Poetry Class: The Great Winged Beast with revisions

Your poem is attached. The first stanza, severely edited, is a great beginning. The last, again edited, works. Your issues are all in between, especially the lines in red which are not poetic and abstract. The metaphor of depression or any other emotional state as a beast on the shoulder is fine, but the physical details of that beast have to be applicable to the emotional state you wish to particularize. You can't give it talons and other  parts without making those aspects part of the particular emotional state--in other words, extending the metaphor in all the different ways this beast corresponds to the emotion that is your burden. (how does "robbed" fit the metaphor?)Instead you use your poem to refer vaguely to different periods in your life when the beast makes its appearance. Vaguely, because there are only generalizations, not specifics. You don't say "when my mother left" or "when I had my bike stolen" or "when the Twin Towers fell." Is the depression about personal or public events? But actually, I want to know that less than to see the beast you invent have physical characteristics that enanable the reader to understand the equation of beast=depression. You need to look at Tyger Tyger by Blake and the story of Sinbad the Sailor and the Old Man he is forced to carry on his back. And if you have not purchased the Workbook and the Drake text, you have done yourself a disservice". Professors comments.

The Great Winged Beast

As far back in time as I can

Remember

This great winged beast

has been a part

of my existence

From time to time

it has visited me.

Suddenly appearing

To land

Upon my shoulders

Weighing me down

Perhaps that’s why

when people told me

throughout out my youth

“Don’t slouch”

I couldn’t obey them

Making me seem to others

A crooked, burdened old man

It would return

to sit upon my back

Holding me down,

Robbing me

of my energy and virility

When I needed to rise and be an

Active participant

in the goings on of life

The years pass, and it comes

to rest again

Beside me

Its talons ripping at my legs,

Tripping me

Causing me to stumble

On the already

Murky and obscure path

Of my life

The great winged beast

Used to come when

I was the most vulnerable

Snatching me away

To carry me

far away

From my chance

at bliss

To drop me into

An abysmal hole

Where I would spend

What seemed

Eternities

Crawling and scrabbling

My way back

up and out

The great winged beast

Would appear

At the worst of times

Ripping me out of

My blissful ignorance

To deposit me atop some

Desolate mountain

Where I would sacrifice

Epochs,

carefully and deliberately

Finding my way

down and home.

The next time

the great winged beast

Comes

I will finally

succumb

to its

Power

Over

Me.

I will not fight,

I will not struggle

To whatever hell

It places me

I will unresistingly remain

Alone and inconsolable

The Great Winged Beast

As far back in time as I can remember

This great winged beast

Would suddenly appear

To land upon my shoulders

 “Don’t slouch”

I couldn’t obey, his weight made me crooked

A burdened old man

It would return

to sit upon my back

Holding me down,

Robbing me

of my energy and virility

When I needed to rise and be an

Active participant

in the goings on of life

The years pass, and it comes

to rest again

Beside me

Its talons ripping at my legs,

Tripping me

Causing me to stumble

On the already

Murky and obscure path

Of my life

The great winged beast

Used to come when

I was the most vulnerable

Snatching me away

To carry me

far away

From my chance

at bliss

To drop me into

An abysmal hole

Where I would spend

What seemed

Eternities

Crawling and scrabbling

My way back

up and out

The great winged beast

Would appear

At the worst of times

Ripping me out of

My blissful ignorance

To deposit me atop some

Desolate mountain

Where I would sacrifice

Epochs,

carefully and deliberately

Finding my way

down and home.

The next time

the great winged beast

Comes

I will

 finally

succumb

Fourth Submission for Poetry class, "The Great Winged Beast".

The Great Winged Beast

As far back in time as I can

Remember

This great winged beast

has been a part

of my existence

From time to time

it has visited me.

Suddenly appearing

To land

Upon my shoulders

Weighing me down

Perhaps that’s why

when people told me

throughout out my youth

“Don’t slouch”

I couldn’t obey them

Making me seem to others

A crooked, burdened old man

It would return

to sit upon my back

Holding me down,

Robbing me

of my energy and virility

When I needed to rise and be an

Active participant

in the goings on of life

The years pass, and it comes

to rest again

Beside me

Its talons ripping at my legs,

Tripping me

Causing me to stumble

On the already

Murky and obscure path

Of my life

The great winged beast

Used to come when

I was the most vulnerable

Snatching me away

To carry me

far away

From my chance

at bliss

To drop me into

An abysmal hole

Where I would spend

What seemed

Eternities

Crawling and scrabbling

My way back

up and out

The great winged beast

Would appear

At the worst of times

Ripping me out of

My blissful ignorance

To deposit me atop some

Desolate mountain

Where I would sacrifice

Epochs,

carefully and deliberately

Finding my way

down and home.

