Quotation: On the Experience of Falling in Love

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

— Elizabeth Barret Browning, British Poet, and Writer

Frank Jirouch's 1928 bronze sculpture, "Night Passing the Earth to Day" (Detail)

I Love Him. I Love Him Not.

There is a child's game. Perhaps you know it. You take a petaled flower or clover, and you recite an age-old ditty. "I love him," then you pluck a petal. "I love him not." Whichever you said when you pluck the last petal is fate. You love him. Or you don't. 

Elizabeth Barret Browning's "How do I love thee" reminds me of this child's game. While the ditty is one of sealed fate, a simplistic toy to determine love — all agency is lost in the finality of whatever is said at the last petal. And could you cheat and count the petals beforehand — but perhaps that defeats the purpose of reciting the words, anyway. One plucks the petals because one is in a state of indecision. 

Which way to go? Who to love? 

But Barret Browning's poem is of a different quality. It has the cadence of a ditty, but it suggests something more  — call it agency — or call it freedom. In her poem, she "counts the ways," and she is not about allowing fate to decide the outcome. She loves. And she has an infinite number of reasons, of ways, of patterns, and qualities on a display of that love.

PDF Copy for Printing

Lesson Plan: Teaching the Industrial Revolution Using William Blake’s poem “London”

I like to teach history through literature. Recently I taught a lesson to High School students on the Industrial Revolution using William Blake's poem "London". We had already been studying the Industrial Revolution in Europe. So students were familiar with the concept - the idea that people began to move to urban centers to work in dirty, factories - without the labor laws we have today. Child labor was common and a general disregard for human life was horrifically rampant. Disease was widespread and a scourge on the populace.

But I like my students to work with primary sources. It's important to show students how historical events mattered to the people living at that time. What would it have been like to live in London at that time? 

So I planned two 45 minute lessons (total of 90 minutes) to look at William Blake's poem "London". I have taught Blake before - but for this lesson, I wanted to show how Blake use poetry to criticize society and the inherent hypocrisy he witnessed in 1790s London when he was living the capital.

We read the poem together and I made sure students see what the poem looked like when Blake published it. One cool thing about Blake is that he was a printmaker and he self-published all of his own books - and illustrated them. 

We look at the illustrated version and I ask students to point out what they notice. We then read the poem together and then using a document camera we work on annotating the text. I have prepared a bunch of my own annotations to guide the process but I make sure that students add their own insights as well! 

After we annotate the text kids work in small groups to work on further diving into the text using 11 reading comprehension questions I prepared. They then report back and we have a class discussion using 9 discussion questions I came up with to help students make more connections from the text to the world.

I'm proud of my students thinking and I'm thinking if you want to try teaching "London" to your student you can download the resource I packaged as a printable PDF on Teachers Pay Teachers.

I hope you enjoy using this resource and of course I'd love to know what you think. Leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

PDF Copy for Printing

"Rest at pale evening . . ." - Excerpt from Langston Hughes's "Dream Variations"

Rest at pale evening . . .
A tall slim tree . . .
Night coming tenderly
Black like me

- from Dream Variations, Langston Hughes

Personal Story

I like to collect quotes from poetry, from various sources, and whatnot. I have always liked this passage from Langston Hughes's poem "Dream Variations." Why do I like it? I like it because it is a relevant example of a poet exhorting darkness - extolling the color of blackness - rather than relegating "black" to a tired, and debilitating symbol of evil. So. That is why I like the poem. Hughes is resurrecting "black" as a symbol of beauty, not as a symbol of moral darkness.

Going Further

The poem imagines a speaker coming upon nature at the moment the sun is going down. Looking at the landscape, there is a moment when day turns to night, and the beauty of the oncoming dark sky fills the viewer with a sense of the sublime, of beauty.

Making Connections

Interestingly, the last line from this passage, "Black like me" is used as the title of a book, by John Howard Griffiths - about a white man who changes the color of his skin to experience what it feels like to be black in the rural South during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. The book is strange because I do not think this kind of experiment would carry over well in today's political terms.

Epilogue

Do you have any poems that you've read that turn the tables on symbolism and imagery? I'd love to hear your examples - you can leave a comment in the box below.

Works Cited

Hughes, Langston. "Dream Variations" The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994.

PDF Copy for Printing

Image Source: "Sunset Park" © 2018 Greig Roselli

"Rats!" by Robert Browning (excerpted from the Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1842)

Do you love rats? Read a delightfully bombastic excerpt from Robert Browning's 1842 poem "The Pied Piper of Hamelin".

Frontispiece, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Chicago, McNally, 1910

Rats!
They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks' own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats
And even spoiled the women's chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats . . .

