bung: How to Do Things with Poems (Burkhard Niederhoff)

E-mail: burkhard.niederhoff@rub.de; office hours: Tue 16:00-17:00, Thu 12:00-13:00 or by

appointment (GB 5/131); secretary: Hildegard Sicking; e-mail: hildegard.sicking@rub.de;
office hours: Tue-Fri 8:30-12:30; phone: 0234 32-28051
Brief Description: There is a notion abroad that analysing poems is an occult gift that
you are either born or more likely not born with. This course builds on the assumption
that analysing poems is a skill that can be acquired, much like swimming, playing the
piano or learning a foreign language. We will focus on different aspects such as genre,
syntax, metre and metaphor to work our way into the complex structures of form and
meaning provided by a selection of poems. We will also try our hand at the so-called
production-oriented method, e.g. the rewriting of a poem as a parody or the filling in of
blanks, which is also taught in German schools and should therefore be interesting to
prospective M.Ed. students.
Required texts: To Autumn, the poem for the next session, will be provided in
Blackboard. For the rest of the poems, a reader will be provided. Additional readings and
exercises will also be provided in Blackboard. In Blackboard, you will also find a list of
useful figures of speech and related terms that you need in the analysis of poems.
Preliminary Schedule
April 15Introduction
April 22Good Friday
RELATING STANZAS AND SENSE UNITS
April 29John Keats, To Autumn (assignment: look up words you dont know and check
the following hypothesis: in To Autumn, stanzas are sense units; in each new
stanza, there is a significant change in content)
ENCOUNTERING POETS
May 6 Poems by Desmond Graham and Gordon Meade (t.b.a.)
May 13 Reading by Desmond Graham and Gordon Meade
ASSESSING SPEAKER, ADDRESSEE AND SITUATION
May 20 Robert Browning, My Last Duchess
May 27 W.B. Yeats, When You Are Old; The Beatles, When Im Sixty-four
Tracing PATTERNS AND PARALLELS
June 3 William Blake, The Lamb and The Tyger
June 10 W. Auden, If I Could Tell You; Elizabeth Bishop, One Art; Wendy Cope, Reading
Scheme
June 17 Whitsun break
RELISHING PARODY
June 24 Ted Hughes, Apple Tragedy; Genesis, ch. 3
July 1 W. Shakespeare, Sonnet 129; W. Cope, From Struggnells Sonnets I
INTERPRETING METAPHORS
July 8 John Donne, A Valediction Forbidding Weeping
July 15 Alice Oswald, The Glass House
Rules and Requirements
To obtain credit (3CP for an bung), you have to (1) read the texts closely and do the
assigned things with them; (2) attend class on a regular basis (if you miss more than
two classes without a valid apology, you will not be able to obtain credit; apologies should
be made by snail mail or e-mail and contain a valid reason); (3) hand in the written
assignment (see below).
Written Assignment
The assignment will be halfway between an essay and a lesson plan. You choose a poem,
suggest something that one might do with this poem in analysing or teaching it, and
explain what this particular procedure reveals about the form and/or the meaning of the
poem. I will provide a selection of poems that you will choose from. Citing criticism is not
required (neither is it forbidden). A model assignment will be provided.
Length: 2000-3000 words.
Deadline: If you hand in your assignment by July 21 (printout at Frau Sickings office
or at the departmental office), I will grade it and comment on it, and you will have a

chance to revise it. The final deadline is September 6 (as a pdf document via e-mail to
hildegard.sicking@rub.de).
Penalty for late assignments: A third of a grade for each weekday that the paper is
late (a 3 that is one day late will become a 3-). If you hand in the paper late, make sure
that one of the departmental secretaries writes the date on it.
Plagiarism: If I catch you stealing somebody elses words or ideas, you will not pass
the course. There will be no rewriting options or second chances in this case. Do not
forget to attach the so-called Honesty Declaration to your paper.
Please note: I will be away from Bochum for a year (sabbatical plus exchange semester).
I will leave on August 1, 2011 and return roughly at the same time in 2012.
Selective Bibliography
Anthologies
Abrams, Meyer H., ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 2 vols. 7th ed. New
York: Norton, 2001.
Boland, Eavan and Mark Strand, eds. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of
Poetic Forms. New York: Norton, 2000.
Meller, Horst, and Rudolf Shnel, eds. British and American Classical Poems. Braunschweig: Westermann, 1966.
Abrams is a general anthology of English Literature, which includes a lot of canonical
poems. Boland/Strand and Meller/Shnel are interesting anthologies of poetry in
which poems are grouped by genre.
Reference Works
Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th edition. Boston, Mass.: Heinle&Heinle,
1999.
Wilpert, Gero von. Sachwrterbuch der Literatur. 8th ed. Stuttgart: Krner, 1989.
Preminger, Alex, and T.V.F. Brogan, eds. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and
Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993.
In Abrams, Wilpert and Preminger you can look up terms that are used in analysing and
describing poetry (e.g. sonnet, elegy, trochee, metonymy).
Plett, Heinrich F. Einfhrung in die rhetorische Textanalyse. 9th ed. Hamburg: Buske,
2001. An introduction to rhetoric; explains a large number of figures of speech.
Ousby, Ian, ed. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1993. Contains brief entries on authors and on individual books.
Ayto, John, ed. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. 17th ed. London: Cassell, 2005. A
very interesting and readable reference work that contains a bit of everything:
symbols, names, proverbs, mythological characters, etc.
Simpson, John A., and E.S.C. Weiner, eds. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford:
Clarendon P, 1989. The most comprehensive dictionary of the English language.
Especially valuable for older texts, because of its listing of historical meanings. Also
available online on the UB website.
Introductions to (Analysing) Poetry
Leech, Geoffrey. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry. London: Longman, 1969.
Bode, Christoph. Einfhrung in die Lyrikanalyse.Trier: WVT, 2001.
Furniss, Tom, and Michael Bath. Reading Poetry. London: Longman, 1996.
On Doing Things with Poems
Maley, Alan and Alan Duff. The Inward Ear: Poetry in the Language Classroom.
Cambridge: CUP, 1989.
Task: What follows is a poem; only the lines have been put in alphabetical order (except
for the first line, which is in fact What happens to a dream deferred?). Team up with the
person sitting next to you and rearrange the lines in what you think might be the original
order.
What happens to a dream deferred?
And then run?
Does it dry up
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Like a heavy load.
like a raisin in the sun?
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

Or crust and sugar over
Or does it explode?
Or fester like a sore
(Task has been adapted from Maley and Duff 41)