John Cage

JOHN CAGE & COMPOSITION

devotion
imitation
circumstance

John Cage & Composition:
method

Examine the following poem. Write a paragraph in which you explain the procedure you think the poet has used in order to complete the piece. Such a paragraph may form a very useful opening paragraph for an essay of critical appreciation. Moreover, such a paragraph will be a useful starting point for the ‘Imaginative Response’ commentary as well as being a useful start for your own piece of writing. After all, in that paper, you will have to copy the method of the writer whose piece is under scrutiny.

Sonnet
by William Shakespeare

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads upon the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

John Cage & Composition:
method

Anthem for Doomed Youth
by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
- Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, -
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

John Cage & Composition:
structure

Read and examine the following poem. Write a paragraph (or more) in which you explain the procedure you think the poet has used in order to complete the piece. Move on to an analysis of the poem’s structure. Ask yourself: What holds the poem together? (But what tensions try to pull it apart?) What contrasts work to give strength to the piece? How does it start? How does it close? Is there a climax or a ‘slow drawing down of blinds’, for example?

To Autumn
by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more.
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lipped by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue:
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river swallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies ;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Cage & Composition:
intention

Examine the following poem. Consider what you think may have been the poet’s intention. (Don’t think of ringing the poet up; poets are either dead or are very unreliable witnesses.) What does it succeed in doing? Write a paragraph (or more) in which you explain what you think the poet intended. Give the poet the benefit of the doubt: assume that what the poem succeeds in doing, the poet intended!

Words for Some Ashby Thom Gunn

Poor parched man, we had to squeeze
Dental sponge against your teeth,
So that moisture by degrees
Dribbled to the mouth beneath.

Christmas Day your pupils crossed,
Staring at your nose’s tip,
Seeking there the air you lost
Yet still gaped for, dry of lip.

Now you are a bag of ash
Scattered on a coastal ridge,
Where you watched the distant crash,
Ocean on a broken edge.

Death has wiped away each sense;
Fire took muscle, bone, and brains;
Next may rain leach discontents
From your dust, wash what remains

Deeper into damper ground
Till the granules work their way
Down to unseen streams, and bound
Briskly in the water’s play;

May you lastly reach the shore,
Joining tide without intent,
Only worried any more
By the currents’ argument.

John Cage & Composition:
discipline

Examine the following poem. First, write a series of paragraphs in which you analyse the poet’s method, the poem’s structure and the poet’s (perceived) intention. (Use quotations appropriately, with introductions and comments.)

Now move on to exploring the discipline the poet has exhibited in completing the poem. How has he used form in an interesting way? Consider rhyme, rhythm, assonance, and so on.

XXV
by Derek Walcott
from ‘Midsummer’,
a series of poems written during a season spent in Trinidad.

The sun has fired my face to terra-cotta.
It carries the heat from his kiln all through the house.
But I cherish its wrinkles as much as those on blue water.
Gnats drill little holes around a saw-toothed cactus,
a furnace has curled the knives of the oleander,
and a branch of the logwood blurs with wild characters.
A stone house waits on the steps. Its white porch blazes.
I tell you a promise brought to me by the surf:
You shall see transparent Helen pass like a candle
flame in sunlight, weightless as woodsmoke that hazes
the sand with no shadow. My palms have been sliced by the twine
of the craft I have pulled at for more that forty years.
My Ionia is the smell of burnt grass, the scorched handle
of a cistern in August squeaking to rusty islands;
the lines I love have all their knots left in.
Through the stunned afternoon, when it’s too hot to think
and the muse of this inland ocean still waits for a name,
and from the salt, dark room, the tight horizon line
catches nothing, I wait. Chairs sweat. Paper crumples on the floor.
A lizard gasps on the wall. The sea glares like zinc.
Then, in the door light: not Nike loosening a sandal,
but a girl slapping sand from her foot, one hand on the frame.

John Cage & Composition:
notation

Examine the following poems. Consider what you would have to say about the method, structure & intention of each. What do you find to admire in their discipline?

Now try to examine how the notation of each poems (its punctuation, its layout, its shape and so on) contributes to its meaning. Think of the poem as a piece of music: like music it does not exist until it is performed. Think of the notation as a set of clues telling us how the poem should be read. What clues are there in its notation about how it should be performed?

Answer one of the questions at the foot of the poems.

Sonnet
by E. E. Cummings

i have found what you are like
the rain,

(Who feathers frightened fields
with the superior dust-of-sleep. wields

easily the pale club of the wind
and swirled justly souls of flower strike

the air in utterable coolness

deeds of green thrilling light
with thinned
newfragile yellows

lurch and press
- in the woods
which
stutter
and

sing

And the coolness of your smile is
stirringofbirds between my arms; but
i should rather than anything
have (almost when hugeness will shut
quietly) almost,
your kiss

A Major Road for Romney Marsh
by U. A. Fanthorpe

It is a kingdom, a continent.
Nowhere is like it.
(Ripe for development)

It is salt, solitude, strangeness.
It is ditches, and windcurled sky.
It is sky over sky after sky.

(It wants hard shoulders, Happy Eaters,
Heavy breathing of HGVs)

It is obstinate hermit trees.
It is small, truculent churches
Huddling under the gale force.

(It wants WCs, Kwiksaves,
Artics, Ind Ests, Jnctns)

It is the Military Canal
Minding its peaceable business,
Between the Levels and the Marsh.

(It wants investing in roads,
Sgns syng T’DEN, F’STONE, C’BURY)

It is itself, and different.

(Nt fr lng. Nt fr lng.)

