First Day of Class

The questions on the agenda today were:


What is Poetry?
What can poetry do that other arts can't?
How do we encounter poetry in our daily lives?
What is the virtue of saying something in poetry rather than prose?

We started by discussing some of our initial thoughts on these questions, and then looked at how poets over the centuries have answered these questions.


Is the following piece by Ezra Pound a poem?

"In the Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

(1913, 1916)


We also looked at the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby" by the Beatles and discussed whether we were examining poetry.  We discussed William Wordsworth's definition of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" versus John Keats's idea of a poet being "the most unpoetical of anything in existence."

We spent time looking at Ted Hughes's poem "The Thought Fox," comparing and contrasting it with Seamus Heany's poem "Digging."  We also looked at W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" and the commentary on poetry within the dedication to Yeats.  We ended class with Elizabeth Jennings' "Any Poet's Epitaph."

I'm including Hughes's "The Thought Fox" because it was one I was unfamiliar with but now that I will include in my classes.  The poem presents an interesting metaphor of a poet's experience creating a poem where late at night ideas come upon him in the "delicate," "neat" and "sudden sharp hot stink[y]" way a way that a fox might.

Red Fox by James Antonson

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.