Daley Images

Why I Write

By George Orwell.

Bodeen Broadside

Kimberly Harvey
Jim Bodeen - Broadside
Eng. 132


World News

The picture that I picked was from the internet: http://www.vietnampix.com/intro3.htm I thought it represented Jim’s poem World News perfectly. It has all the faces of the Vietnam War: the soldiers, the wounded, the enemy, and the children. They all have voices. The poem mentions voices 6 different times. This picture visualizes the voices of the poem.

Lesson Plan Week 3

Some website information

Some class information--No Cliff Notes Due for any author. If you have done your part, turn it in for "Study Question" portion of weekly grade.

Small world, big need for poetry

Lucinda Roy

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/opinion/17roy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

then this

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=lucinda+roy&srchst=nyt


Jim Bodeen:

Creative responses

On the ride home

Study Questions

Study questions

Pick one poem from each section of the book. Rearrange them in your own order. Build a book within a book. Explain your choices for poems and explain why you put them in that order. How do they “talk” to each other in this new order? Is this a different story? The idea is to get you thinking about the sequence of the poems.
2. Find three examples of Bodeen’s sense of humor. How does he use humor in his poems? Does it have a purpose, make a statement? How do they fit in the chapters?

3. Explain the connection to Viet Nam for the last poems in the book starting with “Rexroth” poem.

4. Show how the first section: Nothing is Hid, is also structured as an initiation ritual, in miniature.

5. Tolstoy said you must be wounded into writing, but you musn’t write until the wound has healed. Toni Morrison says, language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. language alone is meditation."

For the sake of argument, I loosely paraphrase Morrison as: Write to heal the wound.

And Tolstoy tells us to button our lip until we have something to say.

Which impulse better descrbes Bodeen’s book? Whose advice does he seem to follow?

6. This book is a book about recovery and discovery. What does Bodeen recover? What does he discover? How does he do it?


Break

Blue Begonia Press Slide Show

Introduction to Michael Daley and Me

Read some of each chapter

Reading for Daley

For the One Among Us Who Will Be the First To Die 11-22
At Amy Moment 41-48
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace 77-90
Running on Empty 141-156
Wild Art 197-220

1. (about 90 pages)
   
   Study questions for Michael Daley:
   
   1. What’s a Lyrical Essay?
   
   They leap around, slip images together and are interested in the rhythms and sounds of words and sentences, and even lines–those elements most readily associated with poetry. I believe they are essays, though, and that they think in essayistic ways. I hope [for] a sense of the "lyrical"–a state of song and movement in my work. I think of the "lyric" essay not so much as a sub-genre, but more as a quality that others might apply to the work.
   
   The "lyric essay" has been described beautifully by the editors of the Seneca Review: "Loyal to that original sense of essay as a test or a quest, an attempt at making sense, the lyric essay sets off on an uncharted course through interlocking webs of ideas, circumstance, language–a pursuit with no foreknown conclusion, an arrival that might still leave the writer questioning. While it is ruminative, it leaves pieces of experience undigested and tacit, inviting the reader's participatory interpretation. Its voice, spoken from a privacy that we overhear and enter, has the intimacy we have come to expect in the personal essay. Yet in the lyric essay the voice is often more reticent, almost coy, aware of the compliment it pays the reader by dint of understatement."
   
   (from Lia Purpura)
   
   Find two examples from Daley’s essays—a few lines or whole passages—that seem to fit this definition of “lyrical essay” and explain what makes them essays, not poems.
2. Make a timeline of the events in the chapters we are reading, by year or decade? The lyrical part of the essay wants to mix them up. What does it look like untangled?
   How do the ideas and event of the first section carry into the other essays? That is, how do his childhood experiences (in school, in the church, at home) influence his adult life?
3. Empty Bowl Press ran from 1976-1998. That’s a long time for a press. As
   Daley notes, there were a lot of them around at one time. Not many lasted. What accounts for Empty Bowl’s longevity? And, more riskily, what accounts for it’s stopping?
4. (MANDATORY) Find an historical or literary allusion in the chapters. Write a footnote so a student unfamiliar with the time period will be able to follow his ideas. Give some brief background. Please, no plagiarism.
5. Combining what you’ve been able to see of Blue Begonia Press and “Running on Empty” from Daley, what picture forms of the Northwest independent press community? What have you learned about small presses from Blue Begonia and from Empty Bowl?

Bodeen's Reading Up--Sound still needs work

Impulse to Love Discussion

Optional, but encouraged. This is a post to discuss Bodeen's poetry, the study questions, ideas.
Ask your own questions, too.

Requires quick google registration to post (keeps out the spammers)

Lesson Plan Week 3

Lesson Plan Week 3

Some website information

Terry Martin:

On the ride home

Creative Responses

Study Questions

This book is #20 on a national best seller list for poetry.

Point to specific reasons why you think this book has found such a wide audience.

Part of this question is to get you thinking about why people buy any book, but a poetry book in particular.

