POETRY LECTURE

DYLAN THOMAS: "The voice discovers the Poet's ear"

ORAL INTERP PREPARATION
- start with the title
- Author's intent implied?
- Clues to meaning?
- what type of poem?
- tell a story?
- create a mood? (other purposes)

Who is speaking to whom?

- Narrative / Epic
- Narrator telling story/poem to audience
- characters in dialogue
- element of plot

- Lyric
- someone like author speaking to:
- self, inner dialogue
- muse, god, unseen auditor
     - elegies, odes, reflective poetry
     - Sylvia Plath, Emily Dicknison
- highly personal, emotional
- remembering or capsulized experience
- personal benefit, purgation, cathartic

- Dramatic
- defined persona that is not author
- usually in the first person
- often in conflict situation
- often in conversation
- characterization is very impt.
     - monologues, soliloquies

About what is the speaker speaking?
- actions, motivation? - is there conflict?
- what ideas and thoughts are explores?
- what moods or emotions are created?

Where and when is the poem taking place
- setting? plot?
- timeless present?
     - Lyric: insight, flash (timeless present)
     - Narrative: unfolds, progresses like story
     - Dramatic: happening now

How does the speaker speak?
- discern patterns of meter, sounds, images
- is the poet conveying meaning thru patterns?
- what is the nature of the speaker's language?

Three types of imagery employed
- Sensory imagery: appealing to senses
     - tactile, visual, auditory, thermal
     - gustatory, aural etc.
     - kinesthetic (emotional body memory)

- Literary imagery: analogic language
     - analogic vs. digital
     - associations, similarities, figures of spch
     - associative juxtapositions
     - Robert Frost's "shock of recognition"
     - metaphors, similies
     - allusions: extrinsic reference
     - hyperbole: exaggeration
     - personifications, paradoxes

- Tone color: sounds of language
- creative use of sounds:
     - alliteration: rep. of consonant sound
     - assonance: rep. of vowel sounds
     - consonance: rep. of cons aftr diff vowels
     - rhyme, meter (back seat!)
- underlining sense w/ sounds
     - frictives (k,f,s,z,th,sh,): conflict
     - plosives (p,b) effect?
     - liquid "l": pleasant
     - dentals (t,d) rushed effect
     - short vowels move quickly
     - long vowels, diphthongs: slowly

- Meter: conventional and free verse
- conventional: rhythmic base
- free verse: more subtle, less regular
- Phrasing considerations: (set rhy. to break)
     - caesura: pause w/in line
- punctuation
- tone color
- primary cadence
     - sense of the sentence
- enbjambment (thought carries to next ln.)
     - end stopped: end w/ punct; inflect dwn
     - endjambed: no punct; inflect up?

PERFORMANCE ANALOGS
- focus for Who to Whom
- mapping out the action for Where/when
- character voices, speaker's voice
- vocal/physical response to:
     - sensory imagery: sensory showing
     - literary imagery: give time for "shock of recog"
     - tone color: careful rate: richness of language
- giving your performance shape
     - fulcrum: major change of imagery / pattern / theme / thought
     - climax: emotional / logical pinnacle

GENERAL NOTES
- take your time
- pay attention to diction
- explore imagery fully
- explore wide variety of poetry experiences
- hook with humor, move to other purposes
- keep appropriate to season, experience, units