Poetry Portfolio
Poetry Portfolio
Poetry Portfolio
3.1 Directions
The directions from Terry Hall to Bartell Drugs are quite simple, indeed. One will exit
the front entrance of Terry Hall and begin walking right along NE Campus Parkway past Maple,
Lander, and Alder Halls until they reach University Way NE. Once at that intersection, one will
cross the street so to be on the right side of the road. From there, they will then turn left to walk
up University Way NE, or “The Ave”. One will then walk four blocks up the slight incline past
Schmitz Hall, Cafe Solstice, H Mart, Crossroads Trading, and the UW Bookstore to find
themselves in front of the Bartell Drugs at the corner of NE 45th St and University Way NE.
3.2 Diffusion
Upon contact, the color swirled and danced as it began its journey of diffusion, so clearly
outnumbered by its counterpart of water molecules. It was temporary, but it changed the
composition of the environment it had been thrown into. It almost felt as if a wind I could not
feel was blowing the concentration of the color about to disperse it among its environment, the
way a gust scatters leaves from a tree across a field to impart the colors across the landscape. It
reminded me of ribbon dancers twirling their sticks round and round if the ribbons were able to
dissolve and scatter, but softly.
3.3 Knots
Constrictor Knot (Rope End Method)
This knot can be used to hold items together or securely tie the neck of a sack or bag,
among other things. To tie it, start with a rope and a pole laid horizontally on a table in front of
you. Place the left end of the rope over the pole so the end of the rope is pointing up. Then, bring
the same end under the pole so it is pointing down. Continuing, cross the end of the rope over
itself and the pole. From there, bring it back underneath the pole to the right of the loop you have
already created. Now, point the end of the rope left and bring it through the loop it just made.
Point it to face up and then bring it through the original loop. Tighten your knot.
Congratulations, you’ve tied a Constrictor Knot!
3.4 Counting
In the quad I counted 29 cherry blossom trees, 4 evergreen trees, and a loose 39 trees that
fall into the category of “other”. The cherry blossoms were fairly easy to number despite the
large crowds present on a sunny Friday afternoon because I divvied them up into their respective
triangular and quadrilateral sections of grass. The evergreen trees are large and few making them
easy to amass, as well. However, the rest of the trees proved fairly complex. There are lots of tall
bushes to be found in the quad. This led me to ask myself what I even consider a tree to be.
Some trees stand just beyond the parameters of the quad which led me to consider where I drew
the boundaries and if others would agree with such decisions. With these factors in mind, I
counted an unconfident 72 trees in the quad.
- Thomas Gout
Seasonal
March or April - Easter
Happy Birthday!
We’ll sing you a song,
And celebrate with cake
Even though it seems wrong
That this day tends to be
More about you than your mom.
CONTEMPT
Clingety crot,
Stealing from others
‘Cause you want what they got.
[ For the thief ]
A cheater on tests is
Dishonest at best
And nevertheless
Ruins it all for the rest.
[ For cheats ]
Sluggardly-guise,
Loth to go to bed,
And loth to rise.
[ For the lazy ]
Justifying jellybean,
Blue and yellow
Make an envious green.
[ For the jealous ]
Trim, Tran
Like master, like man.
[ For the copy cat ]
6.1 Heartbeat
We must devise a plan, retreat while we still can. The day appears, inviting water to the lofty
battle field. My mother, father, sister, brother gather here, among the broken families.
Understand my heart beats not for you, but Mister Candy down the street. Oh such a funny
thing that romance can be.
6.2 Hoofbeat
Pentagram. Rubber ham. Laminate. Procreate. Concentrate. Cavalry. Battle field. Fantasy.
Undertake. Managing. Mastering. Silly goose. Contemplate. Statuesque. Implement.
Tendency. Chocolate shake. Creatine. Internship. Pirate ship. Chapter book. Quick, don’t look.
Needle hook. Theater. Placement test. Faculty. Trivia. Regiment. Amsterdam. Soviet.
Leadership. Patience is key. Interrupt. Comprehend. Contradict.
Clerihew
Barack Obama
Sure loves his mama.
After being president
He seemed quite spent.
Richard Kenney
Worth more than a penny
Teaches us poem
Without being loathsome.
