The students listened to and read the words of "In my craft or sullen art" by Dylan Thomas - his rendition of the same - and then watched Federico Fellini's Satyricon which is a free adaptation of Petronius's original Latin classic.
The afternoon started with a discussion on the film and then it made sense to the students as to how it was connected with poetry. The film is a poem. The students saw that it had an epic feel, was tragicomic, poetic, lyrical and in depicting three kinds of poets showed three lives and their end results in terms of poetry. The themes of the film were discussed. Impotence as a symbol for writer's block - compromise and its lack, the connection between sexuality, war, violence and art, writing and literature etc...
Deviance, gods, politics, society, decadence, experience, suffering, love, hate, life, death, anger, patriotism ,vengeance, lust, sex etc.,
were shown as some of the themes dealt with.
After this keeping Satyricon in mind and the poems written by the students themselves this time around they were taken through my handout on poetry so that the entire gamut of what great poetry consists of - a combination of form, content, structure, genre and style -with each of these five divided up into its further components - was explicated upon.
The section on deeper sources of poetic power was only listed out but will be dealt with in the coming classes along with learning objectives and goals.
The final project is becoming clearer - Roshan, Samia, Shyamli, Aditi, Vaibhav, Pratap, Roanna will make poetry books that are e-texts, handwritten or printed. The books must include images and text and - if possible, sounds/music/voices.
Prerna , Ashwin, Aashim will compile their poems and also do an audio-visual presentation along with Pratap and Roanna. the av presentation is a must for the first three because they haven't written too enough poems as of now, in the middle of the course.
Aashim will work on his fourth poem.
Pratap on his second poem.
Roanna on Kaleidoscope.
Ashwin on his first poem.
Prerna on Rabbit.
The others are also free to work on audio-visual stuff for at least one of their poems, if they want to.
You all need to read each other's poems and leave constructive comments and criticism on them , in the blog - this is a prerequisite for the course - apart from Pratap, I haven't seen anyone else really do it.
It's also a must to read all the poems put on the blog like Drunken Boat by Rimbaud etc.
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