PRERNA GUPTA'S POEMS

The lines below are what Prerna dug out as she felt she identified it as "poetic" in nature. This was followed by the poem she wrote herself as her assignment.

THE POETIC STUFF

Want to get back to old times

Want to talk

Just talk

Careless whispers floating high

Independent of the guilt of dependence.

Is there existence without dependence?

Any kind of dependence

But what is dependence…?

What are you scared of?

Independence from the guilt of dependence?

Is man self sufficient?

Who epitomizes loneliness as success?

Is it you or is it them?

Can’t escape the pinching pain

With the unbearable strain

Lurking fear of him going away

Who conditions this in you?

Is it you or is it them?

Share of your struggle you will have to bear

Or the caterpillar will die inside, my dear.

I can feel the silence and the movement of these ripples in me. It is amazing how the water can be fluid and still at the same time the stillness soothes me. It gives me the strength to be, to see, to take in, to breathe..

Can you feel the power? Can you feel the cold, the silence.

COMMON Language?

Is there one common language..?

How do you talk then..?

How do you make the other understand?

How do you communicate, then?

The words are the same

But the meanings just change

It doesn’t mean the same

There’s a mis-match in the common game

But ‘mis-fit’ is the one who fails.

THE POEM ITSELF

A search

An unquenched thirst

An encounter, soon to be there

A meeting that was arranged

And we met again

Bewitched by his words

I was already slipping away

In a mad rush things changed

A stranger became an insider

I worshipped him all the way

I was a dreamer who dared to dream

He instead fed on my dreams

My fear was what led me to him

A paradox from the beginning

A parasite at the end.

(ENDS)

A search

An unquenched thirst

An encounter, soon to be there

A meeting that was arranged

And we met again

Bewitched by his words

I was already slipping away

In a mad rush things changed

A stranger became an insider

I worshipped him all the way

I was a dreamer who dared to dream

He instead fed on my dreams

My fear was what led me to him

A paradox from the beginning

A parasite at the end.

WHAT WE DID ON JULY 28

1. We concentrated on reading handouts from A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN by Betty Smith that led to active thinking and discussions on why one writes and what one should write about.

2. We then engaged with the fact that two terms - poetic and poetry (poem/s) - need to be distinguished. As an example, the lyrics of the Genesis song "The Cinema Show" from the album "Selling England by the Pound" was examined and compared to the section it was inspired by - a part of the "Fire Sermon" by T.S. Eliot from "The Wasteland." The students could easily grasp that while the latter was effective as music, it was only poetic whereas Eliot's lines were poetry.

3. The concept of inspiration/influence was also looked at.

4. The students understood that the development of art, design and poetry follows a purist-classicist-romanticist- modernist-post-modernist curve. The linkages between art, design and poetry were as they watched Genesis perform The Slippermen (from "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway"), as proof of their abilty to be ahead of their time in connecting costuming, theatricality, performative art, classical music, literature (poetry/lyrics), rock music, rock opera etc. to be very much a part of the avant garde.

5.Then we dealt with the terms lyric and lyrical by examining the love song, the rock lyric, the bardic or troubadourish /folk singer-ish quality of Bob Dylan's songs in the film "Don't Look Back" by D. Pennebaker.

6. The students found the terms poetic, lyrical, poem and lyric inter-changeable many a time and this was confusing for them. However, the lyrics of "Ramona" by Dylan touched a chord in all of them as they listened to the song and read the words. It was set forth as an example of poem, poetic, lyric and lyrical in the old, original Grecian sense of the word. As in : song/s in simple but often beautiful words set to music/a tune with melody/harmony and played/written for an instrument.

7. We screend a Norwegian award winning short film called "Anolit", watched with the intention of spotting the lyrical moments and the poetic moments in it. The students more or less correctly pointed the expected moments out.

8. The students had then to make one liners as definitions of the poetic and the lyrical and found it slightly tough.

9. Reading exercises given to them included reading the handouts which had in it a poem by Berryman left untouched in the course of the day's teaching and reading Marianne Faithfull's " As Tears Go By" , Bob Dylan's "It's all right Ma, I'm only bleeding." They are expected to read love songs, poems and lyrics by writers like Leonard Cohen.

10. Writing assignment: 12-16 lines of poetry with rhyme. Also, each student is to bring into the next class an old piece of writing they consider a poem, lyric, lyrical or poetic.