The next time

the great winged beast

Comes

I will finally

succumb

to its

Power

Over

Me.

I will not fight,

I will not struggle

To whatever hell

It places me

I will unresistingly remain

Alone and inconsolable

Latest Poem from Poetry Class. "Box of Ashes".

Box of Ashes

Perhaps if you had raised me

rather than leaving me

with your mean and spiteful mother,

who became my vacant headed

and befuddled grandmother,

who offered no comfort

but a roof over my head,

all the food I could gorge myself on

rather than teach me

what to do with my emotions,

who created a monster

by giving him a lavish lifestyle,

gilded his cage,

filled his cell with

all the treasures a boy desired

sent him into the world

with no self-control

my youth became as worthless

as a box of ashes

A mother to me,

Is just an irritating, annoying stranger

who tried to discipline me

on the random, rare occasions

you came to see me

Why are you here?

You knew more about the goings on

of all the bars in Syracuse

Than what was going on

inside your lonely son’s mind

only a few miles away

as he tried to make sense of

his life as he grew

Perhaps if I had a real mother

I wouldn’t be a convicted felon,

drug abuser,

thief,

money waster,

whore monger,

liar,

calculating predator,

accomplished actor,

so accomplished

he doesn’t even know who he is,

who’s been trying

to figure it out

by thrashing around

and flagellating in his environment

all these years

until he becomes

just another box of ashes

Out with some friends

Downtown one night

I came upon you loaded

As you sat with your friends

At a table in front of Quigley’s

and you did not know

I was standing

in front of you

mere feet away

Where were your “friends”

that you spent so much time with,

all these years

who you abandoned me for

so you could have companions

to drown yourself in alcohol

and talk about petty, mundane events

Where were they

when you asphyxiated from your asthma

by yourself in your apartment

these people just as worthless

as a box of ashes

Left behind a nine year old crippled dog,

that I used to watch you baby more

than you ever did to me,

another abandoned thing

for someone else to take care of

did you get him

to fill some emptiness inside

The same emptiness

that became my entire life?

Left me with

your belongings that you

compulsively accumulated

over the years

that I had to sell for pennies,

donate to the rescue mission,

take to your mother’s apartment

so she could live amongst this debris

so we wouldn’t get stuck with paying for

another month’s rent for yours

because I already had

the credit card debt to cremate you

and now a box of ashes to dispose of.

It is so easy for me to tell a woman

I love her with straight face

This word means nothing to me,

it is merely a tool

that has it’s proper uses

for certain occasions

When I was a boy

Someone used to speak

this foreign word to me

then turn around and leave

When you were barely out the door

your mother would tell me

what a horrible person you were

because I didn’t know you

I didn’t know

what to believe.

When your mother passes away

Some years from now

Leaving me the last

Surviving member

of the family

That box of ashes

Will finally get scattered

By seagulls and rodents

Searching for sustenance

In some landfill somewhere.

Professor uses my poem as an example in his lesson.

The professor of my Poetry class uses my poem as an example to teach our class.

Although we will be discussing how poetry condenses or compresses language in subsequent lectures, I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the topic and cite selections from poems the class has submitted. These are "before" and "after" selections to demonstrate how the information presented can be done with fewer words, tighter lines, and shorter stanzas.

