So you all maybe wondering what I've been up to... Well here it is! My final project.

Defining Poetry

I'm tired of writing in prose

So here it goes

I'm gonna define poetry

Using poetry

Poetry can be traced back farther

Trace it back as far as you can

Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxons

I start here

Because that is where I know to begin

Oral to written

Lost in translation

Begin by writing down our verbal patterns

See the rhythms

Notice the patterns

Watch it all connect

wæs se grimma gæst Grendel haten

Read it

Immerse yourself

Cheer Beowulf; Damn Grendel

Applaud Grendel; Hate Beowulf

Understand they are the same

Understand that they are a dyad

Listen and see the Celtic knot work that the poet weaves

Song and story now sounded together

as Hrothgar's bard declaimed over benches

a tale often told when hard was held

This is the beginning

The orature proceeding the literature

Loop it out find the link

Link it to Dragons and Monsters

Green Monsters

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

The Green Monster in Arther's court

Come into Arther's court and see

The oral tradition has not died

Hundreds of years later the status is quo

it pleased him not to eat

upon festival so fair, ere he first were apprised

of some strange story or stirring adventure

See the rhythms

Notice the patterns

Watch it all connect

Whose the scope?

Gawain, Lord Bercalac, the old wench

Understand the context

Understand courtly love

A kiss for a kiss

A bond for thy word

Break that word and you have literature

Give the orature rhythm and rhyme

Falsify a story and add depth

Add Giant Green monsters

and a fantastic story

Teach a lesson

Add a moral

An Oral Moral

Teach the reader

Teach the listener

Whan that April with his showres soote

The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veine in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flowr

Mix it

Remix it

When April with his showers sweet with fruit

The drought of March has pierced unto the root

And bathed each vein with liquor that has power

To generate therein and sire the flower;

Notice the difference

Notice the translation

Yet both true meanings are lost

Lost in the reading of an oral text

But this is how poetry evolves

All the characters and Chaucer

Join hands in the Oral tradition

But Chaucer's composure of the tale

In that lies mastery

Mastery lies

Mastered lies

Shaping the tales

Retelling the orature

Shaping the Story to teach a moral tale

Or to teach an entertaining moral…

Switch from morals to politics

Comment on the times at hand

But be slick

And be quick

And hide it within a sonnet

Spencer, Shakespeare and Petrarch

The structured shapers, the Sonneteers,

The Faerie Queen

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

ABAB

CDCD

EFEF

GG

Iambic pentameter or some other meter

And we see it play out

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts

But we shall not part

The thys and thous

And here and now

We study, and twist to understand

The history gives us insight

But history lies

In that lies mastery

Mastery lies

Mastered lies

According to Sir Phillip Sydney

He apologizes for Poetry

He apologizes for the lies

Even historiographers have been glad to borrow

Fashion and perchance weight of the poets

Reference the scope

Many particularities of battles,

Which no man could affirm

Reference the lies

Thus the disjuncture

Reference the word

His-Story

Where did all the women go?

Well I didn’t talk about Sappho

If you forget me, think

of our gifts to Aphrodite

and all the loveliness that we shared

And yet we have forgotten

We have forgotten the women.

Did you think this would be linear?

The scope is not limited

Weave the tale

Recall the facts

Give rise to many voices

Ah well then

Aphra Behn

The Power Usurped

And Behn

Grasps the pen

And Writes

A woman

Knows her desire

Dresses the part

Flee fragile masculinity

A shape designed for love and play

Should not be wasted on the weak

Abandon by her pride and shame

She gave them up and was not meek

A pitching story that was pitched

Long forgotten and resurrected

Teach the reader

Teach the listener

The female voice has not been lost

Just long forgotten

And then Reclaimed

The lack of consummation

If only a flea had been involved

A flea could do the job

The flea could mix

And remix

The blood of the lovers

Swell in the flea

With one blood made of two

And if unfit for tomb or hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

The words keep him alive

And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

The words keep her alive

And by these hymns, all shall approve

Us canonized for love;

And Love keeps the word alive

Love for Orature

Love for Literature

Yet the birth of the creation

Requires only one

One Mind

Perceiving

And regurgitating

Purging

So Fast forward

Leap ahead

Find the voice of the scope

The poetic scope

Still weaving

Still winding

Still constructing the story

And resurrecting the dead

Look into our countries darkest hours

There you will find the poet

Observing our loss

Observing our cruelty

Observing the wretchedness of man

Here in the trenches

Of human warfare

Of Animalistic carnage

Of Sadness

And animosity

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me

Remembering again that I shall die

Tears, midnight tears, Nothing but our vicious tears

Crying out

Yearning for Peace

Remembering again that I shall not die

For his voice lives on

Long after the body is gone

But here I pray that none whom once I loved

Is dying to-night or lying still awake

Solitary, listening to the rain,

And I pray that these prayers are heard

If not by God

Than by those listening

And I pray that this voice will be heard

And its sadness understood

Like me who have no love which this wild rain

Has not dissolved except the love of death,

If love it be towards what is perfect and

Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

I pray

I yearn

That love does not exist

Only in Death

That love for the word

For the poem

For the bard

Keeps this voice resonating

The Quiet Voice

Later found

And the colossal noise

The voice resounds

This is my letter to the world,

That never wrote to me,--

Because of subtle silence

And words wrote so humbly

Her message is committed

To hands I cannot see;

Her voice can still be heard today

Because of the writing

Because of the craft

This female voice has not been lost

Just misplaced

And discovered

If she be the unlikely poet

He be the unlikely philosopher

As a man (not like an image of a man)

As a Lawyer (not like the image of a poet)

Writes about the dump

And the man

And the poet

So the sun,

And so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems

Of every day, all decaying together

That's the moment when the moon creeps up

To the bubbling of bassoons.

And the man becomes more

More than Just a man

And the poem becomes more

More that Just a poem

Transforms the man

Transforms the reader

the listener

They all decay together

So maybe…

Is it a philosopher's honeymoon, one finds

On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead?

Or Maybe… This space…

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

A suggestion:

Cut all the unnecessary words

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

That’s all I have to say about that

And then there is the Man

The one who’s verse

Who’s muttering retreats

Who’s tedious arguments

Who’s overwhelming Questions

He sits and watches

…The women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

Observes and wonders

Will there be time? will there be time?

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water.

Here amongst the waste land

Breeding Lilacs out of the dead land,

Mixing Memory and Desire

A poet is born

A voice is born

Giving rise to what?

Where have the lessons gone?

Where is the morals?

Or are they there?

Hidden amongst the waste land

So do I dare Disturb the universe?

In the room the women come to you

Talking of Maya Angelou

A beautiful phenoix

Out of the smothering ashes of hatred

Comes a voice

And I pray that this voice will be heard

Beautiful and sad

And its sadness understood

Crying out

Yearning for Peace

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

She’ll give rise

To a voice

A voice of her own

One of pride

Validation unneeded

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

The history gives us insight

But history lies

In that lies mastery

Mastery lies

Mastered lies

Reference the lies

Thus the disjuncture

Reference the word

His-Story

Where did all the women go?

Don’t you know?

In the room women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo

Usurp the Power

And Angelou

Grasps the pen

And Writes

A woman

I pray

I yearn

For the poem

For the bard

Keeps this voice resonating