Stanza-Phobia

By Robert Eidelberg

STANZA-PHOBIA:

A Self-Improvement Approach
to Bridging Any Disconnect
Between You and Poetry
by Understanding Just One Poem
(Yes, One!)
and Winding Up Not Only Learning
the Process Involved but Coming to Love
at Least a Few More Poems
(and Maybe Poetry Itself)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781503517530

Robert Eidelberg

A former journalist, Robert Eidelberg served thirty-two years as a secondary school teacher of English in the New York City public school system, nineteen and a half of those years as the chair of the English Department of William Cullen Bryant High School, a neighborhood high school in the borough of Queens, New York. For several years after that he was an editorial and educational consultant at Amsco, a foundational school publications company; a community college and private college writing skills instructor; and a field supervisor and mentor in English education for the national Teaching Fellows program on the campus of Brooklyn College of The City university of New York. For the past twenty years, Mr. Eidelberg has been a college adjunct both in the School of Education at Hunter College of the City University of New York and in the English Department of Hunter College, where he teaches literature study and creative writing courses on “The Teacher and Student in Literature” and “the Literature of Waiting,” both of which he expressly created for Hunter College students. Robert Eidelberg is the author of nine educational “self-improvement” books, all of which feature “a built-in teacher” and two of which he collaborated on with his students in the special topics courses he teachers at Hunter College on “The Teacher and Student in Literature” and “The Literature of Waiting.” He lives in Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, with his life partner of 47 years and their Whippet, Chandler (named, as was his predecessor, Marlowe, in honor of noir mystery writer Raymond Chandler).

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Copyright © 2014 by Robert Eidelberg.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2014920487

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5035-1754-7

                eBook         978-1-5035-1753-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Contact the author at [e-mail]

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 11/20/2014

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 Roses Are Red, Violets Are Whatever

2 A Seemingly Simple Poem But With All The Complexities That Make Poetry Poetry

3 No, Those Aren’t Sentences And Paragraphs

4 But What’s The Poem About?

5 Rhyming: I’m A Poet. Do I Know It?

6 There’s Both Rhyme And Reason To It

7 Poetic Imagery: Imagine That! Or Better Yet, Imagine This

8 The Speaker Of A Poem: The Who?, The What?

9 Rhythm In Poetry: Accent On Syl-La-Bles

10 Getting Into Character In Poetry

11 Fascinating Rhythm: You Got Me!

12 When Only A Verb Will Do

13 Rhythm: Duh As In Dental

14 Meter: A Stressful Situation?

15 The Meter Is Running

16 Okay, So Show Me A Dog That Does What?

17 Imagery And Metaphor: Our Poem’s Complete But We’re Far From Done

18 It’s Metrical Poetry, So The Meter Keeps Running

19 The Bard Of Stratford-Upon-Avon Hears The Rhythmic Bark Of Our Poem

20 So Is Our Poem Nothing More Than Some Dumb Poem About A Dog?

A Glossary Of Poetic Terms Used In Stanza-Phobia

About The Author

In

memory of my younger brother,

Dr. Alan Jay Eidelberg,

passionate and compassionate veterinarian

for 30 years

to Baltimore’s under-served animals

and their companion humans

1

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Whatever

When I was a much younger man…. But this isn’t a book about my early and longstanding disconnect with poetry. Rather, it’s a sort of strange book about yours.

Want to read a pome? Yes, you. How about a po-em–a piece of verse? No? (’Cause what could be worse than a line or two of verse?)

In this book, STANZA-PHOBIA (the title is my way of characterizing a fear of the paragraphs that make up a poem), you will read a poem. Just one. As well as a bit of, I’m hoping, instructive prose from me that will surround that poem.

The self-improvement idea behind STANZA-PHOBIA is that after you have an interactive experience with that single and very solitary poem (and it’s a particularly short one), you will come to know what is truly important to learn in order to connect with a second and a third and a fourth poem (of your choice) and, potentially, with all of poetry on a much deeper level of awareness and appreciation.

If you are up to that self-improvement approach and its interactive method, there’s no reason not to start right now.

THE METHOD TO THIS MADNESS

Except that there’s no printed poem for you to even look at anywhere on this page. But didn’t the lengthy and, I hope, informative subtitle of this book lead you to think that you would be given a poem (yes, one!) to interact with in the pursuit of a better understanding and appreciation of poetry in general? And isn’t it logical to assume that you would get to see that entire poem in the opening pages of Chapter 1?

So much for a reader’s reasonable expectations.

So much for your logical assumptions.

No way will you be given the whole poem as the starting point for an analysis of what the poem is all about. As a matter of fact, you will not get to see all the words and hear all the sounds of our poem until almost the very last pages of this fairly short book. (Don’t you dare peek!)

There is a method to this madness. The approach I will be taking is, if anything, the opposite of analysis (which starts with the whole thing and then, in order to figure it out, takes it apart). Instead, we will begin with an almost blank page. It will be as if we were approaching the wall on which the English nursery rhyme character Humpty Dumpty is known to sit. Our goal is to make his acquaintance, to get to know him as best we can, to make sense of him as a person, maybe even to truly figure out what makes him tick.

But he’s nowhere to be found.

Well, that’s not quite true. If we look closely on the ground beneath Humpty Dumpty’s wall, there he is, scattered near and far in a lot of different pieces of various sizes and shapes. He’s fallen off his wall. (Some say he was pushed!)

In order to make some sort of sense of Humpty Dumpty, we’ll need to gather all the pieces that make him up and glue them back in place (a synthesis). Our mad approach is a putting together, a re-construction so that when we are finished building our poem, we will have a better idea not only of the what, and the why, and the how of our poem but also the what, and the why, and the how of poetry.

THE METHOD (your immediate thoughts and feelings, please, before you read The Muse that follows)

First impressions matter–so what are your first impressions of this book’s method? Does its method strike you as mad? Does it at least sound like fun?

THE MUSE (The Muse Usually Follows The Method–and This Is the First of Many Muses)

Are you with it? And are you with us?

The poem we will experience in the making was crafted not all that long ago. You have signed on to be, along with me, a re-builder. You’ll be supplied with all the tools that you’ll need, but there is no original blueprint to follow (it is lost to the ages–or at least until page 75 of this book). Together we will make it up as we go along. Ready to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? Where to start?

THE METHOD

How about with the title of our short poem, since I know you must be wondering what its title