1. For section one—explain “what repeats itself”
2. For section two—explain what “edges blur”
3. Does TM reveal what the secret is? What is it?
4. Find three poems—one from each section of the book—that exemplify TM’s style/voice and explain why you’ve chosen them.
5. TM makes frequent use of the natural world as a metaphor. Find 2-3 examples of this and explain how the metaphor works. That is, what is being compared to what? How are they similar?
6. Richard Hugo says, if you are not risking sentimentality, you’re not in the ballpark.

Using examples from TSLOW, explain the difference between sentimentality and sentiment.

Sentimentality is on one hand a literary device that is used to induce an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and on the other it is a heightened reader response that is willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation. (from wikipedia)

Sentiment: The expression of delicate and sensitive feeling, especially in art and literature

What the notebook holds.

Break

Introduction to Jim Bodeen

Duende; The Muse; Notebooks

What he’s written.

What he’s writing about now: peace activism; human rights; his mom; travel to Alaska, Honduras, El Salvador, the South West;

Brief Bio:

Bowbells

Seattle

LSU NO

Army

Panama

Viet Nam

Yakima

The Place

Davis High

Latino Literature

Blue Begonia Press

Retirement

Read:

Thinking About Buckshot Kneaded in the Plastic

After the Healing

Bowbells, North Dakota

Alone with the Trombones

Cleaning up the Yard

Structure of ITL:
Dante’s Divine Comedy: Journey into Hell, Purgatory, Paradise

Repeated in section 1, 2, 3.

Study questions:(These are still rough. For all of them remember, "even the middle is an extreme")

1. Pick one poem from each section of the book. Rearrange them in your own order. Build a book within a book. Explain your choices for poems and explain why you put them in that order. How do they “talk” to each other in this new order? Is this a different story? The idea is to get you thinking about the sequence of the poems.

2. Find three examples of Bodeen’s sense of humor. How does he use humor in his poems? Does it have a purpose, make a statement? How do they fit in the chapters?

3. Explain the connection to Viet Nam for the last poems in the book starting with “Rexroth” poem.

4. Show how the first section: Nothing is Hid, is also structured as an initiation ritual, in miniature.

5. Tolstoy said you must be wounded into writing, but you musn’t write until the wound has healed. Toni Morrison says, language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. language alone is meditation."

For the sake of argument, I loosely paraphrase Morrison as: Write to heal the wound.

And Tolstoy tells us to button our lip until we have something to say.

Which impulse better descrbes Bodeen’s book? Whose advice does he seem to follow?

6. This book is a book about recovery and discovery. What does Bodeen recover? What does he discover? How does he do it?

Imitation suggestions: What I Learned from My Mother; A poem written in your mother's voice (how about a combination of the first two: How would your mother answer this question "What I Learned From My Mother"; A poem written in the voice of a forgotten person, avoid the homeless; A political poem; a journey poem; a dialog between two characters who are really two parts of your personality--I like this last one;

Notes on Impulse to Love

Notes on Impulse to Love

Jim Bodeen’s Impulse to Love--Rough Draft of notes for the class,

If you don’t read anything else:

In the Mari Sandoz CrazyHorse

Thinking About Buckshot

The Babe the Dude and the Speedboat

Hawks of the Midnight Sun and After the Healing

Sentries

The Song is a 20 Year Chain

Bowbells, ND: Getting There

Ear Ache

Alone with the Trombones

Cleaning the Yard

To My Children

Canyonlands and All Souls Day

Blackberry Syrup

Overview

I think that understanding the structure of this book is the best way to understand the poems.

The book is structured like an initiation ritual. Separation, Initiation, Return. Like the Divine Comedy and the monomyth. Neruda's Heights of Macchu Picchu is one of the guides.

• The first section is the overture
• The second and third chapters are more complete journeys
• The final section is the re-integration of the traveler.

Separation (Ex: Thinking About the Buckshot/Reading Neruda)

The traveler is called to the journey—first poem, c-4 in the brain

Separated:

From his childhood—the war in the living room (boy/man)

From the memories of the war in Viet Nam (first and last sections)

From health (seizure)

From his culture (Chile)

From his own story (Boy/Man)

Initiation (Hawks; Boy/Man dialogue)

Mystical traditions explored (Chile)

Biblical traditions explored

Other forgotten voices/stories explored (Chile)

Neruda as spirit guide (Chile)

Work-repeated use of that word to describe it--of self analysis

Return: (Ex: After the Healing; Leaving; Blackberry Syrup)

With poems for others (for example, the number of poems dedicated to others in the last section)

Restored health (last section)

Integrated into the community (last section and after the climatic poems in sections 2 and 3.

Attempt to pay back, return the favor by telling his story.

Here’s a more detailed look at each section

In The Mari Sandoz Crazy Horse Camp:

Voice of the poet as shaman figure, speaking for the community

Voice of the oppressed, but not beaten.

