Nov15

Swimming

Posted on November 15, 2011 by sahar94

From the list of the 20 topic words, my number one topic was swimming, and I more than happy to write poems about this topic, simply because I love the water. I love wimming in the water, drinking water ofcourse, and also just look at the beauty of water. Swimming has always been one of my most favourite sports. Even when I was little I would always choose swimming over all the other things a young kid likes to do. Also I think water is beautiful, I could sit for hours at the beach and just look at the waves of the water and listen to the beautiful sounds.

Some ineresting poems I found while I was doing a research on swimming poetry are as follows;

Swimming by Anukka D

Swimming through the darkness
Swimming through my doubts
Through my fears
Through my past

Swimming through my anger
Almost getting drowned in my emotions
Yet swimming still through the storm
Trying to get myself towards the shore

I am swimming through my life Through my present
Through the light of the sun
Through joys and sadness (From a list of poems about swimming)

This poem is a little sad I believe, and something I learned from this poem is that swimming can not only be a sport, but also used for going through difficult situations in life. For example like it says in the poem, “swimming through my anger”. The mood/tome of this poem I would describe as depressed and maybe disturbed.

Thoughts of a Goldfish by C Richard Miles

I am a goldfish; I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.

A goldfish I am; It is getting dizzy. Swimming around this bowl I am.
Am I a goldfish? I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.
It is getting dizzy, swimming around this bowl, I am a goldfish. I am.
Around this bowl I am swimming. It is getting dizzy. I am a goldfish
I am a goldfish. It is getting dizzy around this bowl, I am swimming.
I am swimming around this bowl; I am a goldfish. It is getting dizzy.
Around this bowl, it is getting dizzy. I am a goldfish; I am swimming.
I am a goldfish. It is getting dizzy. I am swimming around this bowl.
I am a goldfish. Bowl this around: it is getting dizzy. I am swimming.
I am swimming around this bowl. Am I a goldfish? It is getting dizzy.
Am I a goldfish bowl? It is getting dizzy. Am I swimming around this?
It is getting dizzy. I am a goldfish. Am I swimming around this bowl?
Am I a goldfish? Around this bowl am I swimming? It is getting dizzy.
Am I a goldfish? I am. It is getting dizzy, swimming around this bowl.
Am I a goldfish? It is getting dizzy. I am swimming around this bowl.
Am I a goldfish swimming? Around this bowl, I am. It is getting dizzy.
Am I a goldfish? It is getting dizzy. Around this bowl I am swimming.
Am I swimming? I am a goldfish around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.
Am I swimming? Is it getting dizzy? Around this bowl I am a goldfish.
It is getting dizzy. Am I swimming? Am I a goldfish around this bowl?
Am I a-swimming? I am a round goldfish. This bowl, it is getting dizzy.
This bowl: It is getting dizzy. I am a goldfish I am swimming around.
Am I a bowl? It is getting dizzy. I am a goldfish swimming around this.
It is getting dizzy. Am I a round bowl? I am this goldfish a-swimming.
I am a goldfish I am swimming around. Is this bowl getting dizzy? It is.
Is it? I am getting a goldfish. I am swimming around this dizzy bowl.
I am. I am swimming around this goldfish bowl. Dizzy it is a-getting.
I am a dizzy goldfish swimming. I am a round bowl. Is it getting this?
Is this bowl around a dizzy, swimming goldfish? I am. I am getting it.
Is this getting dizzy? Am I a round goldfish? Am I a swimming bowl?

I am a goldfish; I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.I am a goldfish; I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy.

I am a goldfish; I am swimming around this bowl. It is getting dizzy. (from)

I found this poem very interesting, because I actually read it and felt dizzy as I was finishing off. This poem was actually very different from the first one I read. The first poem is more about the feelings of a person where as the second one is about a gold fish in a bowl. Thus something I learned is that I could change perspectives when writing a poem and still make it very interesting.

