- Exercise 2: Skills HubWith the idea of multimodality in mind, begin this exercise by reviewing the Skills Hub and taking stock of the micro-courses available to you. Reflect on the skills courses you have undertaken already, summarising your learning within your Learning Log, so your current tutor can glean perspective on the disciplines and skills you are pursuing. At this point, it is important to select new skills in line with the wider parameters of your practice and seek to broaden and identify transferable skills that grow the multimodal aspects of your practice. This could be discipline-specific or more practical skills like word processing or skills gleaned from outside your creative practice. Make a list and reflect on how well you know how to use these tools and what you would most like to learn.Identify resources within the Skills Hub and online that can help support you in developing your ability to expand your knowledge and skill set. Don’t worry about trying to learn everything immediately; you’ll have plenty of opportunities to develop your skills as you progress through the stage. Spend time thinking about how you will apply your skill learning as part of developing your creative practice and personal creative voice. How could a multimodal approach to skill learning support your development, and what options does it bring to your knowledge and understanding of the creative arts? Moving forward during this course unit, you will become increasingly independent and take more ownership of how you interpret and navigate the exercises. It is important to plan and begin to build towards how your projects, skills and application of knowledge connect to the wider theme of the unit, in this case, ‘perspectives’. With this in mind, select a micro-course to undertake before returning here to continue with Exercise 3.
SUBCOURSE UNIT Skills Hub

Spend some time researching the difference between avant-garde and traditional poetry. If any of the following terms are new to you, research these first and add them to your Glossary:

● Avant-garde poetry

In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde (advance guard and vanguard) identifies an experimental genre, or work of art, and the artist who created it; which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time.^[2] The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.^[3]

As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay “The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist” (1825) Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues‘s political usage of vanguard identified the moral obligation of artists to “serve as [the] avant-garde” of the people, because “the power of the arts is, indeed, the most immediate and fastest way” to realise social, political, and economic reforms.^[4]

In the realm of culture, the artistic experiments of the avant-garde push the aesthetic boundaries of societal norms, such as the disruptions of modernism in poetry, fiction, and drama, painting, music, and architecture, that occurred in the late 19th and in the early 20th centuries.^[5] In art history the socio-cultural functions of avant-garde art trace from Dada (1915–1920s) through the Situationist International (1957–1972) to the postmodernism of the American Language poets (1960s–1970s).^[6]

Wikipedia contributors. “Avant-garde.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 May. 2024. Web. 26 May. 2024.

● Traditional poetry

All poetry except “free verse” takes account of accentual pattern. There are three broad categories of poetry: traditional, blank verse, and free verse. Traditional poetry has some pattern of rhyme at the end of the line-for example, the first line might rhyme with the third line, the second might rhyme with the fourth, etc. Also, traditional poetry has a pattern to the number of syllables per line. For instance, a traditional poem might have eight syllables in most of its lines. Finally, a traditional poem has a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables. This pattern of accented and unaccented syllables is the primary component of metrical analysis. Blank verse poetry (from the French “white or pale verse”) also has a pattern of accented and unaccented syllables-in fact, it must have ten syllables per line, but it doesn’t rhyme at the end of the lines. Free verse, by contrast, does not have any regular pattern to accented and unaccented syllables, does not have the same number of syllables in its lines, and usually does not have a regular pattern to any rhyme it may (or may not) have.

Reference: POETRY: METER AND RELATED TOPICS. Available at:https://www.butte.edu/departments/cas/tipsheets/style_purpose_strategy/poetry.html#:~:text=Traditional%20poetry%20has%20some%20pattern,number%20of%20syllables%20per%20line. (Accessed 26 May 2024).

● Postmodern Literature

In the 1960s the counterculture movement found throughout much of the US resulted in new types of artistic expression. Postmodernism Poetry is a type of poetry that flowed naturally from that counterculture and is often noted for a few stylistic and thematic aspects. These types of poems can be difficult to read and understand, and this is often done on purpose as a way of reflecting the poem back toward the reader.

Postmodern poetry often deals with themes of meaninglessness or lack of reality, and frequently demonstrates an existential point of view. Postmodern poetry often includes themes of restlessness and is usually written in a very free format. Line breaks and structures can be chaotic or seemingly meaningless, though there is usually a purpose for the unusual breaks. Postmodern poetry can frequently deal with existential or nihilistic themes. While existentialism and postmodernism are not synonymous, they are frequently related.