Robert Browning, excerpted from The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1842

Works Cited

Browning, Robert. Pied Piper of Hamelin: A Child's Story. Chicago, McNally, 1910. Print.                                                                                                                                                                    PDF Copy for Printing

On Looking Back at My First Blog Post

Portrait of an Articulated Skeleton on a Bentwood Chair

Yes, this is confessional.
Forgetting that what I post on a blog is read by people, today someone (a student, no less) found my blog online and read my first post. It is an obscurely written poem about Prague and Dvořák. I do like the first line of the poem, "Dvořák strums his fingers on the dashboard, a melodic lilt to the tune of lips," but the rest of the poem is arduous.

Poem: Thrasymachus Blushing

thrasymachus blushing
blushing belies betrayal
betrayal of the body 
the body belied

so says socrates
not blushing
but catching thrasymachus in a blush

a crucial catch of the passage
says the professor
a critical juncture blushing
is

for in it
socrates 
calls thrasymachus out

for is it not true
that one cannot
forfeit an argument?
even if one knows forfeiting is the right thing to do
our body forfeits for us
turning rouge
in a crowd of philosophers
vying for truth

to get the answer wrong is an admission of failure
of not getting it

and we want to get it

so we plow on regardless
but our body -
it sees our flaw
and quickens -
blood flows more fully 
and all can see our less than comfortable
feeling of resting with a certain unjustified truth

PDF Copy for Printing

Greig Roselli ® 2012

Quotation on How the Wise Understand

a word to the wise is sufficient

dictum sapienti sat est

Attributed to Plautus, Roman dramatist and Terence, Roman poet

PDF Copy for Printing

Prose Poem: "Cloister"

image credit: Greig Roselli

In the cloister, there is often a sign on the porter’s door that reads, behind this door no one is allowed.  But, sometimes, after time has passed, the sign is worn by fingerprints and folks pass over the threshold unbeknownst to the lawgivers. And, as usually happens when laws are broken, a tension arises there – in the navel, in the cloister, and then, as it ineluctably does – community begins again.

"Cloister" is a prose poem by Greig Roselli.

PDF Copy for Printing

Poem: A Monk Reads at Table

image credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

at table reading,
our minds most likely a cacophony
of invective, misery, and lower back pain.

There is silence. — 
Usually amid the drone of listless
hagiographies,
— put an asparagus spear in your
mouth —

the tables are urchin gray; the reader enjoys
whispering
for
eating in silence is all we can ever do

PDF Copy for Printing

Poets House, Lower Manhattan

Why go to Poets house?

Poets House boasts 50,000 volumes of poetry in an open, eco-friendly environment that affords a view of the Hudson River and the Statue of Liberty. Founded by the American poet Stanley Kunitz, the space is ideal for reading, studying, and writing. Expect books. No public computer terminals. The computer terminals are for catalog access only. You can either read your own book or a poetry book available from the shelf. There are even typewriters available for the budding writer to practice her craft. There is a room specially reserved for quiet in the back. It has couches!

I go on Saturdays sometimes. The last time I went they served free wine and beer!

Best for poets and writers or people who want to be inspired creatively. A very inviting space. The staff is especially courteous.

Where: 10 River Terrace,  Lower Manhattan, Battery Park City
Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 11am–7pm, Saturday, 11am–6pm | Children's Room: Saturday, 11am–5pm
Contact: www.poetshouse.org info@poethouse.org  (212) 431-7920
Directions: Subway: 1, 2, 3, A, C, or E to Chambers St., or the R to Cortlandt St. (northbound only)

PDF Copy for Printing

Lance: A Fragment Poem

Wrapped in a green

T-shirt, I try to ollie — 
Is that a name?
Skateboards, he says.
It’s a move, dad —
Low riding jeans
I want to dress how
I want to dress
Do you think I'm shallow?

Water towers tower; we talk like men
when you are thirteen
You’re not as much a man
As you would want to be in your
Mind’s eye
Don't have it figured
Out?
You ain’t right
In the head

When do you first realize
What love is? Is it when:

He stirred the coffee with
A Donald the Duck spoon
Staring intently at the newspaper
As if to read it?

PDF Copy for Printing

Diagram of Two Sonnet Forms

In this post, I present a diagram of two popular sonnet forms.

Download full-size image for printing.

Poetry Repost: "I am what I am"

By Jacques Prevert

Tercerunquinto.
I Am What I Am

I am what I am
I am made like that
When I have a desire to laugh
Yes, I laugh with a burst of laughter
I like the him who likes me
And it isn't my fault
If it isn't always the same him
That I love every time
I am what I am
What do you want more
What do you want of me

I am made to please
And I can't change a thing
My heels are too high
My waist too arched
My breasts much too hard
And my eyes too dark
And then what is more
What can that be to you
I am what I am
I please who I please
What can that be to you
What has happened to me
Yes I've loved someone
Yes someone has loved me
Like children love each other
Just know how to love
Love to love
Why ask me questions
I am there to please you

Tercerunquinto.
I Am What I Am
Installation view, Ikon Eastside 2008
Photo: Stuart Whipps

PDF Copy for Printing

Why I Like Wanderers (Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Love the Epic!)