Nov9

Interesting Idea: “A Humument”

Posted on November 9, 2011 by sahar94

Interesting Idea: “A Humument”

In my english we have been working on a assignment where we change a piece of text into art and poetry. We do this by drawing a picture and choosing certain words from the text to create a poem. To do this assignment we looked at a few pages of the humument by Tom Philips. However I am very curious on how Philips came up with this beautiful idea and thus I want to investigate this.

Inspired by William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, Tom Philips decided to use the first book he came across, that being A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, published in 1892, and created the “Humument”. He came up with the word humument by putting together human and document. The humument is a book Philips spent a lot of time on, he was in no hurry at all, and as a result this project also allowed him to write poetry which he never thought of being able to do.

By doing some research on Tom Philips something very important I learned is that we should never give up on something or lose hope. For example Philips never thought that he could write poetry, however many people were and are praising his work.

http://www.escapeintolife.com/showcase/a-humument-visual-poetic-artists-book/

http://humument.com/

Nov9

Poetic Form: Villanelle

Posted on November 9, 2011 by sahar94

Poetic Form: Villanelle

A poetic form that usually surprises many poets with its twists and discoveries is the Villanelle. Villanelle, (Villa coming from the Italian word meaning house) has been used and still is being used for more than over 300 years. To create a villanelle one must first come up with two lines, known as a couplet, that rhyme and are the most meaningful lines in the poem. Then a three-line stanza should be made by adding an unrhymed sentence in between the first two line couplet. In the second stanza, the first sentence should rhyme with the first sentence in the couplet, the second line in the stanza should be a line that rhymes with the sentence that was added in between the two lines of the couplet in the first stanza and then the first line of the couplet repeated to finish the second stanza. In the third stanza, the first sentence should again rhyme with the first line in the two sentence couplet, and the second sentence must also rhyme with the sentence in between the couplet and the last line in the stanza must end with something that rhymes with the second/last sentence of the couplet. This is then repeated to complete a total of 5 3-line stanzas and then finally ends with the sixth stanza where the second sentence of the couplet is added to the stanza one more time in the final sentence.

I personally like this poetic form very much because this year I have very often heard my English and Writercraft teacher, Ms. Parrish, talk about the importance of repetition in a story and poem. Thus by investigating this form of poetry I have really learned how to write poems that contain repetition, without being worried about where and when to repeat the important sentences.

http://www.writing-world.com/poetry/villanelle.shtml

http://members.optusnet.com.au/kazoom/poetry/villanelle.html

Nov9

Lisa B: Spoken Word Poet

Posted on November 9, 2011 by sahar94

Lisa B: Spoken Word Poet

Lisa B is mostly known as a articulate, passionate, occasionally raunchy, and funny Spoken Word Poet. Not only has she worked with many other poets and musicians, but is also the first spoken word poet to tour across Canada in 2005. She currenty lives in in Vancouver B.C. However she is also well known and loved in England where she auditioned in slam competitions, and was very succesful. Her spoken word poetry is usually accompanied by diverse acoustic instrumentation and most of her poetry is also based on her own experiences she faced as a middle class white women, that being violence, sexism, homophobia, as well as racial and class privelage.

After doing some research on Lisa B, I decided to listen to a few of her spoken words. One of her spoken word poems that I found very interesting is called, “Window”, where she starts the poem by talking about a girl who would believe everything that was said to her, making the audience laugh and even she joins the audience by laughter. Then suddenly her expressions and tone of voice changes as she talks about the mother having to go to the psychiatric hospital because she cannot take care of herself anymore, her voice trembles here, and this made me think whether she had expereinced something like this when she was younger?

In conclusion I find Lisa’s personality to be very interisting because as I was looking at a few of her performances I noticed that she really allows the audience to respond to her strong actions, especially because she really focuses on huge topics such as racism, and this is shown in her video where “An Added Weight”.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whaj-NAjPPQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqozbqIy7ss