There are five key characteristics to Postmodernist Poetry: the embrace of randomness (Postmodern works reject the idea of absolute meaning), playfulness (black humor, word play, irony and other techniques of playfulness often are employed to dizzy readers and muddle the story), fragmentation (collage-style forms, temporal distortion, and significant jumps in character/setting), metafiction (drawing attention to their work’s artifice and reminding readers that the author isn’t an authority figure), and intertextuality (pastiche and the combination of high and low culture).

Reference:National Poetry Month: Postmodernism Poetry. Available at: https://libguides.ferrum.edu/nationalpoetrymonth/postmodernism#:~:text=Postmodern%20poetry%20often%20includes%20themes,with%20existential%20or%20nihilistic%20themes. (Accessed 26 May 2024).

● Confessional poetry

Confessional Poetry

In 1959, M.L. Rosenthal reviewed Robert Lowell‘s book Life Studies (1959) in The Nation. In his review, he wrote about how poets were shedding the mask that prevented them from describing their own life experiences, and thus, the term Confessional Poetry was born. Confessional Poetry was a literary movement born in the late 1950s that honestly and directly spoke about the poet’s own life experiences, often remarking on the psychological battles they have faced.

Key characteristics of Confessional Poetry

Confessional Poetry has a few key characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of poetry. They include intimate subject matters, the use of the first-person point of view, autobiographical experiences, and careful use of craftsmanship.

Confessional Poetry: Intimate Subject Matter

Confessional Poets were not unique to write about emotions and feelings, but they were unique in the way they wrote about intimate, highly emotional, and psychological experiences that were considered taboo such as depression, suicide, drug use, alcoholism, and sexuality. Subjects once considered too shameful to speak about publicly, Confessional Poets were now openly discussing them. A very famous example is Sylvia Plath’s Confessional Poem ‘Daddy‘ (1965). In the poem, she compares her father to a Nazi and herself to a Jew during the Holocaust. She openly discusses a hatred for her father and speaks of her own suicide attempts.

Reference:English Literature American Literary Movements Confessional Poetry. Available at: https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/american-literary-movements/confessional-poetry/#:~:text=As%20previously%20mentioned%2C%20Confessional%20Poetry,with%20mental%20illness%20and%20trauma. (Accessed 26 May 2024).

● New Formalism / Neo Formalism

New Formalism is a late 20th- and early 21st-century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical, rhymed verse and narrative poetry on the grounds that all three are necessary if American poetry is to compete with novels and regain its former popularity among the American people.^[1]

Wikipedia contributors. “New Formalism.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 7 Nov. 2023. Web. 26 May. 2024.

● The Cambridge School

The name sometimes given to an influential group of English critics associated with the University of Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s. The leading figures were I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Q. D. Leavis, and William Empson. Influenced by the critical writings of Coleridge and of T. S. Eliot, they rejected the prevalent biographical and historical modes of criticism in favour of the ‘close reading’ of texts. They saw poetry in terms of the reintegration of thought and feeling (see dissociation of sensibility), and sought to demonstrate its subtlety and complexity, notably in Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930). The Leavises achieved great influence through the journal Scrutiny (1932–53), judging literary works according to their moral seriousness and ‘life-enhancing’ tendency. See also leavisites, practical criticism.

A second group sometimes referred to in the contexts of tragedy and myth as the Cambridge school, although more often known as the Cambridge Ritualists or the myth-and-ritual school, was made up of the classical scholars Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook, who in the early 20th century applied the anthropological theories of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890–1915) to the origins of Greek tragedy, arguing that the drama was derived from religious rituals. Their views influenced the development of myth criticism.

Reference:Cambridge School. Available at:https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20111001151820242 (Accessed 26 May 2024).

Visual and Concrete Poetry (BRIEF)

Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) wrote in almost every form imaginable, and he loved to play and experiment. Here’s one of his concrete poems ‘Archives’:

“Archives

generation upon

g neration upon

g neration up n

g nerat on up n

g nerat n up n

g nerat n p n

g erat n p n

g era n p n

g era n n

g er n n

g r n n

g n n

g n

g”

Edwin Morgan, Archives in Collected Poems (Carcanet 1996) p.140.