Drum beat of the repetitions

Confident declarations

Overture/Exposition: Nothing is Hid from The Heat

Establishes setting—time and place

1991, Persian Gulf War

Introduces the voice/persona

Main themes, including war, Latin America, childhood, biblical archetypes, sense of humor

This short section replicates the overall structure of the book from

separation (C-4), initiation (Bible, Townspeople Speak) to the return (Leaving)

Separation-Initiation-Return: Chile

The Price of Things

Chile trip.

Classic epic journey

Theme of politics, human rights, Neruda/Latino literature, lost stories

Begins with plane flight.

Climaxes in Hawks

But best poem is the one that comes after it

Ends with “afterward” that helps with the whole section

Reunion-Initiation-Return: Bowbells

Echoes

Same epic archetype as The Price of Things, but a coming back home rather than a going away. In the tradition of the indigenous journey.

Much different style

Two voices/ dialogue style

Boy/Man

Return, not a separation that leads to the understanding.

Goes back to Bowbells—incredible first poem.

The Man and the Boy On the Last Day of the Year and the Man and the Boy seem to represent the depths (go up to go down)—the work on your own insides, writing and thinking—required to come to grips with what started in Chile and exploded during Gulf War One. The work goes back to the earliest separations, back to prebirth.

Interrupts the seriousness AGAIN with the poem that follows it and it is also the best poem in the section. Read In the Womb, too.

Return and Integration

Impulse to Love:

Viet Nam shapes us today (96)

So does our childhood. (Trombones)

The traveler brings back of the wisdom. Brings lessons for the present. Tries to help others.

It feels like this is the section of the book that we’ve been building to

Alone with the trombones—a sense of humor, revealing.

Cleaning up the yard is the big poem in this section. Refers back to the beginning section. Like it picks the story back up after going down into the history of his quest. But this is THE STORY, one feels of his time in Viet Nam. Nobody fucks with the Bo. We wrapped them in gauze until they disappeared—this is repeated earlier as an image, the gauze—and the sense that THIS is what is being uncovered now is clear. Title of the poem is clearly about this, too. Garden as metaphor for health/arrival/stories.

To My Children: A War Story is an incredible poem. This is crucial to understanding why the poet is speaking, and on this journey.

Much of the section deals with Viet Nam experience 20 years later. And those that don’t directly, seem to deal with it indirectly.

After you read the section, it feels like every poem is about viet nam. But many aren’t. So, the question is, starting about “Letter to Rexroth” how are they connected? You could ask this about the opening poems in the chapter. They seem to be preparing us for Cleaning the Yard. There’s a sense, generally of abundance—like with the story revealed, the gifts are everywhere—silk, feasting, old roses.

I see these as part of the formal structure of the book as a whole. The last section is a blessing, a benediction. This structure is made explicit in his next manuscript, which he models on an order of worship in the southern gospel tradition, set to Wynton Marsalis’ In this House on this Morning.

The last poems are about re-integration in the community. Ars Poetica calls the garden solace. The poem/poet is sewn back into the fabric, new friends are made, rivers are given new names and a dessert, Blackberry syrup with ice cream, is served the end.

Terry Martin's Lecture and Reading

This is raw footage. Edited version out later in the quarter. Reading is first. It starts at 7min 45 seconds. The lecture has sound problems for the first 10 minutes or so, skip ahead if you can. And the camera started shooting everything in green, so we converted it to Black and White.

Discussion of Terry Martin Lecture and Reading

Share your reactions. Ask about the study questions. Ask your own questions.

Registration to a "google account" is required. Very quick to do (five minutes?) and you get access to blogger and other things (photo storage, video uploads etc).

I'm working on getting the video online. It's a process. And it will probably be in b/w because the white balance on the camera went sideways during the reading and everything looked like it was underwater. Or maybe it was all that cough syrup? Anyway.

I'll try to put up a link the day of the reading so this can happen when you're fresher. We've never tried this, so we'll experiment and see what happens.

Study Questions for Terry Martin

Here are the Study Questions for The Secret Language of Women

Everyone must answer this question:

This book is #20 on a national best seller list for poetry.

Point to specific reasons why you think this book has found such a wide audience.

Part of this question is to get you thinking about why people buy any book, but a poetry book in particular.

Then, answer one question from the list below:

1. For section one—explain “what repeats itself”
2. For section two—explain what “edges blur”
3. Does TM reveal what the secret is? What is it?
4. Find three poems—one from each section of the book—that exemplify TM’s style/voice and explain why you’ve chosen them.
5. TM makes frequent use of the natural world as a metaphor. Find 2-3 examples of this and explain how the metaphor works. That is, what is being compared to what? How are they similar?
6. Richard Hugo says, if you are not risking sentimentality, you’re not in the ballpark.

Using examples from TSLOW, explain the difference between sentimentality and sentiment.

Sentimentality is on one hand a literary device that is used to induce an emotional response disproportionate to the situation, and thus to substitute heightened and generally uncritical feeling for normal ethical and intellectual judgments, and on the other it is a heightened reader response that is willing to invest previously prepared emotions to respond disproportionately to a literary situation. (from wikipedia)

Sentiment: The expression of delicate and sensitive feeling, especially in art and literature.