Lesson Nine

Catch up time...thats what Fridays are for I guess....


I dont really know how to respond to the ninth lesson without merely parrot-ing back the facts that were given. There wasn't an argument made or a side taken so the post was highly informative but uncharacteristically uncontroversial. I guess I agree with it? One of the main things about the information we were given was the lack of African Americans and women in the two rival poetic anthologies of the early 1960s. It is ironic how poets, at least now, are seen as more "outcasts" and as a subgroup in the literary community yet they were exclusionary in their own right. Especially amidst the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, it is very ironic that these types of practices were accepted.

As for the decline of poetry...I wonder where and when the form became less popular. Granted, I am no avid newspaper or magazine reader so I can't entirely vouch that a poet WASN'T on the cover of Life or Time magazine in their last editions, I can safely assume. I can think of people who are outwardly against our "war" in the middle east, I won't even get into it's comparisons with our "war" in Vietnam, but poetry must not pack the same muster as it used to since I don't really remember poets, poetry, poetic movement or stance, ever being mentioned in the same breath as war in Iraq. The fallout must have been after the Beat movement since, according to Kasey, the Language poets received little mainstream press.

I am trying to be creative but the only thing that pops into my head is the "I'm just a bill" from schoolhouse rock so I decided to make cut ups of those words, throw them up and whichever words appeared face up would make the poetic line in order from distance from me backward...and the words I used were "I'm just a bill yes im only a bill and im sitting here on capitol hill"..I added all punctuation.

Billy tossed from capitol hilly (shuffled 8 times)

A sitting a yes hill bill just I'm only
I'm on bill yess I'm hill just and
only im here. I'm yes a sitting
only a on,
A bill. Sitting hill yes I'm just bill and on
here on hill capitol and a
hill. I'm only capitol just here a I'm
on sitting here, hill I'm a only.