Morgan is using the form to reflect on how much information and knowledge is lost over time, especially in terms of social history – the further we go back, the less information we have about people’s lives. But perhaps you read this poem in a different way? That’s fine, but what’s important to appreciate is that this poem’s layout is essential to its meaning.

REFLECTION

I was intrigued by the last technique and decided to experiment a bit on the poetic style mentioned above. I believe the message of losing out information and social bonds as generations go by is really strong:

A poem about a bond between brother and sister. Each verse is a decade.

BROTHER AND SISTER BOND

BROTHER AND SISTER, HUSBAND BOND

BROTHER, WIFE AND SISTER, HUSBAND BOND

WIFE AND SISTER, HUSBAND BOND

WIFE AND SISTER BOND

AND SISTER BOND

AND BOND…

(BRIEF)

Write another sound poem, this time giving voice to a more abstract concept, such as pain, love, freedom, or fear. Don’t use any real words, just create a voice for your abstract noun using sounds.

Think about vowels in particular and whether you want to stretch these out or make them short and clipped.

PAIN AND LOVE–BIRTH–A MIRACLE

GRGRGGGRRRR AHHHH AHHHH AHHHHHHH

GRRR RRRRRR R RRRRRRRRRR RRRRRRRR RRRRRRRRR

GGGGGGGGGGGGGGRRRRRRR AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

(SILENCE)

(BABY SOUND)

UAH UAH UAH UAH UAH UAH

(MOTHER)

AWWWWW AWWWWWW

UAH UAH UAH UAH UAH UAH

OHHHHHHH OHHHH OHHHHH

BOOOHOO HOOO HOOO HUUH HUUH UH HUUUH

HUUUH HUUH HUUH

Found poems (BRIEF)

Is there any such thing as originality in writing? Unless you’re coining new words, the words you use will already exist, so the originality of your work comes from their arrangement rather than the words themselves.

Found poetry takes this way of thinking one step further, by taking some text that already exists and shaping it into a poem. The text might be taken from a newspaper article, a science textbook, a novel, a diary, an encyclopaedia, or an advertisement. It can come from anywhere.

When the poet shapes this text into a poem, they may slightly edit or remove material (known as ‘treated’ found poems), or they may simply break the text into lines, without interfering with the original content at all (known as ‘untreated’ found poems.)

Using the words of others to create new texts can take the pressure off the poet, especially one who’s experiencing a block or a ‘fear of the blank page’. This kind of poetry also raises interesting questions about originality and ownership of words.

There are clear equivalents for ‘found poetry’ in other artforms, including the visual arts. Marcel Duchamp’s urinal piece, ‘Fountain’ (1917) is known as a ‘found object’ and is perhaps the best known example. Artists who create collages from pre-existing imagery and pre-coloured papers and other materials can also be described as using ‘found’ materials.

It can be great fun to take what already exists and see what can be made from it. You could think of it as a kind of ‘literary upcycling.’ This technique isn’t limited to art and literature though. In Austin Kleon’s TED Talk, ‘Steal Like an Artist’, he describes how Stravinsky based his ballet on the existing scores of other composers. It caused a scandal at the time, but Stravinsky responded to the critics by saying. ‘You respect. I love.’

Original Material

Constantine Cavafy Poems

SORT A-Z POPULARITY

A study made out of Kazafi’s Poem titles

An Old Man, In Church
The First Step, Since Nine O’Clock
Ithaka, In Despair
Grey, Thermopylae
Hidden, In the Harbour
Understanding, Their Beginning
Ionian, Voices
The Town, In 200 B.C
Footsteps, On an Italian Shore
Return, One of Their Gods

One Night, Trojans
In Despair, Monotony
Waiting For The Barbarians, Those Who Fought For The Archaean League
Pictured, Desires
Sensual Pleasures, As Much As You Can
The First Step, The God Abandons Anthony
The Town, The Windows
They Should Have Provided, Very Seldom
Supplication, In The Same Space
So Much I Gazed, Remember Body…

Confessional Poetry

Key characteristics of Confessional Poetry

Confessional Poetry: Intimate Subject Matter

Constantine Cavafy Poems

Share this: