Wellington Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Te Wāhanga Aronui

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ENG 231: Modern Poetry

Students wrote a short poem in imitation of one of the poets studied and also wrote a short fiction piece based on a studied poem.

About the course: A study of a range of modern poetry in English. The course offers an exploration of C20 and C21 poetry in English from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" onwards. There will be selections of poems from, among others, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Kae Tempest, and Wellington poet Ashleigh Young.

Course coordinator: Professor Harry Ricketts

Assessment details: Write a short poem of 20-30 lines in imitation of one of the poets in the course materials. You don't have to imitate a particular poem, but it should be clear from your poem which poet you are imitating AND write a short fiction piece based on a particular poem in the course materials  This can take any form you like but it should be clear which poem it relates to.

Student work

Ronia Ibrahim

Ticketman (Sylvia Plath imitation)

The station is a portal.

Spaceless timeless machine centre

Ripping the seams of the continuum’s bodice

I pull my coat on

in case it starts to rain

But then it comes, the train

With its ticketman who’s going about

All blue hat business

My token’s ready

I’m three-one-two-two

The carriage begins moving into spaceless goo

And when the ticket man gets to me I’m wordless

Choo choo choo

He wants to chew me up and make me feel like a failure

He wants to spit me out and make me demure

All right, I'll be his Little Miss Muffet

With barely a bowl of curds and whey

And something stupid to say

To make his milk-piercing moustache

Do a dance

and cry,

Heil polka! Heil tango!

Again.

Again.

I’ll make him trip and twirl

While the train curtains whirl.

He’ll wish he never

Laid eyes on this girl.

Omen (Inspired by Adrienne Rich’s Women)

It was cold and autumnal and I was four. We went to Owhiro Bay, my dad and I. Something about dads and daughters, things to do. We went there often, to spot the seals. Sometimes they were baking idly on Red Rocks, or strutted fatly. Sometimes, you saw them splashing on the shore line. Sometimes, you might see one lying dead in a rock pool.

That day, there were no seals. Only fog, the rocks, and ships anxiously shifting through the thickening haze.

There was someone though. I am unsure if she was real, but her image is ingrained in my mind: a small figure, toes dipping into the torrential sea. Crouched over her lap, weaving her hand back and forth desperately. Sewing. Her bent figure nearly disappearing into the rocks, as if she was concentrating on trying to fold herself into oblivion, or explode.

“Daddy,” I said, tugging his coat sleeve. “Who is that lady?” But when my father looked up, she was gone. In the distance a ship blared. The clouds had thickened into a nauseous, grey mass.

In her place was what she must have been working on, snagged against the black rock: a dress of tangled, red threads. It fluttered violently, threatening to get swept up by the breeze. As the waves crashed in, I stepped forward, holding my breath each time the water would seem to consume it. But it would draw back and the dress was still there, stuck on the wet crust, dark and heavy. Breathing. Vein like.

“Come on,” my dad said.”There’s no woman. Let’s go.”

-----

When my father says the word women he drops the w so that it sounds like he is saying omen. Perhaps the W is too much for him. Maybe the word stings his tongue and he needs to make it more palatable. Or maybe it's just his accent.

I am a woman now. I am an omen too - but this I think I have always been. When I was a baby I was what they called a colic one. I was demanding and loud, a burden stuffed with applesauce and talcum powder. Although an infant, I came pre packaged as a burden, with a label that sounded like the pleasant beginning of a cauliflower, and the poisonous end of an alcoholic.

When I grew older,I became much quieter and less demanding. Which is what a woman should be, I suppose. I learned how to say please and thank you, how to wash blood off a mattress and how to hate my nose. These things are easy to do. You don’t get much time to be mad at people when you are too busy being mad at yourself. When I think of women though, I always see her: perched against Owhiro, hair wrestling in the wind. I want to know why she was sewing. Where she disappeared. How she looked both fragile and fierce. Sometimes I mention the woman to my father, and he says, What omen?

Author's notes

Ticketman:

This poem was intended to be an imitation of Sylvia Plath's poetry. I took a particular interest in inserting elements of nursery rhyme and surrealism. One of the things I love about Plath's poetry is her use of dark emotion and lament along with jarring childish language and even sarcasm. This kind of distorted and humorous tone was something I wanted to emulate: a poem about the intense angst of a young girl in the face of masculinity and authority. I also had a lot of fun inserting bizarre and formless images like dancing moustaches and the attire of time.

Omen:

“Omen” was inspired by Adrienne Rich's poem Women, which had a distinctly wistful, dark fairytale feeling to it. This piece of prose is intended to show the point of view of a child watching the scene of the poem. I took inspiration from Rich's evocative images of the natural world, finding Wellington weather and scenery and apt setting for such an atmosphere.

I was also particularly interested in the intensely symbolic, focussing on the image of the red thread and how I would visualise that against the backdrop of dark rocks. The concept of something being a sign/symbol for something was a theme I was drawing on, perhaps a result of much of the poetry analysis happening in class. I had fun as well , thinking about the ways “womanhood” can be captured in images, and the ways it interacts with visibility/invisibility and memory. This piece was also definitely partly autobiographical, as my father does indeed pronounce women as "omen," and Owhiro Bay is a location ingrained in my emotional memory.