What do we mean when we identify poetic language as different from prose?
Among the many differences, the foremost is compactness. Poets use imagery, symbolism, metaphor and other mechanisms to pack a great deal of substance--emotions, ideas, information--into each line of poetry. In this lecture, the mechanism that interest us is the the process by which unnecessary words are eliminated. Where prose often conveys meaning in expansive ways, using complete sentences and grammatically correct structures, poetry not only manages with fewer words but strives for fewer words. Poetry tries to use a minimum number of words to encapsulate, preserve and amplify a particular experience, sensation, thought or feeling. One critic describes this as "stripping language to its bare essentials" to make the intended point.
Poetic lines are thus not automatically created by simply chopping up a prose paragraph into individual lines, but rather by making conscious choices to choose one word over another, or in this instance, by discarding words that are not necessary, repetitive for no purpose, or lacking needed meaning.
What are some of these words that can often be be discarded?
1. Prose sentences contain words that exist only to create grammatically correct sentences. "It is Tuesday" and "It is raining" and "There is a cockroach" are sentences that each have just one important word: Tuesday, raining, cockroach. The other words are there to create the subject-verb structure of the typical sentence in English. They are completely superfluous in poetic lines.
2. Other words poets often manage without are: is, are, was, were, (especially in "there is" or "there are," often avoided by prose writers as well). They are called "verbs of being," and they function only to indicate time in a sentence, while "verbs of action" such as walk, climbed, running, fought provide information about both time and action, and are thus so much more valuable in poetry!
3. Then there are all sorts of function words speakers and prose writers use, such as: such as, for example, in addition, and other such words that connect and separate ideas, but can easily replaced with line breaks in poetry.
4. But for my money, the most superfluous words in poetry (most obviously in first person poems) are the self-reflective comments: I thought, I remmbered, I decided, I had the feeling that, it seemed to me, and so on, endlessly. The speaker or narrator in the poem is obviuosly doing all these things. Why is it necessary to characterize the obvious? If the poet writes "When I was back in seminary/they put forth the proposition/that you can petition the Lord/with prayer," is it really necessary to say "I remember?" And when the poet continues: "Petition the Lord with prayer?/You cannot petition the Lord with prayer!" is it really necessary to say, "Now, when I think about how I felt back then I have come to the decision that?" 
Obviously there are other ways to condense the poetic line--imagery, symbolism, metaphor, sound, line breaks, to name a few--but for our purposes here, let's pretend that the only requirement is to render a written line more succinctly, more tersely, more tightly by eliminating the unnecessary, the pointlessly repetitive, the self-reflective, and the words devoid of content. To illustrate, here are some lines from poems class members have submitted and shorter, more concise, more crisp, more direct and more condensed lines.

ORIGINAL #1

Ode to City Electric

This is a great place to work,
They say with a straight face.
Someday you can become a salesman too
Making the owner Sandy millions,
sitting at a comfortable desk
working at a leisurely pace.

Then someone appears one day, you’re told
To learn the computer system
To take the comfortable place of one of those
calm, content people
Sitting at a desk in one of those rooms upstairs,
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

Dirty warehouse worker,
Unfit to breathe the same air.

Why are you taking so long
Filling orders?
Searching high and low
for something not there.
But according to the computer it is,
Are you blind?
Is the prescription on those glasses you wear
Up to date?
We by the virtue of being employees
Of the great City Electric
Can get a 15 percent discount at Lens crafters
You sightless, stupid fool.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for,
Search the area nearby
Where the computer says it should be.
Develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.

COMPRESSED VERSION #1

 Ode to City Electric

“This is a great place to work,” they say with a straight face,
“Someday you can become a salesman too.”
Then someone appears one day,
tells me to learn                                      (the active uses fewer words than the passive)
the computer system,
to take the comfortable place of calm, content people                 
sitting at a desk in rooms upstairs,                    (in one of those unncessary) 
Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

            Dirty warehouse worker,
            Unfit to breathe the same air.

“Why are you taking so long filling orders?”
I search high and low for something not there.
“Are you blind, sightless, stupid fool.
City Electric employees get 15% Lens Crafters discount"
or develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,
Telepathy, telekinesis.

Professor's Response to my memory/location poem.

"100%. 75 points. There is a lot of anger in here which animates the poem. It definitely tells a story and identifies characters, placing them in action. What I like most are the quoted lines (which you should put within quotes). They sound like real conversation, making the story move efficiently even as they characterize the speakers.
When you revise for Module 6, focus on getting rid of excess words and uninteresting phrases. As a poet, edit the actual events--there is no need to recount things exactly as they happened but rather the way they work best in the poem. Also, you have too many line breaks which interfere with the continuity of the story--many of these could be combined for longer lines and shorter stanzas. You actuallly have a fairly long time frame and a long development as you provide a sense of what goes on, then the firing, then the period after being fired while you are still there. Think about compressing each segment so that the language becomes tighter. Finally, work on the ending which seems rather anticlimactic. A sense of the self also should be included, not just the decision to go  back to school. It's also a rather flat line. Still, you did an excellent job at this stage of the poem!
Please post this in the Discussion Drop Box

comments for my city electric poem.