http://www.luckygoat.org/bio/

Oct24

Christian Bök: Conceptual Poetry

Posted on October 24, 2011 by sahar94

Christian Bök: Conceptual Poetry

Christian Bök is a Canadian writer, born in Toronto, Canada. Bök is well known for writing the Crystallography poem as well as Eunoia, a lipogram, in which he only uses one vowel in each of the chapters. Bök is also a sound poet and conceptual artist. Conceptual poetry also known as “uncreative writing”, is usually a new work that focuses on the initial concept of the poem rather that its final product. Bök usually creates Conceptual Poetry when he needs a break from all the other projects. Bök is the creator of “The Odalisques” , a conceptual poem, where he rearranged the 21 components by using a typographer to adjust the letters in the alphabet by point size, line length, line spacing, etc. He uses different variations by turning, scaling and sometimes overlapping the figure using the same set of curves and shapes. The outcome is a nude female figure, and the purpose being for him to recall the female figure as a kind of difficult, aesthetic potential, forthcoming within the beauty of a rearranged alphabet.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22097

http://www.typeisart.com/

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1682

http://mechanicalbrides.com/christianbok.html

Oct17

Frank O’Hara

Posted on October 17, 2011 by sahar94

Frank O’Hara

Urbane, ironic, at times genuinely celebratory and often wildly funny are some words used to describe O’hara a famous lyric poet’s personality. After graduating from high school in 1944 O’ Hara decided that he wanted to join the U.S. Navy. Very soon after he went to Harvard where he took creative writing classes with John Ciardi. Ciardi was a great influence to O’ Hara. Due to his reccomendation O’ Hara was given a graduate fellowship in comparative literature . In 1951 O`Hara moved to New York where he got hired at the Museum of Modern Art. In his writing the influence of art was everywhere, for example O`Hara`s ``A City Winter and Other Poems“ was published with two drawing by Lary Rivers, which was one of the first poetry books with drawings. This fact reminds me of the day in class when Ms. Parrish showed us a poetry book that had picture of a sign put in the highway, just because the picture is put in a poetry book the picture is looked at as being poetry. This is very surprising because during the 1950`s, which is not a very long time ago, drawings were very uncommon in poetry books that even included actual text in them. Frank O`Hara`s first collection of poetry “Meditation in an Emergency“, was his first collection that received recognition, they proceed from the heart of noise; they are written on the run, in a hurry, on a lunch break, in a perennial emergency. “Poetry should be between two persons instead of two pages“ is a very famous quote by O`Hara. He often writes poetry communicating his own experiences known as the “I Do This I do That“ poetry, very similar to a journal entry that many people can relate to. “Having a Coke With You“ is a video that I looked at where he reads his own poem. The poem is very sweet it seems like he has written it for someone who he loves dearly. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDLwivcpFe8 All in all O`Hara I believe was a poet who really believed that poetry is nothing without art, it is the images we see that allow us to write great poetry. For Frank O`Hara it was New York City as a whole that he was inspired and energized by.

http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/07/frank-oharas-me.html

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/ohara_f.html

http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.com/2008/06/frank-ohara-having-coke-with-you.html

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/ohara/life.htm

http://www.frankohara.org/media/video.html

Oct10

What is Poetry?

Posted on October 10, 2011 by sahar94

What is Poetry?

My first thoughts before having a discussion with the class about poetry and listening to a few poems, was firstly a very obvious thought that probably many people have about poetry and that is; poetry is when words in a text rhyme to make the poem flow. Some other thoughts I had were, poetry is like a puzzle you have to read it very carefully to understand, music can be created from poetry due to the rhyming it usually contains, and everyone can have different thoughts and feelings about a poem, for example a poem can make one happy and another upset depending on how they relate to it.

Something very interesting I learned during the class discussion is when Charles Bernstein’s poem “1-100″ was played, and many students in the class including myself said that counting from one to a hundred is not poetry. However when further analyzing we realized that Charles’s poem was not just counting like everyone else counts but instead he started counting using a calm voice and as soon as he reached the 70′s he started to sound very loud and mad, which allowed the students to express their feelings by laughing. Thus as a class we came to a conclusion that the poem “1-100″ could be a poem since poems are expressive and laughter is an expression. This conclusion also relates to what Kenneth Goldsmith said about poetry, ” If John Cage theoretically claimed that any sound can be music, then we logically must conclude that properly framed, any language can be poetry”, so for example if I were to listen to Bernstein’s poem somewhere outside class I would probably never say that his work should be called poetry but because we were in a writerscraft class talking about poetry we all automatically had the thought due to its proper framing.

