Week 4 - February 26
Transformations
and trespasses --"stones"
Ovid and Company
1. Why so
many poems about Sisyphus, poets? From Gods and Mortals
Mitchell:
"Myth of Sisyphus"
Enzensberger: "instructions for sisyphus"
Clifton: "nothing is told about the moment"
Pacheco: "New Sisyphus"
Torga: "Sisyphus"
2. Transformations
Daphne (Boland,
Sexton, Deagon goldenrod 1-3) what is at stake for the
poet
Philemon and Baucis (Gunn goldenrod 9)
Philomela (Ritsos 13)
Hyacinth (Gluck 14)
3. Trespasses
Actaeon
(Laughlin goldenrod 4)
Niobe (Sheck salmon1)
Icarus ( Lindgreen, Guthrie, Rukeyser, Bulanov, Reid salmon
3-5)
Arachne (Hollander salmon 6-7)
Psyche (Hine salmon 9)
Phaeton (Kossman salmon 10)
4. Why sonnets: Winters ("Apollo and Daphne"2) Borges
and Weores( "Proteus" 7)
goldenrod & stanzas in Hine 9-salmon and Raine one line short
of sonnet salmon 10
5. Group work 2 tasks
1. Create
your own metamorphosis
myth - with playdough and pipecleaners make a figure of the
one transformed in mid-transformation
2. After
you've shared what you are pulled to and what you think needs
work in poem explore how it might change if it were a sonnet
6. Poem -for_____________________(what
trespass)
I
was transformed into _________________________
with
________________________(give one detail of this transformed shape)
Assignment:
explore a time in which you trespassed or were transformed but
treat yourself as a mythic figure - or find a mythic figure that
captures this transformation another way to do this would be to
skin through Hamilton's Mythology till you come upon a myth that
speaks to you intimately
Read:
chapters from Colum's The Children of Odin and poems from Jeff
Mann's Ash: Poems from Norse Mythology