English 206 Poetry. My Memory Poem

 This is a poem I just submitted for my Poetry class. It is in homage to a great and wonderful place, one of many that I had the pleasure of working at for what was a sadly short three month, from November of  '08 to January of 2009. It has been edited for conciseness that the professor requires. I will include the long edition some time in the future.

Ode to City Electric

This is a great place to work,

They say with a straight face.

Someday you can become a salesman too

Making the owner Sandy millions,

sitting at a comfortable desk

working at a leisurely pace.

Then someone appears one day, you’re told

To learn the computer system

To take the comfortable place of one of those

calm, content people

Sitting at a desk in one of those rooms upstairs,

Who shrink in fear of you on the stairwell,

Dirty warehouse worker,

Unfit to breathe the same air.

Why are you taking so long

Filling orders?

Searching high and low

for something not there.

But according to the computer it is,

Are you blind?

Is the prescription on those glasses you wear

Up to date?

We by the virtue of being employees

Of the great City Electric

Can get a 15 percent discount at Lens crafters

You sightless, stupid fool.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for,

Search the area nearby

Where the computer says it should be.

Develop the powers of clairvoyance, remote viewing,

Telepathy, telekinesis.

My coworkers agree

He’s a fucking asshole

Doesn’t want to listen to the blaring sports report

Doesn’t want to talk shit

Doesn’t want to hear me quote

Spaceballs all day

“Let the Swartz be with you”.

Doesn’t want to take Travis’s spot

Putting away shit

all day in the warehouse.

One of my coworkers who had been here

for some miserable years.

Dying to escape

From the monotony of the warehouse,

of days, months, years,

running up and down three flights of stairs,

of the moods of fat, moody Farnham.

Send me please to another branch

Put me on the road

Free from the prison of the warehouse

I’ll do anything. PLEASE!!!

Tell Farnham the boss

when you’re on your lunch break,

All the things you’ve confessed.

In what you foolishly thought

Was their confidence,

From having psychotic fantasies

To hating having to work here.

Hired as a backup driver,

a guy they call “Glue-stick”,

the dispatcher of this place,

his name some unpronounceable

Balkan last name

comes up to you in their midst.

“Do you know where such and such place is?”

Before you can form a thought

The others desperately and agitatedly

yell, “Oh, Oh, Oh, I know where that is”.

Wednesday my favorite day,

the only day they let me drive.

So I make it last the whole of the day.

Day trip to the Rochester store,

stop at the rest area,

then after your delivery

picking up half of what

you delivered last week as a return,

then tearing off as fast as I can

to stop at the diner down the street for brunch,

coming back to jealous co-workers

who spent the whole day

talking shit about you behind your back

as they spent the day

running up and down three flights of stairs.

Terminated after the holidays

for “poor performance”.

But we’re so nice

“We’ll let you work out your last two weeks”.

Their mistake.

Big mistake.

Now I get paid to lolly gag

more aggressively than before.

Smashing bulbs,

graffiti the place.

"Harvesting" batteries.

Do you want to buy some back?

I have so many

They’ll go bad before I can ever use them.

What was I thinking?

Stuffing boxes of them

down my pants, behind my belt,

inside my pants,

front and sometimes back.

One on each side of my jacket,

in pockets that seemed to welcome them.

On and off for months as the weather got cold,

then two or three times a day

after I was told I was “laid off”

How about some flashlights?

So many dumps like this

I have worked in.

Sweated,

Sometimes bled,

And cried when I got home.

This lesson existed before me,

for so many years,

unwilling to learn.

The only way to escape?

The one that finally sunk in.

Go back to school.

Get yourself

a Bachelor’s Degree. 

