English E-learning lesson 2

I chose Mark Strand as my favourite poet is because he can communicate his feelings through poems exceptionally well. You can feel what he is feeling through his poems. Something like sleeping could mean a lot to him. An example is "Sleeping with One Eye Open". He expresses his feelings through the fear of war breaking out again. Many other poets all speak about things that do not mean much and are "bland".Now i will talk about his biography.
Mark Strand was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. His early years were spent in North America, while much of his teenage years were spent in South and Central America. In 1957, he earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. Strand then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a Fulbright Scholarship, Strand studied nineteenth-century Italian poetry in Italy during 1960-1961. He attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop the following year and earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer.[citation needed] Strand has since taught at many universities and published eleven books of poetry, in addition to translations from the poetry of Rafael Alberti and Carlos Drummond de Andrade, among others. In 1997, he left Johns Hopkins University to accept the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professorship of Social Thought at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Since 2006, Mark Strand teaches literature and creative writing at Columbia University, NYC.
In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during the 1990-1991 term. Strand has received numerous awards including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1999 for Blizzard of One.
[edit] Awards
• Fulbright Fellowship (1960-1961)
• Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets (1979)
• MacArthur Fellowship (1987)
• Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1990-1991)
• Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry (1992)
• Bollingen Prize (1993)
• Pulitzer Prize (1999)
• Wallace Stevens Award (2004)
• Here are the 3 poems made by him:
• Blizzard of One
• It could be said, even here, that what remains of the self
Unwinds into a vanishing light, and thins like dust, and heads
To a place where knowing and nothing pass into each other, and through;
That it moves, unwinding still, beyond the vault of brightness ended,
And continues to a place which may never be found, where the unsayable,
Finally, once more is uttered, but lightly, quickly, like random rain
That passes in sleep, that one imagines passes in sleep.
What remains of the self unwinds and unwinds, for none
Of the boundaries holds – neither the shapeless one between us,
Nor the one that falls between your body and your voice. Joseph,
Dear Joseph, those sudden reminders of your having been – the places
And times whose greatest life was the one you gave them – now appear
Like ghosts in your wake. What remains of the self unwinds
Beyond us, for whom time is only a measure of meanwhile
And the future no more than et cetera et cetera ... but fast and forever.
Black Sea
•
One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,
the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming
like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long
whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,
the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,
and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.
The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood
on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea
break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear ...
Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all
that the world offers would you come only because I was here?
• Extracted from: http://waywiser-press.com/strand.html
• Biography from :www.wikipedia.org/Mark_Strand/
• Chenyang

English Home-Learning( Lesson 1)

Hello everyone, this is the poem I have chosen :

"

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

if little by little you stop loving me

Well, now,
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine

"

The author has used figurative language in the following ways:

Personification--

"wrinkled body of the log",

"my love feeds on your love"

"if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me",

"my roots will set off
to seek another land."

The author chose to use personification

as it makes two seemingly impossible

objects/actions/etc. seem possible.

I like this poem , mainly because the use of

the language is different from some other

poems that I have read.It makes the meaning

of the poem seem obvious to those who do not

really understand poems( which includes me).

Some other poems just state very deep sentences

which makes it difficult to understand. Another

reason is that it does not include violence, or any

other inappropriate content in it, and has a very

"mellow" atmosphere. It expresses its meaning

in a very smooth way. Anyone would understand

the meaning of this poem. It does not give off any

hint of racism, sexism, or any other inappropriate

moral values.This is my reasons for liking the poem.

Credits

"If You Forget Me" by Pablo Neruda

Extracted from http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/pablo_neruda/poems/15705

By Chenyang