- •Unit one
- •I will teach you in my verse
- •I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
- •Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
- •Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
- •Is a paling stout and spiky?
- •It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
- •Islington and Isle of Wight,
- •I like them all!
- •Unit two
- •I'm Joe Linn, I come from San Francisco. I'm leaving for Peking.
- •I'm going to learn Chinese. I know some words already
- •I hope you like Peking.
- •Unit three
- •It’s cuz we're concentrating
- •Is reality’s accordion. Unexpectedly
- •I thought this was
- •I took drama
- •Into my own hands and alongside
- •I told you not to do it and you did it again!
- •Unit four
- •Violently engaged. But it was the artists
- •I looked left toward the little bridge,
- •Incredibly enough, being led
- •In servizio sulla Linea Mediterraneo - Nord America sailing 1968
- •Unit five
- •It was “about breeding.”. Breeding yes, I flashed the thought of all the deaths
- •In the birdcage
- •In the face of “what counts
- •It’s pennies”. In o-eight
- •Unit six
- •In the feminist fable
- •Into activist or choose to manifest
- •In smokey loops
- •Unit seven
- •Is That Why They Call Them Flower Children?
- •In a high school senior play, shouting
- •In broken English and rapid Greek about tanks
- •Into citizens, just now, in the streets of Prague.
- •I was running
- •In the gutters
- •I still see blue sky and sea under sun and wind
- •Is a little dock, still a black rock beach, footprints
- •Unit eight
- •In search of Athena and Apollo’s
- •In different, steaming jungles in Vietnam.
- •Unit nine
- •Voice spilling. He will not
- •Voices soften thick air and as they sing every
- •If you run after two hares you will catch neither.
- •Unit ten
- •In rural Turkey?
- •I feel sure that was the afternoon
- •Unit eleven
- •In Athens the Greek music
- •I squint myself into your eight and ten year old eyes to conger
- •Into a monster. Other answers are better buried.
- •Sideducking Your Question
- •Family Game
- •Irresistible
- •Is a room whose boundaries invite me to compose
- •Is a room
- •Answering Machine
- •Into the room where only
- •The Business of a Clean Sweep
- •The Night House
- •Into half truths. Simply an issue of light.
- •In her house in the middle
- •University Weather
- •Clinic Wait
- •Is in an exam.
- •The Baroness of Ballard
- •In hers. He says
- •Is dying but she is hanging-on.
- •Salzbergwerk Berchtesgaden in Germany
- •I forget where we were headed but it rained.
- •It was dark, a musty smell and the guide’s voice
- •Passages in the Bad-Hotel Zum Hirsh
- •Milltown Maltbay, Cookery School
- •Fourth Day at the Literary Seminar
- •In pink overstuffed
- •You Hated to Practice
- •Our Teacher Says Music is Her Mission
- •In a room that is the color of ice. First Rehearsal of the Opera, "Andrea Chénier"
- •Emanuel Ax, Hunger & Taste
- •Barometric Pressure
- •Its little ledges of blue slow motion
- •Inflaming the cheek after the slap.
- •The Question of the Color of the Walls
- •In splats of blistering gold & refresh ourselves in grapefruit.
- •Eau de California
- •The Perfumer
- •Afterimage of the Bird of Passage
- •The Most Important Thing to Save When the House is Burning Down
- •I needed that.
Unit eleven
Exercise 1. Read, translate and transcribe the following poem by American poet Carol Levin from the collection “Place one foot here”. Write down all unknown words into your dictionary. Use them in sentences of your own:
Philosophical Slapstick Comedy
Greek character is kind of cloddish, kind of left over
Turkey. Opposite
from the Italians or Yugoslavs we met dislocating
the air with their elbows & opinions.
Yesterday on the top deck of the boat back from Aguara
the atmosphere was peacock blue,
the sea, very serene, all very Greek. On one side of the deck
a shy man played
full blast a radio, playing a kind of flute music
almost oriental, on the other side
of the deck an English boy & a Greek boy played two
guitars singing Bob Dylan
at the top of their lungs in perfect English. A mess
of noise that didn’t
really blend at all. That’s Athens. Where I counted on
meeting great thinkers. Pericles, Socrates, Plato & Aristotle. Always
In Athens the Greek music
comes into my window from the street, like it is now, drowning
any inclination to hear my self think.
Exercise 2. Speak about great thinkers of Greece and Rome. Repeat their names for clarity of articulation. Consult the dictionary. Work for precision with a minimum of tension. After you have accurately mastered the phrases for clarity, work for speed in repetition.
Exercise 3. Read and transcribe the following poem by Carol Levin. Translate it. Repeat new words over and over. Accuracy first, the speed! Make a recording of the way you sound as you begin your studies, and then make a comparison, recording every six to twelve months:
Dibs On Summer ‘68
But then
An age sage gets to the newsstands
before me. His book Boom makes a splash
in television and lecture venues.
Heretofore
I’ve trumpeted my personal sixties unseasoned
polyphonic trope, stimulated now I accelerate
the midwifeing.
Boom
recounts struggles of Thomas Gilmore,
Stokley Carmichael and Dr. King,
courageous freedom fighters
for blacks facing
raciest red necks. I tender a tale, believe it
or not,
of Christina, my lovers fiancee,
lured to a bogus convent on a remote
isle in the Aegean, dressed in black
held captive behind fifteen foot walls
painted pink. I think she’s still there.
All before
many people alive today
were even born. Old news
akin to spume on ocean waves crashes
and drains
as the next breaker flaunts
its pizzaz.
Boom.
Unseasoned my
unfinished narrative is my estuary typed
in black on a remote manuscript, A David
facing Goliath struggling to be freed.
(Boom, Tom Brokaw. Random House 2007
Exercise 4. Discuss the poem with your group-mate. Remember that you are not in competition with anyone, and that you will progress at your own rate.
Exercise 5. Decode a modern song you have never heard before, translate and transcribe every line. Write down the unknown words into your dictionary. Use them in sentences of your own.
Exercise 6. Tell about the song decoded. Discuss the transcription. Try to persuade the audience that the text transcribing deserves their attention. Speak with distinctness. Use the Intonation patterns in accordance with the emotions conveyed by the author.
Exercise 7. Write down the questions of the listeners. Answer them. Work for precision with a minimum of tension. After you have accurately mastered the phrases for clarity, work for speed in repetition.
Exercise 8. Imagine you are aboard the ship. Consult the dictionary and find the terms which name the parts of the ship. Repeat them for clarity of articulation.
Exercise 9. You have received a letter from an unknown person. Express your feelings. Use the Intonation patterns in accordance with your emotions (doubt, reproach, uncertainty, hurt feelings etc).
Exercise 10. Describe the ideal teacher of phonetics. Speak on the appearance, skills, manners etc. Prove your position. Use some proverbs, sayings, idioms, and tongue-twisters. Mind your pronunciation.
Exercise 11. Read, translate and transcribe the following poem by American poet Carol Levin from the collection “Place one foot here”. Write down all unknown words into your dictionary. Use them in sentences of your own:
The Imagination Is A Threat
“Every secret has its little casket”
Gaston Bachelard
Dear ones, the pads of my fingers dust
your girlish curlicues in cursive on fading
picture-post-cards Grandma saved. Writing side
of the glossy Chistofro Columbo slicing blue waves:
“now in the Mediteranian
have gone on tours of Portagal, Spain, Naples & Pompei”
and your boyish, although teensy printing on a photo of Athens.
“I am looking at the Acroplis and on the end of it it looks
like a face has nose and eyes and a mouth”.