Eggs
If they’re wise
Don’t fight with stones
Truth is
What the rich say
Hold tightly
The embrace
Requested from others
Thunders before
You can stop your ears
The rich
Are never
As ugly
You gone
Every day is like three autumns
Anxious heart
Flutters like a flag
Proverbs
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a
lifetime
Cliches
All Dead
● Now that we have a solid foundation of this knowledge, we can move onto the next
chapter
Mostly Dead
● I have a ton of homework to do
● Let’s get to the root of the problem
Lively Metaphors
● “All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop
up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops” (The Secret History)
● “Its red brick facade flat as a stage backdrop against the empty sky” (The Secret History)
● “The library was like a tomb, illuminated from within by a chill fluorescent light that, by
contrast, made the afternoon seem colder and grayer that it was” (The Secret History)
Conceptual Metaphors
● Nature is green/the ocean is blue
○ The big blue
○ Look at all the greenery
● Food/energy is fuel/gasoline (therefore we are a vehicle)
○ I’m running out of steam
○ I’m running out of gas
○ You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is going to die
● Earth is our mother
○ The mother will provide
○ Mother seems angry, do you hear the thunder?
○ It’s raining, mother is sad
○ Be good to your mother
Metonymy
1. Two regular-looking people walking through the Burke Museum parking lot…barefoot
2. A calendar in my friends’ apartment featuring photos of scantily-clad men on the beach
with the actual days part of the calendar being very, very small in comparison to the
photos
3. Took a fast and sharp U-turn in the car which caused the pancakes to fall out of the to-go
box and onto…the speeding ticket my partner had received for going 15 mph over the
speed limit
4. Three birds flying overlaid together in my line of sight to look like one bird with six
wings
5. A girl’s long skirt had a sheer, lace bottom and as she was standing in the last golden
hour glow of the day, it made that part of her skirt appear to light up and glow
6. A young girl walked into Lake Union on a hot day…fully clothed
7. Ran into the same neighbor twice within a stretch of about two hours…each time with a
different girl
Riddle
Haiku
Watery droplets
Sit atop the blades with ease
Unmoving moisture
Glistening droplets
Silently await our rise
Greet us, unmoving
Charm
1. Gather dew
a. Preferably from a flower, but grass or shrubs will do just fine
b. Preferably from a garden (yours, or otherwise), but any plot of natural land will
suffice
c. Preferably from a damp morning in April or June, but any month should be okay
so long as what you are collecting is dew and not liquified frost
d. Preferably in a glass jar of some kind, but any container capable of holding
liquids will prove worthy
e. Preferably eight drops, but any more than four and we’ll be able to properly
manage
2. Absorb or ingest the dew in the full amount of which it was collected
a. Methods that have proved most effective include
i. Use as eye drops
ii. Baked into a bran muffin
iii. Dribbled onto the base of the neck while laying face down in the shade
iv. Used as the water atop one’s toothbrush (but only in the morning)
v. Dotted upon the three most prominent freckles on one’s left leg
(preferably the calf)
3. Remain observant for nine fortnights
a. Stretch each day of this period of time, each day a different part of the body
b. Rub your temples and the arch of your feet in circular motions each day in the
opposite direction as the last
4. Upon the tenth fortnight, reap the rewards
a. Most common results entail
i. Dewier skin
ii. Livelier footsteps
iii. More moistened joints (both inside and out)
iv. Gratitude
v. Reinvigoration in and for one’s life
Repeat this cycle annually (in or between the preferred months) for best results
Use at your own risk
● Side effects can include
○ Daydreaming
○ Puffy eyes
○ Fits of sneezing in multiples of six
○ Moist inner ankles
○ Emotions more delicate than usual
1. The Problem is that words are not all that great at conveying emotion.
2. The centaur is both man and animal, horse specifically. We, as people, are both mind and
body. Our body acts as the primal animal on instinct, perceiving things the mind is not
aware of or slower to pick up on. We are bodily action and the perception and response to
it.
3. Emotion is in the body as the horse part of the centaur. Feelings, on the other hand, are in
the mind or the human.
6. A psychopomp is a guide of sorts, often associated with one’s soul. For our purposes, our
psychopomp is Aristotle. As the father of much of western thought in logic and
philosophy, his writings and teachings have acted in guiding us into the depths and weeds
of communication, language, and poetry.
7. English metrical verse is most often counted as stresses, syllables, and the two combined
as metrical feet. This order makes the most sense logically to me as I can feel the stresses
before I count syllables.
