Poetry Group Presentation
Students will make presentations on poetry per: Writing about Literature (82). The sections are: Elements of Poetry: The Speaker & The Listener; Elements of Poetry: Imagery; Elements of Poetry: Sound and Sense; Elements of Poetry: Form, Elements of Poetry: Meter.
Jay, Jacqueline, June and Tia: Imagery
Joseph, Ade, Al: Sound and Sense
Melvin, Angela, Nick: Form
Ajmand, Igor: Meter
We will go over: Elements of Poetry: The Speaker & The Listener together in freewrites.
We had a guest last week, Thursday, October 27, 2011, Maria Acuña. She performs with the Quijeremá, which has a performance at "Strings," November, 2, 8 PM in Berkeley on San Pablo near Alcatraz.
Students were very quiet and didn't engage Maria much. In fact, she didn't even share any of her own work. Today, as a freewrite, write a response to Maria in the form of a letter. Tell her what you took from her presentation and ask her a few questions in retrospect you wish you had asked.
Visit her website first and read more about the ensemble, if you have not already done so: http://www.quijerema.com/home.cfm
Born and raised in Venezuela, Maria Fernanda Acuña specializes in a variety of drums and Latin American percussion instruments such as the Peruvian Cajon, Afro-Venezuelan hand drums and Maracas. For her work with Quijeremá she has developed a unique drum-set incorporating folk instruments from around the world combined with traditional cymbals, snare and kick drum. She also is an accomplished Cuatro player. Her unique approach and wide range of instrumentation plays a major role in defining the sound of Quijeremá.
Acuña began her musical training on piano as a child, and as a teenager, trained on trapset with noted Venezuelan percussionist Jose Matos. She studied composition and arranging in Caracas with Maria Eugenia Vera, and percussion with Itabora Ferreira (Brazil), Alexander Livinali (Venezuela), and Alex Acuña (Peru), as well as studying at the Jazz School in Berkeley, California.
Acuña has worked with a variety of artists including Alex de Grassi, Rafael Manriquez, Jackeline Rago, The Venezuelan Music Project, and Eduardo Mendelievich with Creative Voices.
Acuña has a degree in Latin American literature at Mills College, with an emphasis on the historic and cultural development of Venezuelan music as it relates to the African diaspora, and is presently in a Master’s program in English Literature at Mills College. She also teaches Spanish through music to children at “Viva el Español” and in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Recap Continued
Besides deciding which students would present which poetry lesson, we also read a few poems, from Indivisible. Again, not much response from the audience (you). Verbal participation is a part of the class.
Students are worrying about grades. One student mentioned she needs an A in the class. It's too bad that knowledge is not an end in itself; it is the grade which is as I mention in the syllabus, not a true measure of one's skill, conceptual success, progress, or understanding, let alone one's ability to demonstrate this mastery once the incubation or class has ended.
Getting the A is the easy part. Identification and application of these skills in the real world is where the difficulty lies.
Take your vitamins before you show up tomorrow.
10 comments:
Dear Maria Acuna,
Thank you so much for coming and presenting to our English class. We really appreciate your time and talents. You’re a phenomenal musician and poet. We listened to Tinta Verde and I read your extensive biography--it is such an honor to have someone so multi-talented present to our class.
I really enjoyed the poems you chose for our class to read during your presentation. They were both exceptional poems. Your enthusiasm for poetry is infectious. I have always appreciated that poems are more free, less structured literary forms and I'm glad that you agree. I also enjoyed the literary techniques you discussed and your incorporation of history (both of the authors and the poems) into your discussion and analysis of each poem. It's incredible how politics and wars can get incorporated into poetry and how each poet expresses these themes in his or her own way.
Again, thank you so much for presenting to our class. It was very enjoyable and I learned a lot. It's always more effective when a poet discusses poetry and your presentation was a wonderful.
Thank you,
Tia Gangopadhyay
Dear Maria Acuña,
Thank you very much for taking the time to come to our class to speak to us. It was very interesting to hear about how you got into poetry and your musical history. I remember what you also said about how there was one time you mentioned when you really listened to the lyrics you were singing and noticed how even though you were singing it joyfully, the actual context of it was very sad. For whatever reason, that story stood out to me because it is important to really listen and understand what is being said; it really goes for the most general things around them. After all, if one takes the time to stop and listen, they can get a better understanding of their surroundings and have something to write about.
I have also been wondering myself what particular experiences in your life you enjoy or feel most comfortable writing about? Who are some other artists outside of poetry and music that you admire and what do you take from them? What is your favorite form of art that is not poetry and music? Again, thank you so much for coming in and speaking to us.
Thanks,
June Yee
Dear Maria,
I thoroughly enjoyed your visit to our class. Your perspective on poetry as well as music was very enlightening. I was bummed that we didn’t get to share any of your personal work; Professor Sabir says it’s great. I really do enjoy poetry. Blake, Frost and Whitman are some of my favorites. Today we are listening to your work from Tinta Verde and it sounds wonderful. I too am a percussionist and string musician so I can appreciate the complexity of the work. It’s very soft and mellowing. I do have a question for you: What are some of the excersizes are strategies you use to get the creative juices flowing? I have a hard time getting my thoughts out sometimes and haven’t really found a solution to the problem. Anywho, thank you again for coming to visit us.
Sincerely, Jake Stabler
Dear Maria Acuna,
I wanna thank you for taking your time to come to our class. Having you as a class speaker gave us a nice break from our everyday routine and also gave us an opportunity to talka bout poetry. Ms. Sabir posted a short history of your accomplishments, and it is quite impressive how intouch you are with your creativity.