Status Report for Bill Bronson - 9/27/10

Working on the book that will gain me fame and fortune and allow me to escape the torment of the working world. Home all day typing all my notes from paper into Word, arrange them by place, order them chronologically. I have finally gotten rid of all the written notes and should be done this week with my voice recorded notes. Then it is just a matter of putting it all together and plugging the holes, fleshing things out. Hopefully I will have something to start submitting to agents this winter and beat my self imposed deadline of next summer. The story is there in the notes, it's just a matter of putting everything in order, developing what needs developing, and cleaning it up. It's very exciting. I would have never had been able to get half of where I am at if it wasn't for unemployment, thanks be to God for Allied Electric. The great thing about it is that I don't have to get it perfect before I can submit it to people, although you should get it as perfect as possible to reflect where you want the story to go, to give agents a more than general idea of the story you want to tell. Then when they see some potential in it, they have you sit down with a professional editor to perfect it so we can all make some money. It is very exciting. If I was wearing sweatpants I would be embarrassed. Will post more to my blog. What is up in your perfectly normal and sane experience of the world, my brother?

Professor's Response to my "Speech" poem.

"You have written a poem that is all idea. Important ideas, certainly, and clearly strongly felt by you, but I’ll be darned if I can find a single, solitary ITEM-THING-something that can be touched or smelled or tasted or heard or seen—anywhere in this poem. Even the river and mountain are metaphoric, not real. I imagine you saw the parts of speech as a sort of list. It is, but those items do not provide the sort of “thingness” that this approach to poetry looks for. The idea is to use things to explain abstractions and ideas. You try to use abstractions to explain ideas! A catalogue driven approach would have listed all the titles of the books you have encountered, from Run Spot Run to where you are today. Or a list of imaginary places in books that have captured your imagination. Or a list of teachers. Or even your earliest words. Once you have that list, you could organize, analyze, and present y0ur ideas within those items,  commenting briefly. That’s the catalogue’s approach. This, unfortunately, no matter how heartfelt. Is not. Have you looked at one of the student’s poems in the Workbook about learning and teaching words to his little brother? It is more metaphor than catalogue, but it does transform the abstract into the specific!

If you choose to revise this for Module 6, I would keep only the concept of “speech,” and find a whole other approach".

It makes sense to me. Another example of me thinking I know what I'm doing and not bothering to read the required readings before doing the assignment. 

Second Assignment for English 206 Poetry. "Speech"

                                                               Speech.

I read books that teach, that entertain,

to distract, and escape from

Schools that introduced them to me,

tried to teach me to interpret

Sentences that carry me along a black river in white,

to another idea or imaginary place,

further down the page,

across and over a paper mountain,

and dive into an ocean of

Words my teachers said were

nouns,

verbs,

adjectives,

adverbs,

pronouns

formed out of

Syllables I seem to create arbitrarily out of the

Letters A through Z,

the confusing jumble in between,

to a child told “no”,

a parent thinks

“to someone you will always get it wrong”. It

Sounds like beasts, calling for companionship,

warning and challenging competitors,

expressing some redundant mood or feeling.

What does it matter?

Learning this language of

Misunderstanding?

Translating it all into Understandable

Noises carried in the air,

on the wind going nowhere,

disappearing somehow,

like myself in the world,

my words

misinterpreted,

ignored,

maligned,

mocked,

absorbed

People talking without saying anything

I have been talking my whole life but

Am I understood?

Do I know what I mean?

Does what I say matter,

or do I make noise to comfort others,

as I comfort myself before the blackness comes,

the same blackness of words that sit upon this page?

English 206. Poetry. My first assignment.

   Being Taught Loneliness       

   conquering colorful video games

   stoic speaking television standing in the corner

   silent serene house until Grandma came home

   muscled mute G.I. Joes resting in the basement

   debilitating delicious fried food

   How does a boy learn to become a Man?

New Beginning

Today I commit myself wholly to the practice of my beloved art, writing. For decades I chose to survive madness, despair, and unbearable torments because I knew once I committed myself to writing I would live a life of luxury, free of stress and the imposition of other people's will. I will travel in the circles of the highest quality of people, artists, entertainers, and entrepreneurs. I will be free of the shackles of my slavery, my life will, for the first time in my life be my own. All I have to do is begin the journey of learning about and developing my talent. Today my life becomes more than mere survival, mere existence. Today I no longer hold myself back, today I begin to live the life I was destined to live.