9. The two most common metrical patterns in our literature are iambic pentameter intended
to imitate speech and ballad measure which imitates song.
10. The heartbeat and the hoofbeat are real-world examples of double and triple metrical
rhythms. It can be difficult to force oneself to read poetry through the robot as it often
sounds off-putting and unnatural. By likening poetic metrical rhythms to common
rhythms heard in the real world, they became easier to hear and create.
11. The gorilla represents the natural or expressive way one reads a poem. The robot
represents the metrical reading of a poem. The two can walk through a poem hand in
hand and occasionally their feet fall together, but not always. When this doesn’t occur,
the gorilla carries the robot across the lapse until it can be set down to continue again.
The robot has to be programmed and has a difficult time when the poem deviates from
the prescribed pattern. The gorilla has that innate humanness to him where he can move
and adjust and flow with the poem, wherever it may take him, without trouble.
12. As I understand it, a counterpoint occurs when the gorilla and the robot (the natural and
metrical readings) fall out of step with one another or fail to align, sometimes producing a
slightly uncomfortable reading or extra focus on behalf of the reader. A substitution
occurs when a poem breaks its pattern of meter which usually results in the
mispronunciation of a word and thus causes the robot to trip up and have to be carried
across it by the gorilla.
13. Darwin’s two kinds of scientific mind are the lumpers and the splitters.
14. David Hume’s three Laws of Association are the Law of Similarity, the Law of
Contact/Contagion/, and the Law of Causation. All fall under the overarching Law of
Sympathy.
15. Magical thinking, or a magical theory of reference, is subscription to the belief that an
individual can influence the outside or material world through their actions, behaviors,
beliefs, practices, thoughts, words, use of symbols, and actions, among other things. It is
sometimes understood as superstitious thinking, as well. It is willing to provide a cause
where sciences would not be so willing.
16. James Frazer describes two types of sympathetic magic: Imitative Magic and Contagious
Magic. Regarding imitative magic, there are Indigenous groups that would draw a picture
of an enemy in the dirt, gather around it and harass it verbally and physically by yelling
taunts and stomping on it hoping to negatively affect the real person it represented. In my
own life I keep pictures of my loved ones on my walls because it reminds me of the real
people they represent. For contagious magic, old German tradition dictated that one could
gather dirt from an enemy’s footprint into a bag and hang it in the chimney or fireplace.
As the dirt dried, supposedly the foot of the enemy would wither. In my childhood I
would sleep with shirts and sweatshirts of my parents to feel as if they were with me.
17. Imitative magic could be seen in poetry as the use of metaphor where one thing is
compared to the other as if it were an imitation of the thing. Contagious magic could be
understood as metonymy in the sense that it is a detail in a large scene that is a part of the
larger context and is therefore still connected to it even if taken apart.
19. Stepping out of her black and white room into the color-filled world, Mary was probably
overwhelmed with all she learned so quickly. While not being outright taught anything,
necessarily, Mary learned of the undeniable and yet incommunicable experience of
seeing color. In the sense that no single person can explain what “red” looks like, neither
can I explain exactly what Mary gained beyond pure experience as understanding and
knowing. Relating to our class, people cannot fully understand or know something
without experiencing it for themselves. Poetry is an attempt to bridge that gap between
experience and knowledge through the use of words. It is an attempt to impart our
experiences to an audience through language rather than their own experience.
I understand this final line in the same way I understand feelings. They don’t necessarily
have to mean something. People are always digging into their own subconscious and
dissecting poems word from word in search for the innate human desire of meaning.
Feelings don’t necessarily mean one thing or another, they simply exist in the mind just
as emotions do in the body; they simply are. One must not always tear themselves apart
to uncover some hidden truth, but simply exist with that feeling, allow it to reach every
crevice of their being, then let it dissipate. Seeing as poetry is the attempt to convey
emotion and feeling, these two entities are inextricably tied. Poetry must not always be
taken apart for examination, but simply read, felt, experienced, and enjoyed. Feelings are
not always understandable in the clean-cut logical way our minds prefer to consider
things, but must hesitantly be given over to the body for it to do what it does best.