I think that the insight you provided us with regards to poetry was really helpful. The Pablo Neruda poem that you shared with us was very interesting. I wish that we had the time to take a look at some of your poetry, however. I apreciate your stance on having poetic freedom and your view on poetry's universailty. I found your presentation to be really helpful and I hope that the next time you visit, you'd be able to share some of your poetry with us. Again, I wanna thank you for taking your time to come to our class and speak about poetry.
Sincereley,
Melvin Arquero
Dear Maria Acuna,
I really enjoyed your presentation to the class about poetry. It was very interesting when you asked the class what is poetry meant to us. It really got me thinking about what poetry is. After listening to your presentation and putting some thought into the question I came up with the fact that poetry is whatever the writer wants it to be. It is solely up to whom ever is writing the poem. In your presentation to the class, the story that stuck out to me the most was the story of your music, how it sounds so upbeat but tells such tragic stories. I loved how you didn’t have any idea that you were singing a song about a boy who had fell out of a tree and died until you actually took the time to read and understand the lyrics. I find myself singing along to many songs that I am unsure of the meaning, until I really pay attention to what the musicians are saying, which makes me fall in love with the song even more. It is amazing how tragic events can create such beautiful music writing.
I would like to thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to come and talk to the class before we jump into our poetry unit. It is an honor to have someone such as yourself in our classroom to talk about your work. I wish we had had more time to listen and enjoy your music as much as you enjoy playing it.
Thank you,
Jacqueline Diulio
Tia Gangopadhyay
Professor Sabir
English 1B 9-10:50 AM
1 November 2011
Speaker/Listener Poetry Analysis
Reetika Vazirani's poem "It's Me, I'm Not Home," exemplifies the literary technique of speaker and listener. Throughout the poem, the repeated line, "leave a message after the beep" conveys the speaker's indifference toward his listener (5). The whole context of the poem seems to express a certain passivity. The speaker is telling the listener that while "A loves B," "B loves C [and] C won't answer" (5). This parallels to what the speaker is doing. While the listener is calling the speaker, the speaker does not answer and expects the listener to "leave a message after the beep" (5). The speaker is trying to express to the listener the ideas of fleeting romances and quick ending marriages which are causing him to give up and go to sleep, rather than stay up and answer the phone. It is almost as if the speaker is telling the listener that he is done trying to communicate and put in fruitless effort. Today, he is not going to answer the phone. Today, he wants the listener to "leave a message after the beep" (5).
Works Cited
Vazirani, Reetika. "It's Me, I'm Not Home." Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Ed. Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2010. 5. Print.
Hello Ms. Acuña,
I very much enjoyed your time with our class. I personally did not say much, because one cannot read from a blank page. I am an outsider to the world of poetry, as I am more attuned to the structured physical world. I do not relate well to the abstract and open nature of poetry. But this is also why I appreciated your presentation so much. Gaining your insight into the realm of poetry allows me to fill out my blank page with your wonderful insights. So thank you for taking time out of your day to share with us.
There are a few questions I would like to ask you that were not apparent to me during your visit. I don’t think very well on my feet. Anyway, as you didn’t get a chance to share any of your work with us, is there a website where I can experience some of your poems? Also, you spoke of how some poets would write about their experience in moving to and living in another country. Having grown up in Venezuela, how has the move here affected you and affected the essence of your poetry?
Again, thank you so much for your time.
Nick Malecek
P.S. – Your percussion work is very nice. We are listening to a track featuring you at the moment.
June Yee
Professor Wanda Sabir
English 1B Tuesday/Thursday, 9:00-10:50 AM
1 November 2010
Speaker and Listener Analysis
Maya Khosla's poem, 'Under Wolf-Paw' utilizes the literary technique of the speaker and the listener. The speaker is directly addressing the listener with anger as the listener is presumably “telling [the speaker] to leave” (1). The speaker continues by telling the listener about her herself and disparages the listener for refusing to tolerate her history and her culture, saying that he is “stiff entrenched too long and deep under wolf-paw and snow to shift” (6-8) and how he excepts her to change and accept everything. The speaker continues her rant to the listener by further affirming that she will not let the listener's words bring her down and that she is here to stay. The poem in generally is about addressing the people who have no tolerance or understanding and who turn their nose up at other cultures.
Works Cited
Kholsla, Maya. “Under Wolf-Paw.” Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry. Ed. Neelanjana Banerjee, Summi Kaipa, and Pireeni Sundaralingam. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 2010. 20. Print.
Adetona Adewale
Professor Sabir
English 1B
01 November 2011
Dear Maria Fernanda Ocuna, I really enjoyed your presentation about poetry to my class and I learned a lot about different forms of poetry and how some people view certain kinds of poetry. In addition, I had never met a Venezuelan musician slash poet and I found that aspect of your presentation very fascinating and surprising. But I really enjoyed listening to your accent because it sounded extremely South American and Latina. You made me aware of the fact that some really cool traditional sounding folk music existed in Venezuela and you also made me really want to travel there as well because your Venezuela seems really exotic. I saw in you another person that had as much passion for the art form as I do and I was taken aback by your sheer knowledge of the history and true beginnings of the craft. Moreover, I specifically enjoyed your over all presentation to my class because it was extremely interactive and inclusive.
Dear Maria Acuna,
Thank you for taking your time to visit our class to talk about poetry and for sharing meaningful poems with us. I really enjoyed the experience and especially what you told us about poetry. I also found your past experiences very interesting, especially the part where you were singing a song that had tragic lyrics and how it made you focus on the words. I was looking forward to read poems written by you but we ran out of time. Writing poems is a difficult process for me so I admire people who can write poems full of meaning. I look forward to seeing you again and to hear more of your experiences.
Thank you,
Arjmand Khan
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