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Just Love the Epic!
On Loving the Greek Epic Form

Odysseus slays the suitors (while Penelope and Telemachus Look On)

I have a penchant for Greek epic. It's the absolute in the epic I adore. The epic form does seem outdated. But it lives on in presidential speeches and high arching ontologies. Odysseus is an epic wanderer. He's clever. He's stubborn. And he risks the lives of others for his own gain. That's who he is. I think they call it an archetype. Odysseus the man of many wiles. They don't call him that for nothing. I don't like the epic for all those reasons, though: I like the epic form simply because I like to think of the stories of Homer and so forth as unmoored from traditional metaphysics.

Living Life Like I Am a Character in a Novel
I live more like a novel. Or at least when I read novels, especially contemporary novels, that is the vibe I feel. Maybe I should say I want to live my life novelistically rather than epically. Or maybe I should say to live one's life like an epic is foreclosed to us. To think of the world metaphysically has never been all that simple, or might I say, successful. We see in the novel something akin to what it means to live day to day in our modern life. We see in the epic something "satisfactory" to quote the Wise Men in T.S. Elliot's poem about the former dispensation of gods forgotten.

A New Dispensation: God is Dead
I would say the new dispensation is the forgetting of God. Of absolutes. God is still around. We just forget to not believe in him so he sticks around, lingers, like a photograph of a former boyfriend you keep for memory's sake.

I am not saying this mantra "God is dead," in a purely Nietzchean sense, but maybe more like God has been dead (no one killed him), and we like to keep his poster still tacked to the wall.

I'm The Type of Guy Who Likes to Wander 'Round
Which is why the wanderer is an apt modern trope. For Odysseus, it is a mark of human fragility and the inevitable consequence of a man who forsakes God. For the modern wanderer, it is not so much the case we wander because of something the Greeks called excessive pride (hubris). Still, instead, it is a search for different authority unrelated to a top/down structure of power. To wander is more like to stumble about looking for what authorizes existence.

We wander because to stay still is too Medieval.

We keep it going. Kierkegaard's category of immediacy, it turns out, is not a definition of despair but rather an accurate depiction of humanity. If the immediate man is the despairing man, then I would have to claim that all men are despairing.

Growing Up and What That Means for Me
What happens to philosophy when it grows up? Does it become a wanderer sans the narrative script of Greek verse?

I only say all this to mask a more autobiographical story.

I've been in flux. I am in between apartments. Moving from one place to another always unsettles me.

Or maybe it's the tracts passed out in the subway stations announcing the end of the world on May 21, 2011.

And, Finally a Dedication to Walker Percy and György Lukács
I dedicate my homelessness to Walker Percy and György Lukács. No, don't worry, I am not writing a doctoral dissertation on those two guys. It would be fun. I am lucky if I can land a teaching gig this summer. Pay my rent. Eat hot dogs on Coney Island and manage to subsist on anything that can be stir-fried in a wok.

Peace out.

PDF Copy for Printing

"The Red Wheelbarrow"; Or, A Poem About Poetry

In this post, I write about my favorite William Carlos William's poem — "The Red Wheelbarrow".
"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams has fewer words than his other famous poem "This Is Just to Say." 28 compared to 16. "This is Just to Say" is simple: desire. "The Red Wheelbarrow" is complicated because it is not about desire. It is about language. And meaning what we say. A poem about poetry. I don't think I am saying anything different than what a poetry professor would say. It just seems right. My reading.

The Red Wheelbarrow

by William Carlos Williams

---

so much depends
upon a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

PDF Copy for Printing

This is Just to Say; Or, A Reflection on Desire

William Carlos William's very short poem "This Is Just To Say" frustrated me on my first read. Is this a poem? These few words? 28. Words. Seem to say everything. At least something. Not nothing. Something to say about desire, I take it? A fresh plum in the refrigerator that sits there expectantly, wanting to be eaten. I eat it. It is so cold, sweet, delicious.

The beauty of the poem is that it cannot be said any other way. What I mean to say is that if I wanted to tell someone about this poem I would have to read it out:

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
...that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

I cannot paraphrase it. It is the poem itself that utters its meaning. I could translate the poem.

