Topics Raised in Three Poems a Week

October 1

“Metaphors”

Sylvia Plath

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Issues raised in class on October 1 — Review all

Sir Philip Sidney: “Poetry nothing affirmeth”

Plath’s Ariel

WB Yeats – “We make of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. … The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self as one may choose to name it, comes to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.”

TS Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Ted Hughes’ Crow

Michael McClure

The Jazz Beat Festival on Oct 8 and 9

Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies