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"Would it be different if … ?"
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Unseen Poetry
In this seventeen-part course, Professor John McRae (University of Nottingham) provides a step-by-step guide for approaching unseen poetry. The first three modules introduce key concepts (e.g. the ‘movement’ the poem, ‘binaries’, etc.) as well as the more concrete approaches (e.g. compare the first and last lines, look at the verbs, etc.). In modules four to eight, these concepts and approaches are applied to five unseen poems. This is followed in the ninth module with a discussion of the eleven features of poetry that can provide useful starting points for analysis – lexis, syntax, graphology, semantics, etc. In the final eight modules after that, we demonstrate the same approach with eight more poems – four of them very famous, and four of them less so.
"Would it be different if … ?"
In this module, we introduce poetry and poets and consider one way that we might start thinking about the impact of the poetry in front of us – ‘Would it be different if … ?’. In particular, we think about: (i) the range of texts that ‘count’ as poetry – it’s wider than you think!; (ii) the importance of coming up with your OWN opinions about the poem in front of you – and being able to explain WHY you think the way you do; (iii) the subjectivity of poetry – just because SOMEONE ELSE thinks it’s good, doesn’t mean YOU have to; and (iv) using the question “What would happen if … ?” to explore the impact of the words, phrases, effects that the poet HAS used.
Poems included in this module:
– Abdul Ghafar Ibrahim, ‘The Wall’ (1972)
– Edward Clerihew Bentley, ‘Clive’ (1905)
– Extract from UK national anthem (18th century)
– William Wordsworth, extract from ‘’Tis Said That Some Have Died For Love’ (1800)
– William Wordsworth, extract from ‘The Thorn’ (early draft, 1798)
So let's begin at the very beginning. A very good place to start. What is a poem
00:00:05now? I would like you to switch off this video, Miss as soon as you switched it on
00:00:15and write down some poems that you know
00:00:21and a poem can be anything.
00:00:26It can be a new rap by Drake. It can be a song by Dua Lipa.
00:00:28It can be a chance at a football stadium. It can be anything at all.
00:00:32It can be in any language you like. It can be in any shape you like.
00:00:40Take a minute or two to do that.
00:00:44And when you've done that,
00:00:48have a look at this.
00:00:50And right now
00:00:54you have no idea what to do with that or what to say about that
00:00:55because we are never told taught, encouraged to do anything like read this
00:00:59and your head goes a little bit to an angle because it's
00:01:09at a bit of an angle
00:01:13and you can see all the words
00:01:15the wall and they're all in different fonts and different kinds of letters.
00:01:17And then in the middle,
00:01:23I cannot escape.
00:01:26So what's going on here?
00:01:30Well, I'm not going to tell you ever. I hope what it's about,
00:01:33because what it's about means that I'm standing in front of the poem,
00:01:41telling you what to think.
00:01:46My job here is getting you to think about what's
00:01:48going on in this text because it's clearly a text.
00:01:52Somebody made it like that,
00:01:55and that person is called a poet. Sometimes
00:01:58sometimes there's a rapper or she's a singer or perils a singer. Yeah,
00:02:03you have to negotiate what you think is going on,
00:02:10and I'm here to give you some tools
00:02:17to explore
00:02:19what's going on.
00:02:21If at the end of all that you decide there is a meaning
00:02:23to the text that we're looking at,
00:02:30that's great.
00:02:32But remember that that meaning is your interpretation,
00:02:33not mine,
00:02:39not your teachers.
00:02:41But it's a process,
00:02:43and I want to help you understand the processing
00:02:45that goes on when we look at a text.
00:02:48When somebody sends you a text with two mgs and rotten spelling,
00:02:51you have the skills to decode it.
00:02:58Poetry is no different.
00:03:02It just happens to have that name poetry.
00:03:04I've written this book. This is the promo slot.
00:03:08You need this book
00:03:11just pure and simple.
00:03:13Get this book and it will tell you everything you're going
00:03:14to get in the next couple of hours on the screen,
00:03:17and it will give you loads and loads of poems.
00:03:20But one of the things I did at the beginning of this
00:03:22was I
00:03:25put a page of poems, all sorts of different kinds.
00:03:27What I like about Clive is that he is no longer alive.
00:03:33There is a great deal to be said
00:03:39for being dead.
00:03:41Duh.
00:03:45Is that a real poem?
00:03:46Well, you see what it does, It sort of
00:03:49rhymes,
00:03:51and it
00:03:54is in the shape of four lines.
00:03:54It's pretty tough, isn't it?
00:03:58There's no sort of
00:04:00inspiration there.
00:04:04Uh, here's one that you might know.
00:04:06God save our gracious queen. It says here,
00:04:10Long live our noble queen. God save! That's a poem.
00:04:13Uh, may not do very much for you, and they inspire the head out for you.
00:04:18Here's
00:04:24three different lines by the same poet,
00:04:27and this one is somebody who is considered to be a great poet.
00:04:29Look at this first line.
00:04:34It is said that some have died for love.
00:04:36Now there's something about that isn't there. There's a rhythm. There's a oh,
00:04:41and he, the same poet, wrote.
00:04:48I've measured it from side to side, three ft long and two ft wide,
00:04:51and he's mentioning a grave.
00:04:58So even a great point. This is actually Wordsworth, who will come too much later.
00:05:01We could read one of these really great ones later on.
00:05:06He can write this tosh,
00:05:09and you can write a line like that that goes straight to your heart,
00:05:12to said that some
00:05:16have died for love.
00:05:18Now, one of the first tricks I'm going to teach you
00:05:21is when you see
00:05:25something that purports to be a poem or could be a poem,
00:05:27because you often get poetic crews as well,
00:05:31and you could take out a line and it almost becomes a pawn.
00:05:34Would it be different if
00:05:38stop Write that down.
00:05:42This is going to be the first element in your toolbox.
00:05:43The first thing you're going to take off every single time you read something.
00:05:46Would it be different if
00:05:50some have died for love?
00:05:53I eat. If we take away two said that
00:05:55would it be different?
00:05:59Some have died for love.
00:06:02Some people have died for love. People die for love.
00:06:05Tis said
00:06:09that some
00:06:10have died
00:06:12for love.
00:06:13That distance is it. It's It's more
00:06:15objective,
00:06:18he said, that some have died for love,
00:06:20and there comes a point
00:06:24where there's no point in me explaining anything.
00:06:26You enjoy it.
00:06:29It resonates with you
00:06:31or it doesn't.
00:06:33Some people consider me to be a bit of an expert on
00:06:36poetry because I've written a book called The Language of Poetry.
00:06:38But there's lots of stuff that does not very much for me,
00:06:41and there's lots of stuff you'll get used to this
00:06:46that I enthuse about and think is wonderful.
00:06:48And the fact that I think it's wonderful doesn't mean it's wonderful.
00:06:50It means I think it's wonderful
00:06:54and I'm not trying to force you to think anything is wonderful.
00:06:56But I hope you'll think that quite a lot of stuff that we look at is wonderful.
00:07:00So,
00:07:05you know, is a song by duality poetry.
00:07:07Well, the form of it is that it looks like it's poetry you know, often got rhymes.
00:07:10It's often spread out on the page that the look of the thing is different,
00:07:16So would it be different? It's going to be our first question.
00:07:23When we look at this one called the Wall,
00:07:27you can see
00:07:32the wall to wall to wall ball. Would it be different if it was all in capital letters?
00:07:33Yes,
00:07:37the loop would be different. Would it be different if it was all informed?
00:07:38Of course it would.
00:07:41The bit I'm gonna look at is
00:07:44in the middle there.
00:07:47I cannot escape, which is written a bit more like, Would you say handwriting?
00:07:49Maybe something like that. Anyway, it's written in a different script or fond.
00:07:56So my big question to you is
00:08:02would it be different if
00:08:06that was just an empty space
00:08:10with no words in it?
00:08:11Mm.
00:08:17And the answer. You can't get away from the fact that, yes, it would be different.
00:08:20But you're thinking, Aren't you
00:08:25about how is it different? What am I going to see? If he asks me how it's different?
00:08:27I'm not worried about what you say.
00:08:32What I want is that you think about it.
00:08:34Let's change the words.
00:08:40It's one of the great ways of finding how
00:08:41a poem works is it's called heuristic Lee writing.
00:08:44If you want to get really boring about it.
00:08:49But if you just swap around the world or two just to see how the actual words work
00:08:51and I'm going to ask it, would it be different if instead of I cannot escape
00:08:59it? Read,
00:09:05No escape
00:09:07thinking about that.
00:09:12And I think most people would have a sort of subjective feeling about that.
00:09:16But we've never been taught how to put this into words.
00:09:24So I'm going to follow up that question with
00:09:26which of the two for you
00:09:29is stronger.
00:09:34I cannot escape
00:09:36no escape.
00:09:39Now there's no correct answer.
00:09:45What there is is your
00:09:48subjective response,
00:09:50and you could argue both ways.
00:09:55You could do a Hegelian dialectic on his
00:09:59Centenary year
00:10:03because, yeah,
00:10:06no escape, which is stronger. What do we mean by stronger?
00:10:09No escape could mean absolutely dead. No, nothing there more negative.
00:10:13I cannot escape what the one thing we can say about that is, there is an eye
00:10:21involved, so it's more personal.
00:10:25It's more subjective,
00:10:28which is stronger,
00:10:30I don't know,
00:10:31but what's important is the process of thinking about
00:10:33what it would be like
00:10:37to be different.
00:10:39Would it be different
00:10:41if
00:10:43dot, dot, dot
00:10:44
Cite this Lecture
APA style
McRae, J. (2020, October 12). Unseen Poetry - "Would it be different if … ?" [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/unseen-poetry/simon-armitage-poem
MLA style
McRae, J. "Unseen Poetry – "Would it be different if … ?"." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 12 Oct 2020, https://massolit.io/courses/unseen-poetry/simon-armitage-poem