Great Poetry: Poetry is Life and Vice Versa

Episode II: How Poems See

1. Fill in the blanks:
_______________ were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of __________
_______________ a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, _____________, and slow.

There came a _____________ that you couldn’t tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of ___________.

--Howard Nemerov

2. Explain the difference between an “image” and a simile?

________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

3. Who wrote, “my Luve is like a red, red rose?”

a) Robert Frost
b) Robbie Burns
c) Rob Roy
d) Bobby Fisher

4. “A metaphor is when you take Image X, which is called the

__________ , and you are going to move it over and, in fact,
overlay it and __________ it . . . with another image, the
___________.”

5. “When you say X is Y, you are, in fact, creating a ____________

_____________.”

6. Image X + Image Y = ____________.

7. What new school of poetry emerged in the 1980s? _____________________

8. How does “the Martian” read metaphor differently than
humans do? _________________________________________
____________________________________________________

9. What are “Caxtons?”___________________

10. What is “shrieking without pain?” ______________________

11. The whole point of a lot of the poems of the early 1980s was to
“make the ______________ strange.”

12. According to Bruce Meyer, what is symbolism?

___________________________________________________

13. “Imagism was an attempt to really revitalize poetry by taking

the poem down, basically throwing out ___________,
metaphor, symbol, anything that was ____________ and to
create a kind of tension out of the juxtaposing [of] images.”

14. What Japanese form was Ezra Pound trying to imitate?

__________

15. How many syllables in the English version of this Japanese form? _________

16. Who came up with the American school of Imagistic poetry?

a) Billy Dee Williams
b) John Williams
c) Walt Whitman
d) Williams Carlos Williams

17. What type of poem involves retracting and

apologizing for something said earlier?
____________________________________

18. The Deep Image School of poetry “would look at a metaphor and . . .
make the metaphor into something ___________________.”
19. James Wright’s tries to convey that “sense of joy when you make contact with
something _____________ and you understand it.”

20. According to Bruce Meyer, what is the difference between poetry and prose.

21. Robert Frost: “Poetry without rules is like playing _________ without the _______ up.”