Outside Poetry Event: The Brain and the Healing Power of Poetry with Sati Mookherjee
(Notes) (Tuesday, May 4th)
● Poem of Hope from Jack Gilbert
○ We must risk delight
● Doesn't become its full self until it reaches and is receipted by someone
● Lets be transparent and be loose and casual
● Dr. Gihnsberg
● Will do
○ Readings
○ Process of crafting them
○ Journey and how honors influenced the evolution of her career
● Wisdom
○ Life is weird and unexpected things happne
○ Always be doing something (even if doing nothing, make it intentional)
○ Honor your whole self and ways of being
Books!
● Seeks to demystify poetry
● Make poetry not like flossing
● How to make our own reading pleasurable
● "Eye" the story of her grandfather being exiled from India to England
● Motif of circles
● Our lives are intersecting right now because of the historical actions behind us
● Things that feel fixed may not be fixed
● Interested where orbits intersect
● Represent abstract ideas imageristically
● Lunar eclipse
● We come together and we come apart
● What keeps coming up
● Hinduism influences
○ Monotheistic
○ God is the substance of the universe
○ "if I really believed that you believed in God I would die"
○ God is the thing inside an atom that holds the electrons in place
○ Gods and goddesses and dieties are meant to represent aspects of God
○ God is very abstract
○ Current Indian government Hindu nationalistic nation
○ It is a secular democracy
○ Hindu isn't associated with right wing and political harm
○ You can critique the political ideologies and still be HIndu
○ Hindutva!!!
● God is a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere
○ Ralph waldo emerson
○ St. Augustine
● Something has to be at stake in your work
○ She is convincing us that eyes are important
● Has to tell us something about grief and loss
● The act of attention is important, sacred
● Have other eyes, new light, and look
● Poetry gives us time and space to slow way down and pay attention
● Close your eyes to see better
○ Third eye, eye of insight
● Richard Kenney
○ One of our finest living poets
○ The creation of 0
○ Our gaze is so powerful we're holding up the world
● Kal means yesterday and tommorow in Bengali, time as a circle
● Under every deep, a lower deep opens
● The finity of grief, doesn't end but is contained
Ways of Being
● Very localized and inward facing
● Hold space for not knowing, confusion, messiness
● Grief and loss
● Necessary loss
● Expected loss
● The ones you don't see coming
● The project of being human is to learn how to reconcile with them
● All this book does is sit with it, right after the initial shock and horror
● Who am I without you?
● Words have permanence and people don't?
● Shwa sound is the most common, different letters
○ The
○ Cut
○ America
● Stressed versus syllable timed language
● Gaps and spaces
● When something like this happens, all you have is your own nature
Process
● Started writing eye in med school, 25 years old, 8 years
● Every experience changes you and who you are
● Full manuscript writing week thing
● Scraped 75% of it, 51 years old when someone wanted to publish it
● It's not about my feelings, its about the work and the work being good
● Taskshaping
● What I can do is observe when I can't do anything else
● Clots of language
● Grief and depression are two separate things
● Should not put pressure on grief to get better
● Accept your ways of being
● Space for grief
● Get treated if you are depressed
● You have agency in both
● You have agency
AFFIDAVIT
I. Reading
1. Did you read at least one poem every day, noted and dated in your logbook?
No. I did not note reading a poem on the days of April 8th, April 20th, May 4th or 5th,
May 25th, 26th, or 27th. This accounts for seven days I did not mark a poem down. I do
think it is worth noting, however, that I read multiple poems on other days and even
found some in my scrolling of social media that I simply enjoyed in passing.
2. Did you do all the assigned readings, in time for the target class?
Yes!
3. Did you memorize and recite aloud seventy lines over the course of the term?
Yes!
● The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (15 lines)
● The Owl and the Pussy-Cat by Edward Lear (33 lines)
● Tell all the truth but tell it slant by Emily Dickinson (8 lines)
● Invictus by William Ernest Henley (16 lines) (recited to Eva on June 3rd, see
confirmation below)
II. Writing
1. Did you complete all pitches and problems, in time for the target class?
Yes!
3. Did you keep the Commonplace Book and Lexicon, logging entries every week?
No. I missed one week in noting something down in the Commonplace Book and
Lexicon. It was the last full week of April. I did mark all of the poems I intended to
transcribe throughout the log, however, and did so at the end of the quarter.
III. Conversation
1. Did you come to every class, on time, and participate actively in our discussions?
Yes!
2. Did you attend one outside event, and make note of it?
Yes! This note can be found directly above the affidavit.