Either
1. Write a commentary on one of the poems, discussing its effects and devices and showing how these contribute to its themes, and, ultimately, to its meaning.

Or
2. Read Ursula Fanthorpe’s poem carefully. Write a poem about the proposed development of over five hundred houses in the quiet and wooded Slad valley outside Stroud. and write a commentary on what you have written, noting any difficulties you encountered. What insights into the original have you gained from trying to emulate it?

John Cage & Composition:
indeterminacy

Examine the following poems. Consider what you would have to say about the method, structure & intention of each. What do you find to admire in its discipline? How does each poem’s notation help create meaning?

Do not be afraid if you feel you cannot ‘understand’ a poem. It’s true, you may have read it carelessly; it’s true that for some words you may need a dictionary and for some references you may need an encyclopaedia, but do not panic. In the exam you must read the poem carefully; and the examiners will give you the meanings of any unusual words and will also gloss any difficult references. What if you’re still lost for words? Maybe the poet is deliberately employing indeterminacy for an important effect. Analyse what it is we don’t know. Has the poet assumed we know things we don’t? How has this assumption been communicated? What evidence is there for accepting this conflict as deliberate? Read the poems carefully.

Answer one of the following questions:
1. Choose one of the poems. Write a commentary analysing the style, form and content of the poem, showing how its use of language contributes to its meaning and overall effect.

2. Read again the poem by Ben Rice. Write a similar poem of your own in which a dramatic moment is brought to life and write a commentary on what you have written.
What have you learned about Ben Rice’s style in trying to imitate it?

Last Summer
by Lavinia Greenlaw

Not the same road but the same trail of minor incident.
Nothing I see happen, but evidence:
treadmarks, carrion, smashed grass, the odd shoe.

This time I’m alone; not alone, with my daughter,
her fables, her wolf dance, her songs in cod-Arabic.
She twists and pinches a loose tooth.

The engine still has its heady cough, first diagnosed
in a timbered garage on a mini-roundabout
in a country trading on a lost name.

This thing’s running on fresh air! Did we laugh?
Do you remember the housemartins that flew semicircles
over the garage eaves, building or feeding?

Last Hooves
by Ben Rice

This is your last ride, Jerome.
At the end of the beach, under Baggy Point

We have a marksman in the rocks.
His barrel will be tracing you all the way

Along the wash. Think of yourself
At the point where two lines cross

Inside the small circle of the gun-sights,
And say a prayer as you fly, boy.

They coughed a little guilty.
They unhitched their ties.

My mare had her blinkers on.
Her lunge-line dragged on the sand.

She chewed on her snaffle.
Her hocks jutted like cliffs.

Those nostrils were pipes smouldering.
The men shouldered in with revolvers.

*

I held the saddle as a drowned child.
I heaved it by the pommel,

Brushed her down with the curry,
And rubbed my tears on her blaze.

I lifted a leg as quick as I could
Manage

And felt the rung of the stirrup
Take my soul.

It was one in the morning.
My face was a bruise

And my backside ached on the stubben.
They screamed: “After the gun, Jerome!

After the gun!” And I crossed my heart
Over like treasure.

My last ride had begun.

*

Before you die, your whole life flashes before you.
Does it hell.

Remember Jerome?
Muscle and bone. Flanks smacking in the wind.

No long summer days, but the circle of the gun-sights.
No eager first kiss, but last hooves, Jerome.

No gallery of faces, no teenage montage, but skeletal embraces
Waves on the hard, dead sand.

You know who your friends are Jerome!
This blind mare, headlong for the point,

The whip in your hand, helpless like an eel,
And the wind jabbering a commentary.

And the prayer for some pirouette, some recoil,
some rearing up, some little whinnying.

And the hope for some freak, some kelpie,
Some Pegasus, some sudden seabeast, Jerome.

To turn and gallop for the sea. Steeplechase
The waves. Dive among the white horses.

John Cage & Composition:
inter-penetration
Art is often created by the clever and subtle juxtaposition of unlikely pairs of ideas. One idea - or sequence of ideas - penetrates another set. A poem about autumn becomes a poem of loss for the love of a wife; a poem about birdsong seems also to be about some kind of despair. A good reader will be able (a) to trace the separate threads which have contributed to the final tapestry of the poem, and (b) to see how the different strands both reinforce and alter the significance of others: in other words, by recognising patterns in incongruities we can create meaning.

Examine the following poems. Get used to the procedure: consider what you would have to say about the method, structure & intention of each. What do you find to admire in their discipline? How does each poem’s notation help create meaning? What gaps - or ‘aporia’ - are there which hint at delicate levels of indeterminacy?

Answer one of the following questions:

Either Write a critical analysis of one of the poems, paying attention to content, style and meaning.
Or Write your own poem about fear in which two sets of images are interwoven. Then write a commentary in which you evaluate the success of your work. What have you learned about the techniques of John Donne and Seamus Heaney in writing your own poem.

The Apparition
by John Donne

When by thy scorn, O murderess, I am dead,
And that thou think’st thee free
From all solicitation from me,
Then shall my ghost come to thy bed,
And thee, feigned vestal, in worse arms shall see;
Then thy sick taper will begin to wink,
And he, whose thou art then, being tired before,

Will, if thou stir, or pinch to wake him, think
Thou call’st for more,
And in false sleep with from thee shrink,
And then poor aspen wretch, neglected thou
Bathed in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie
A verier ghost than I;
What I will say, I will not tell thee now,
Lest that preserve thee; and since my love is spent,
I had rather thou shouldst painfully repent,
Than by my threatenings rest still innocent.

Punishment
by Seamus Heaney

I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adulteress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain’s exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles’ webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.