Minutes of Last Meeting
Guidelines and Contests
The Connecticut Poetry Society sponsors these poetry contests:
WALLACE W. WINCHELL POETRY CONTEST
Open to all poets. NEW GUIDELINES AND PRIZE AMOUNTS
Submit poems: Oct. 1-Dec. 31 (postmark)
Prizes of $400, $200, and $100.
Send up to 3 unpublished poems, any form, 80 line limit each. Include two copies of each poem: one with complete contact info and one with NO contact info. Both copies should be marked Wallace Winchell. Include SASE for results only (no poems will be returned). Winning poems must be submitted by disc or electronically following notification. Send fee of $15 for up to three poems; make check out to Connecticut Poetry Society. Prize winning poems will be published in Connecticut River Review.
Send submissions to Wallace W. Winchell Poetry Contest, CPS, PO Box 270554, West Hartford, CT 06127.
Middleton rewrote some of Shakespeare's greatest plays: Study
London, November 10 (ANI): Hundreds of lines in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure for Measure were written by English Jacobean playwright and poet Thomas Middleton, according to a new computer-assisted research.
For long, it has been suggested that both plays have passages uncharacteristic of Shakespeare, and that Middleton had edited them after The Bard's death.
Now, the new research shows that Middleton made about 10 per cent contribution in each of Shakespeare's plays.
The evidence has been found both on stylistic grounds, and in references to historical events that took place after Shakespeare wrote the plays.
Middleton's contribution seems to be so extensive that Oxford University Press (OUP) has included both Macbeth and Measure for Measure in a new two-volume complete works of Middleton (1580-1627).
Gary Taylor, Middleton's joint general editor at OUP, said that the two Shakespeare plays would not have been included without compelling evidence.
"What's new is that we have greater confidence that it was Middleton. We can precisely identify which bits are Middleton," Times Online quoted him as saying.
The Oxford Middleton provides evidence that in Macbeth, elements like perjury, remarriage, a mother whose husband is legally but not actually dead, and a husband/father/Scot suspected of treason are linked to the scandalous political trials associated with the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1616.
The passage also echoes the circumstances of Middleton's childhood, as his father died when he was just five, and his mother remarried less than ten months later. His stepfather left him and his mother to go abroad, and was assumed to have died.
Professor Taylor said that Middleton had been overshadowed by Shakespeare perhaps because the latter's plays were published in 1623, just seven years after his death.
"Middleton's plays weren't similarly collected . . . While Shakespeare's company owned the legal right to have his plays printed, Middleton owned his own, and no one published one volume of his plays," he said.
"That meant that, with the closing of the theatres in the Civil War, when they started up again following the Restoration, people only knew of three playwrights - Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher," he added.
It was not until the 19th century that interest in Middleton was revived. By then, Professor Taylor said, "Shakespeare had more than a 200-year headstart".
The researchers checked every word and phrase against databases of early modern English literature.
They suggest that Middleton is responsible for these lines in Macbeth: "Everyone that does so is a traitor and must be hanged" "And must they all be hanged that swear and lie"
According to them, Middleton's own plays include lines such as: "Have 'em all hanged up" "swear and lie". (ANI)
Assignment
Write a villanelle. What is a villanelle?
villanelle, a poem composed of an uneven number (usually five) of tercets rhyming aba, with a final quatrain rhyming abaa. In this French fixed form, the first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately as the third lines of the succeeding tercets, and together as the final couplet of the quatrain. Representing these repeated lines in capitals, with the second of them given in italic, the rhyme scheme may be displayed thus: AbA abA abA abA abA abAA. The form was established in France in the 16th century, and used chiefly for pastoral songs. In English, it was used for light vers de société by some minor poets of the late 19th century; but it has been adopted for more serious use by W. H. Auden, William Empson, and Derek Mahon. The best‐known villanelle in English, however, is Dylan Thomas's ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ (1952).
Form
The villanelle has no established meter, although most nineteenth-century villanelles had eight or six syllables per line and most twentieth-century villanelles had ten syllables per line. The essence of the fixed modern form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition.The villanelle is a poem of 19 lines, five triplets and a quatrain, using only two rhymes throughout the whole form. The entire first line is repeated as lines 6, 12 and 18 and the third line is repeated as lines 9, 15 and 19 -- so that the lines which frame the first triplet weave through the poem like refrains in a traditional song, and form the end of the concluding stanza. With these repeating lines represented as A1 and A2 (because they rhyme), the entire rhyme scheme is A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2.
It looks like this:
a1
b
a2
a
b
a1 (repeat entire line)
a
b
a2 (repeat entire line)
a
b
a1 (repeat entire line)
a
b
a2 (repeat entire line)
a
b
a1 (repeat entire line)
a2 (repeat entire line)
There are only two rhymes.
Prospects
Anthony Hecht
We have set out from here for the sublime
Pastures of summer shade and mountain stream;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.
Is all the green of that enameled prime
A snapshot recollection or a dream?
We have set out from here for the sublime
Without provisions, without one thin dime,
And yet, for all our clumsiness, I deem
It certain that we shall arrive on time.
No guidebook tells you if you'll have to climb
Or swim. However foolish we may seem,
We have set out from here for the sublime
And must get past the scene of an old crime
Before we falter and run out of steam,
Riddled by doubt that we'll arrive on time.
Yet even in winter a pale paradigm
Of birdsong utters its obsessive theme.
We have set out from here for the sublime;
I have no doubt we shall arrive on time.
| Do not go gentle into that good night | |
| by Dylan Thomas | |
| |  |
Do not go gentle into that good night, Mad Girl's Love Songby Sylvia Plath"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; | |
From The Poems of Dylan Thomas, published by New Directions. Copyright © 1952, 1953 Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1962, 1966, 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971 New Directions Publishing Corp. Used with permission. |
Education
See Villanelle above
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