts-rimes) is:
surprise/rise, white/bright, mind/behind, rock/lock, head/bed, share/hair, way/day, place/embrace.

I ask that poets use them in any order or scheme. You don't need to use all of them, but it does suggest a line limit of 16 lines (yes, there are ways around that - internal rhyme is one possibility). There are 8 couplets suggested; use 7 and you have a sonnet form.

I feel that that creates a box for your poem, but leaves lots of room for your own decoration.

Check the Poets Online Archive for responses to this prompt and others