Poetic Criticism

ITS A FEMALE FANTASY

 By: Ronnie Frye

I’m a premier dream team

you know whatta mean

I night-scape, bringing my five alive.

vain.., maybe, long ago, bit of a game!

not these days, I’m neat and meaty

but... not a lot like Warren Beatty.

I’m a romantic hit... not a Brad Pitt

got creative talent.. but no bank balance

a poetic muse, daring, suggestive, but never crude.

I haven’t got a car, can’t take you very far..

don’t make a fuss... please get on the bus.

I’m a ‘he-mail’, throaty and course

not a seductive radio voice., rather a Marlboro horse

no other vice., only chicken tikka with rice.

Got moist, rosy lips.., but, unlike your perfect pair

mine are red raw with, ‘sad’... down turned tips.

Don’t sing for a tenner... or in Vienna, I’m a fan who won’t cling

but I do own a sizeable ‘ding a ling’.

Cally-Ally, I’m not a match for Downey Junior

but energetic ‘green fingers’... will grow you a perfect petunia.

ANALYSIS

Literary criticism, poetic evaluation especially, has become increasingly negative. Forums designed for support in one's poetic ascent have turned into to an exhibition of ego-oriented digression, where one poet debases another and claims superiority. Commentary on poetry has developed into a competition, instead of a learning process. There are many methods of constructive annotation that are more successful than negative critique. One technique among these is the affirmative analysis approach, where the adviser emphasizes only the well written portions of the poem, and explains why he or she enjoyed it by using technical criteria. By implementing this method, the author grows confident and wary of what people know as excellent writing.

As I mentioned, the first activity I give my students serves to complement their reading: literature distinguishes itself from other kinds of writing because it trafficks heavily in image-laden words—words that renew our awareness of reality, of the world. Thus, unlike abstract argumentation or bare exposition, literature makes use of a whole lot of description. A simple way of putting it might be: where an essay will say that one is sad, a poem will show the sadness—by evoking it in the figures that may be found in the landscape where the persona happens to be, for instance.

This first activity doesn't have to be exhausted all at once: in certain instances, it might be wise to spread out a number of cumula­tive "description exercises" all throughout the semester. Since my students are lucky enough to be studying in a school whose campus is the last green place in the mega-city nightmare of  Metropolitan Manila, there isn't a paucity of beautiful things they can describe. Weather permitting, I sometimes hold  sessions outside the classroom and under the generous shade of UP's wizened trees, where I instruct my students to describe any particular scene or image that appeals to them then and there.

Or sometimes, I decide to make the class stay in the classroom, and bring an interesting, usually mysterious picture—a person, a flower, a landscape,  whatever—instead. At other times, I ask the students to each bring a picture or an object to class, and I raffle these off back to them: whatever a student gets she is asked to describe it in writing before the end of the meeting. Depending on what I wish to accomplish, I may or may not ask them to have a "direction"—which is to say, to be "meaningful"—in their descriptions. Thus, I cannot really say I require that their descrip­tive passages have a point right away. The more important point of this activ­ity is to help them bridge the gap between words and things, between language and the world it both serves and brings into being.

As a supplement to this, I ask my students to keep a journal which I collect at the end of every week and try to read and scribble feedback in over the weekend. Problems relating to grammar invariably present themselves on these occasions, and if the errors prove system­ic¾which is to say, enough students share them—I sometimes decide to devote a few minutes in the subsequent meetings to a quick review of these problem areas. (Offhand, they never fail to include varying combinations of the following grammatical topics: Subject-Verb Agree­ment, Tense, Pronouns, Prepositions and Idioms). My idea is that by asking students to write more or less constantly and with a generous amount of friendly supervision, these problems will resolve themselves somewhat. After all, the acquisition of language is necessarily a solitary thing—and as in any other skill, there is no substitute for hard and painstaking work, for practice.