Sep26

John Cage and “Silence”

Posted on September 26, 2011 by sahar94

John Cage and “Silence”

So why does John Cage like “silence” so much? To find out about this I decided to do some more research. 4`33 is by most people referred to as Cage`s “silent piece”, however Cage does not believe in absolute silence and that is something he tried to make clear to everyone. Even when he visited an anechoic chamber at Harvard University to experience real silence he heard two sounds. One high sound that being of his nervous system and one low sound that being his circulatory system. After this experience he said, “Try as we may to make silence, we cannot. The essential meaning of silence is the giving up of intention”. This reminds me of the Ear Cleaning we as a class did in the dance studio. All students were as silent as possible, however many different sounds were heard by everyone, such as, students talking and moving chairs on the second floor, cars driving past the school, people breathing and other small movements by everyone in the class. Just like how we as students tried to experience silence any other person like artists can because there might be some interesting sounds out there that they can experience just like how Cage heard his nervous system and circulatory system. Thus in conclusion I learned that John Cage tried to experience absolute silence but figured that music is continuous it is only we who can turn away from it.

References:

http://solomonsmusic.net/4min33se.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y

http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/silence.html

Sep25

Voiced and Voiceless Consonants

Posted on September 25, 2011 by sahar94

Voiced and Voiceless Consonants

Listening to the sound recording of voiced versus voiceless contenants made me look at the sounds of letters differently. I found it very interesting and I played along with the instructor when pronouncing the consonants. I felt my vocal cords vibarting when pronouncing voiced consonants and did not feel a vibration when pronouncing voiceless consonants but instead a lot of air coming out. Thus for the first time I learned the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds which was very exciting. My interest allowed me to watch a few more videos about voiced and voiceless consonants and I learned that practicing the pronounciation of different consonants is especially helpful to people whose first language is not english. For example in one of the videos the instructor is teaching the difference between the voiced sounds and the voiceless sounds because usually people do not understand the difference between the two, for example the voiced sound heard in back versus the voiceless sound in pack. Therefore this knowledge especially helps people who study the english launguage because it allows them understand the meaning of different words that sound and look very similar as well as pronouce words correctly by knowing the difference between voiced and voiceless consonants.

References:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyKR7cBDpZE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_8xaaIJQBU

http://esl.about.com/od/speakingenglish/a/voiced.htm

Sep25

Dadaism

Posted on September 25, 2011 by sahar94

Dadaism

During world war I a group of French and German writers, artists and intellectuals such as Kurt Schwitters, were very angry about the situation. They said that If society is going in this direction then we’ll have no part of it or its traditions, especially artistic traditions. Filled with anger they came to a conclusion that art just like everything else in the world has no meaning at all. Thus they came up with a project called Dada, but what is Dada really? Well, Dada are basically sounds that make no sense just like baby talks and it has only one rule which is to never follow any rules. Even today Dada is performed by many artists such as Jaap Blonk who was greatly influenced by Kurt Schwitters’s work. Dada today is best known as colourful, wittily sarcastic, and at times silly type of art. Many people like myself have learned that even though the language of Dada makes no sense it is unique and a great way to express your feeling about something, just like how the French and German artists expressed their anger during the first world war. Thus this knowledge generates many ideas for a piece of writing, or any other artistic work. For example one should not only worry about words rhyming when writing poetry, poetry can be anything that comes straight from the heart even if it does not make any sense to anyone.

References:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpDxCDbpP84&feature=related

http://arthistory.about.com/cs/arthistory10one/a/dada.htm

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-artists/kurt-schwitters.htm

sahar94

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Swimming

Interesting Idea: “A Humument”

Poetic Form: Villanelle

Lisa B: Spoken Word Poet

Christian Bök: Conceptual Poetry

Frank O’Hara

What is Poetry?

John Cage and “Silence”

Voiced and Voiceless Consonants

Dadaism

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