Background Knowledge
Poetry is the infinite sea of images that we see in the sky. A scream can be a poem, a sweet voice, a chant. Poetry can at any moment bloom from the heart of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound and all the poets that have sung to the universe. We are able to listen diverse tones in crumbs of sounds conveyed in rhythm, rhyme; in tear drops on a petal: I say, believe and feel that "Poetry is the dew of imagination on an excited Heart" Yet, there are sad hearts with the syncopated sound of pain in them that make us feel sorrow. We should look for happy poems enlightening the hearts of humanity in order to dissipate the clouds from our senses.
Literary Theory explains all of these terms and teaches us the effects of literary terms in poetry. It uses words that become familiar to language arts teachers. Literary theory speaks of symbols that poets use. It also speaks of tone and voice as well of expression to form poetic genres with beautiful styles.
A song, a stanza, a popular saying, multiple sounds or jazz are not the same. Each one of these genres emphasizes literary resources like repetition, alliteration, rhyme or personification. Personification injects life into an item. It inserts wings to things, and makes them say absurdities or words of the wisest quality. Poetry has the faculty of being eternal; and even though there are wars, it continues. Poetry describes war, bleeds, explodes or releases the atomic bomb.
Repetition is one of the oldest literary resources. It is found in biblical prayers or in the poems of Netzahualcoyotl. Through repetition poets reflect tiredness, ask for mercy or for pardon. Behind repetition we can find secret codes of a trodden road like in the songs of the slaves of the United States' Civil War, "Following the Drinking Gourd". in which we find the constellation Big Dipper with a star pointing to the North, guide for fugitive slaves to that direction. I like this example because I own a dipper, and I show my class the utensil.
Repetition is more than once. It is made of a rhythmical pattern: the repetition of a sentence, a word, a sound. A good example of repetition is in the following poem "St. Louis Blues" by W.C. Handy.
I hate to see the evening sun go down,
I hate to see the evening sun go down,
‘Cause my lovin' baby done left this town.
Here we see that the repetition is used to reinforce the lament for the lovin' baby that has abandoned the town and the singer. Another example is ‘My Lady' by Jesus Papoleto Melendez:
The handsome Lady
Rides a handsome man
In a handsome cab
Drawn by a handsome hair
In the handsome air
Blessed by handsome stars
In a handsome night
and continues repeating the word "handsome" until the enda in each of its versus:
Who rides a handsome man
In her handsome cab
Who doffs his handsome hat
Quite handsomely!
Alliteration is when you hear consecutive or neighboring words with similar beginning sound. An example can be observed and heard with the verses in the poem "A Montage on Mistery" by Jesús Papoleto Meléndez:
Chasinf the colors of their own broken masterpieces to pieces
in the pitiful pain of a perpetually parading
before the blood & veins of their eyes,
In the poem "Bond and Free" by Robert Frost we hear the rhymes in our voice when we say ‘see'-'free' or ‘trace' ‘embrace.' Rhyme is a similar sound in two words. Rhymes are usually easy to hear and make poetry easy to memorize the similar sound in two or more phrases that appear close to each other in a poem.
On snow and sand and turf, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With the straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be.
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.
Personification is a kind of metaphor that gives inanimate objects or abstract ideas human characteristics. We can find an example at the end of the poem "Root Cellar" by Theodore Roethke: "Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath."
difficulty of writing a sonnet and distinguish it from free verse form. The poet writes for catharsis, to play, for knowledge, out of creativity, and as a vocation. Do not let young hearts die. Make them feel the shock of Emily Dickenson or Silvia Plath or make them feel the nursery rhymes. I imagine myself with this curriculum unit like the muse that inserts her toes into the lake of poetry. I do not intent to try more than a few writing and listening activities.
The majority of my students are Hispanic, and it is important for them to learn about the history of poetry in Spanish. I will ask "When Spanish appear in written poetry?" The students will start guessing and after few minutes of discussion I will explain how Alvaro Cardona-Hine offers a journey through time of Spanish poetry. He translated Jewish, Arabic and early Spanish poems into a book which he called cancioneros. What Jewish, and Arabic languages have to be with this section? The poems written between 1511 and 1605 mixed these two languages because Spain became their new country as you must consider the USA as your new country -I'll add. Those poems reflect the common written expressions of troubadours: minstrel choruses, chants, lullabies, and oral tradition passed from mouth to memory, until the musicians and poets took interest and began to use it for their own inspiration.
Investigators theorized that the roots of Zejel were Andalusian/Moorish. This is a form of refrain that contains only two rhymed lines. They also discovered older verses named Jarchas which are a little bit longer than zejels. In the 19th century Muccddam Ben Mufa, used the poetic form named Muguasajas written in classical Arabic. These forms open our understanding of the intense conviviality of the Christian, Moorish, and Jewish groups in Spain before the 13th century. With this introduction to the history of language, I can point to a literary term named macaronic poetry where languages are melting. I will cite a poem by the reverend Pedro Pietri named "Tata:"
Mi abuela
has been
in this dept store
called America
for past twenty-five years
she is eighty-five years old
and does not speak
a word of English
That is intelligence
Spanish is the inherited language of Latinos and, of course, Mexicans. It is important for them to know the background and periods in which the first poems were written. I want them to know that the long history of literature in Spanish can be found in any poetic anthology by Jose Ortega y Gassett, or Alvaro Cardona-Hine. As a joke I will let the students know that not only those troubadours sang mixing languages. In the magnificent repertory of the children's composer Francisco Gabilondo Soler, "Cri Cri," we find his song "Ratón Vaquero" which also mixes English and Spanish. Here are some of its stanzas:
en la ratonera ha caído un ratón
con sus dos pistolas y su traje de cowboy.
Ha de ser gringuito porque siempre habla inglés
a mas de ser guerito y tener grandes los pies.
El ratón vaquero
sacó sus pistolas, y se inclinó el sombrero,
y me dijo a solas: What the heck is this house
for a manly Cowboy Mouse?
Hello you! Let me out! and don't catch me like a trout.
Conque sí, ya se ve,
que no estÃs a gusto ahí,
y aunque hables inglés
no te dejare salir.
If the name of this literary term is called "macaronic poetry," between the Hispanic population in the South of Houston we speak "macaronicly," meaning the way we talk, mixing Spanish and English; that's exactly what happened in Spain when the Jewish and Arabic settled in the Iberian Peninsula. The ESL students will enlist common phrases mixing Spanish and English like: "Te quiero so much!' -better known as "Spanglish" among ESL students and Hispanic population.
Other forms of literary expressions that prevail are songs. My students like popular music, and this is a great excuse for me to let them know the metric structure of their ranchero (ranch) songs. The syncopated tun ta ta, tun ta ta that we hear with the Mexican guitar facilitates the continuing of syllables. Most of this ranchero songs or "corridos" have a count of 8 syllables in each of its verses. An exception is "Juan Charrasqueado" unique for the 13 syllables in each of its verses:
Ãndale Juan que ya por ahí te andan buscando
son muchos hombres no te vayan a matar,
ando borracho les decía y soy buen gallo
cuando una bala atravesó su corazón.
After proving what is metric and the way we sing our passions, I will introduce poets and composers who count syllables, tune their rhythm, rhyme or try to rhyme in their tunes, poems, or songs to make them better, nice, beautiful and catchy.
A list of suggested literary terms can be found on Appendix 1.
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