Annotating a Poem for Analysis

How can annotating a poem lead to interesting literary criticism?

I recently required my literature students to analyze a pair of poems for an exam. They were to write out the poems by hand and then annotate these as a step in their analysis. Those annotations typically took one of two forms:

1. Simple identification of ideas or formal elements
2. Attempts at interpreting or synthesizing

The first of these is a very primary level of analysis and reflects one's ability to understand and represent the content (paraphrase) or to identify basic components of literary form (character, setting, diction, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, repetition, figures of speech, etc.). The trick is to move from the first to the second of these levels (on the way to more developed literary arguments). Here are some examples.

Emerging Genres of Video Poetry

As poetry intersects with online video, we are seeing the emergence of new hybrid genres. Here is an attempt at surveying those genres. But before I get to my categories, I invite you to dive in and watch a video poem. Later on, at the end, I will come back to it for analysis. If you don't watch the rest of the sample video poetry in this post, watch this one. It matters. And it's done so very well. It's called "To This Day" and it is by Shane Koyczan:

To This Day from To This Day on Vimeo.

Without any analysis, I think it fair to say that a video like this proves that poetry is more than alive and well online in video form today. It's actually quite amazing. What did you think made it work so well?

Astronauts and the Otherworldliness of Poetry

I just tweeted to an astronaut.

He probably won't tweet back, since he's busy getting ready to return to earth tonight (which I plan to watch). But I had to thank him for pioneering the use of poetry in space. He has done the first-ever zero-G music video -- aptly performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity":

This is fascinating on many levels, but let me say a few words about how this represents a minor triumph for poetry -- something more than a mere publicity stunt. Let's think for a minute about how poetry itself has always been otherworldly.

Fully Empowered by Poetry

This is the story of the literary moment that changed me forever. And it centers on a single poem by Pablo Neruda that I stumbled across thirty years ago.

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being, 
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,

I was 17, taking a college course over the summer at the University of Utah while still in high school. In the bookstore I came across Pablo Neruda's Fully Empowered (from his Plenos Poderes of 1962), a slim volume with the Spanish in a thin column on the left page and Alastair Reid's fine translation on the right. The first poem I opened to was called "Births" ("Nacimientos").

and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.

This poem cast a spell on me, starting off tamely enough as a kind of philosophical musing, taking us outside of time to a place where birth and death are somehow both nostalgically distanced and personally proximate.

The Utility of Poetry for Dentistry

While my son underwent the filling of two cavities today, the dentist asked me what I've been reading. I told him how I'd just begun teaching an introductory course in literature and how excited I was to cover a range of works with a fresh group of students.

He recited a ballad to us
as he filled two cavities for my son

This led to him telling us about how he learned some poetry from Mad Magazine back in the day, an odd remix of "Casey at Bat" and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." He even left my son with the suction running so he could ferret through his office to try to find me a copy of the poem. He'd kept it all these years.

"Has learning poetry made your life better?" I asked, fishing for some nugget to take back to my students.

"Do you know how many laughs I've gotten from reciting poetry?!"

And that led, inevitably, to his recounting the story of being a missionary in the South and coming across some toothless 95-year old man spitting tobacco into a can who recited to him the ballad of "Elmer and the Bear." Mark furiously wrote it down in a notebook and memorized it.

My son was late getting back to class because of Elmer. Our dentist took enormous pleasure at reciting the entire thing. He seriously stopped working and relished delivering the lines -- laughing behind his mask. His assistant patiently waited, with a look on her face like she'd heard this ballad a few times before.

So here's the kicker. My teenage son had been pretty down in the mouth, so to speak, about getting these cavities filled. One might even say he was surly. But by the time Dr. Fullmer had finished his bear ballad, my son was smiling.

Yep, literature is equipment for living.