Poetry Unit: Week 3
Poems of Address
“This is my letter to the world,
that never wrote to me.”
-- Emily Dickenson
McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
Activities
1. Write a poem addressed to someone else that evokes a particular mood or emotional state
through concrete images. Suggestions include: Loneliness, Anger, Guilt, Hilarity. (Meinke, 3;
Williams, 3; Whitman, 5)
2. Write a poem in a the form of a letter to one of the following:
a. A friend
b. An enemy
c. Someone who is dead
d. A stranger
(Rihaku, 6)
3. Write a poem to an anonymous “you” suggesting some secret connection in a mysterious and
unique way. (Gerber, 4)
4. Write a poem addressed to another self, your alter ego, or to your image in the mirror, but don’t
explain that you are addressing yourself. Let that come out in the poem.
5. Write a poem addressed to some part of your body. Be sure that the poem always displays a
consistent attitude or strong feeling.
Write an apostrophe to an animal or object. Consider whether the tone should be comic,
serious, or something in between. (Shapiro, 7)
6. Write a poem that includes talking to yourself – complaining, praising, informing, cajoling, etc.
Or, write a poem in which you talk to yourself at an earlier, or later, age. (Ignatow, 8-9)
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McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams
Appendix
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
Note the audience and conversational tone of the poem.
It almost sounds like a note left on a refrigerator door.
Williams is known for having precise and consequential
imagery.
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
This is a poem to my son Peter
by Peter Meinke
this is a poem to my son Peter
whom I have hurt a thousand times
whose large and vulnerable eyes
have glazed in pain at my ragings
thin wrists and fingers hung
boneless in despair, pale freckled back
bent in defeat, pillow soaked
by my failure to understand.
I have scarred through weakness
and impatience your frail confidence forever
because when I needed to strike
you were there to hurt and because
I thought you knew
you were beautiful and fair
your bright eyes and hair
but now I see that no one knows that
about himself, but must be told
and retold until it takes hold
because I think anything can be killed
after awhile, especially beauty
so I write this for life, for love, for
you, my oldest son Peter, age 10,
going on 11.
Meinke utilizes very intimate language. Consider the
following:
1. What is the tone, and how does it change
throughout the poem? What helps it change?
2. How can you create an intimate tone to your
own writing?
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McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
Excerpt from The Chinese Poems
by Dan Gerber
Another winter morning
I’m expecting your call
I stand close to the window and watch
My breath form a rose on the glass
I scratch your name on it
then wipe it away with my sleeve
listening for your tires
to crunch through the ice on the drive
I notice how snow glistens on the pine bows
That there’s no wind at all
It’s too cold for my walk
Nothing dares disturb this stillness
I know you aren’t coming
I press my cheek to the window
The telephone rings
My breath forms a rose on the glass
Gerber writes about someone who is not present. While
we may not understand the specifics of the situation, we
grasp enough to image the lonely, haunting scene.
Excerpts from “Song of Myself”
by Walt Whitman
1
I celebrate myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my Soul;
I lean and loafe at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass.
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes—the shelves are crowded with perfumes;
I breathe the fragrance myself, and know it and like it;
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.
The atmosphere is not a perfume—it has no taste of the distillation—it is odorless;
It is for my mouth forever—I am in love with it;
I will go to the bank by the wood, and become undisguised and naked;
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
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Alone, far in the wilds and mountains, I hunt,
Wandering, amazed at my own lightness and glee;
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game;
Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves, with my dog and gun by my side.
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McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails—she cuts the sparkle and scud;
My eyes settle the land—I bend at her prow, or shout joyously from the deck.
The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me;
I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots, and went and had a good time:
(You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.)
I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west—the bride was a red girl;
Her father and his friends sat near, cross-legged and dumbly smoking—they had moccasins to their feet,
and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders;
On a bank lounged the trapper—he was drest mostly in skins—his luxuriant beard and curls protected
his neck—he held his bride by the hand;
She had long eyelashes—her head was bare—her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous
limbs and reach’d to her feet.
The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside;
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile;
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log, and led him in and assured him,
And brought water, and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north;
(I had him sit next me at table—my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.)
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I am the poet of the Body;
And I am the poet of the Soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of hell are with me;
The first I graft and increase upon myself—the latter I translate into a new tongue.
I am the poet of the woman the same as the man;
And I say it is as great to be a woman as to be a man;
And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.
I chant the chant of dilation or pride;
We have had ducking and deprecating about enough;
I show that size is only development.
Have you outstript the rest? Are you the President?
It is a trifle—they will more than arrive there, every one, and still pass on.
I am he that walks with the tender and growing night;
I call to the earth and sea, half-held by the night.
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McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
Press close, bare-bosom’d night! Press close, magnetic, nourishing night!
Night of south winds! night of the large few stars!
Still, nodding night! mad, naked, summer night.
Smile, O voluptuous, cool-breath’d earth!
Earth of the slumbering and liquid trees;
Earth of departed sunset! earth of the mountains, misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon, just tinged with blue!
Earth of shine and dark, mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds, brighter and clearer for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow’d earth! rich, apple-blossom’d earth!
Smile, for your lover comes!
Prodigal, you have given me love! Therefore I to you give love!
O unspeakable, passionate love!
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
by Rihaku (Translated by Ezra Pound)
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
An Address poem may or may not be written to
a real person, but regardless, it is always
written to be read by an audience. Also
remember that the poem does not have to be
limited to the persona or character of the poet.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
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McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
The Fly
by Karl Shapiro
O hideous little bat, the size of snot,
With polyhedral eye and shabby clothes,
To populate the stinking cat you walk
The promontory of the dead man’s nose,
Climb with the fine leg of a Duncan-Phyfe
The smoking mountains of my food
And in a comic mood
In mid-air take to bed a wife.
Shapiro writes a poem of address to a fly, using
fantastic imagery and telling diction. Consider
why he chose to do so, and its effectiveness.
Riding and riding with your filth of hair
On gluey foot or wing, forever coy,
Hot from the compost and green sweet decay,
Sounding your buzzer like an urchin toy—
You dot all whiteness with diminutive stool,
In the tight belly of the dead
Burrow with hungry head
And inlay maggots like a jewel.
Self-Employed
by David Ignatow
I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
Most people talk to themselves. Ignatow uses
that common occurrence to convey an internal
conflict.
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another good change to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,
depressed and about to leave,
and wave myself back in wearily,
for who else could I get in my place
to do the job in dark, airless conditions?
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McIlvain – Poetry Unit, Week 3
In a Dream
by David Ignatow
Ignatow now adds a twist of talking to his “self”
at an earlier age.
at fifteen I approach myself,
eighteen years of age,
seated despondently on the concrete steps
of my father’s house,
wishing to be gone from there
into my own life,
and I tell my young self,
Nothing will turn out right,
you'll want to revenge yourself,
on those close to you especially,
and they will want to die,
of shock and grief. You will fall
to pleading and tears of self-pity,
filled with yourself, a passionate stranger.
My eighteen-year-old self stands up
from the concrete steps and says
Go to hell,
and I walk off.
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