C'est juste pour dire
par William Carlos Williams

J'ai mangé
des prunes
... qui ont été
dans la glacière

et qui
tu as probablement
épargne 
pour le petit dejeuner

Pardon moi
ils étaient délicieux
si doux
et si froid

Is my translation adequate? No matter. 
The translation would have to be another poem. I mean. The same poem. Written under the same conditions. I am afraid I am not a poet. Even if I were a poet I would have to be convicted to write a poem such as this one. I would have to be William Carlos Williams. I can only present an ersatz -- both in translation and in paraphrase. It would have to be a translation written by a poet in the same mind as Williams. The translation would have to stand alone as a piece of poetry as simple and beautiful as the original English. A bad translation would take away from the poemness of the original. Worse than a bad translation is a bad paraphrase: to say, "Oh, that poem is just about some guy who ate his girlfriend's plum that was not his to take that he took out of the refrigerator." There are two things wrong with the previous statement. First, it is a gross estimation of affairs. Second, it adds its own interpretation that was intuited, absconded, I should say, from the original. I cannot intuit from a poem and call my intuition the poem. The intuition, that it was a girlfriend's plum, is an intuition that could be countered. It may have been a boyfriend's plum. It could have been a plum in the icebox at work. 
The intimacy of the poem seems to suggest something intimate, something personal, something non-work related. 
To take the plum from a stranger, a co-worker, even someone who lives with you, but is not a lover, is not what is evoked in this poem. I just know it is an intimate partaking of the plum uninvited. It is at the level of togetherness and separation that this poem speaks. The three ellipses in the first stanza attest to the hesitation I speak of. The probably hints at "knowing your habits," the "you" an instance of the intimate second person. The forgive is only to be understood by the confession itself: a declaration, not a confession. It is not so much the narrator admits to eating the plum but he declares -- and here is the simplicity — that they were "delicious / so sweet / and so cold." The guilt is not there. Not even in the forgiving. Is the narrator asking to be forgiven for his own desire? No. If he knew it to be wrong he would not have done it. Or he would have given another reason. "Forgive me / they were not mine/ but yours / not mine to take." There is no impunity either. This is not a poem about release from moral obligation. A simple declaration of desire. Desire qua desire. Desire that happens upon an encounter with an object of desire. The natural affinity of a person to sate his desire. And to realize, perhaps, afterward, oh wait, the desire is yours to partake as well. In my desiring the deliciousness, the sweetness, the coldness, I forgot about our togetherness, or co-habitation, our couplehood. And only here, in my presentation. It is an ersatz.

PDF Copy for Printing

For William Carlos Williams's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" click here.

Christmas Post: If Jesus were Albrecht Dürer

Self-Portrait of Albrecht Dürer

The twenty-fifth day of December is an odd time to commemorate an incarnation of a God? I agree with T.S. Eliot, though, "satisfactory." (the best use of that word in a poem is reprinted below).

Jesus, a rabbi from the first century (a century named after him, so to speak, in the year of our Lord) was born in Palestine, in the Northern Hemisphere, correct? So, he came into the world at the eclipse of the sun’s strength. The Winter Solstice (which by the way, this year was also marked by another eclipse, a lunar one). If he had born in Australia, however, he could have at least eschewed swaddling clothes. And there would have been more reason for sheep(or kangaroo) to be lowing.

How do the Australians celebrate seasonal Christian feasts? I suspect their Christmas's are void of hot chocolate and burning fires. More like surfing and tan lines to fête the baby Jesus.

And their Easter has to be a mess? But, that’s another story. Just suffice it to say, it’s a difficult stretch to celebrate new birth when everything around is falling into winter.

A Little Bit of Poetry: "Poem for a Trieb"

In this post, I present a poem I wrote inspired by a night of Scrabble where I felt the tug and pull of friendships and a desire to break through the mundane.

The author as a teenager —in Mandeville, Louisiana
at Georgette Pintado's house on Live Oak Street (with Amy and Jeff).

---

I never venture to believe in avatars anymore
for they seem too
much like
superheroes,
like Jesus,
in his benign human nature, divine,
so I dismiss the idea of divine blood,
vouching for more a raw libido, exhausted
breaths, numbing existence,
mere existence —
The funny thing is
that
I

… when the coffee table
is cleared and Brian
sets up the Scrabble board,
David and Juniper
are determined to win,
so they joined in the fight to
beat us —

PDF Copy for Printing

Vocabulary Essay (Or, Short Brief): "On Bereft"

A very short brief on the word "bereft".
bereft (adj.) \buh-reft\
A state of loss, deprived. Often used with "of".

The face of a boy with a bereft look.

"Bereft" is a poetic word for it connotes loss without the slippery slope of s’s doubled in "loss".

The strong consonant sounds in bereft leads to a charge, tapering to a whisper, to a closure of the mouth, a word of leftover things, forgotten things, bereft things, a swallow of breath, exhaled, then exeunt.

PDF Copy for Printing

Lesson Plan: An Example of Teaching Poetic Tone in the Classroom (with William Blake's "London" and "Jerusalem")

Class objective:  To continue the theme of Poetic tone by using examples from film and the poetry of William Blake.

The following class can be tailored to fit a high school language arts course or a college Introduction to Literature, or British Literature section.