- •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 five
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:
Bumbling
Before dawn and for the last time
I scampered to the foredeck
to watch our arrival and stood
confounded: where
was Venice?
I saw only a series of little islands
floating in the coolest time of day.
I grimaced ignorance
of geography as we disembarked
struggling luggage, tingling
in confusion
of water taxis and emblems
of Byzantine origins on pale
salmon colored palaces.
Poled in a gondola under
the Rialto Bridge
on the Grand Canal
to some hotel gasses of decomposing
islands of garbage floating
alongside assulted us.
Orange peels, sandwiches,
fishheads, cheezy,
sickening, rank smelling
chemically engaged
in transforming into
something else,
woke up
our olfactory senses,
explained why thirteenth
century Venice had led
the trade to fetch spices
to mask rot with fragrance.
The kids puckered
faces, pinched nostrils,
grinning, we faced each other
at the onset
of our odyssey wideyed.
Exercise 2. Make up a list of tree species according to the model in exercise 2, Unit 1.Read, translate and transcribe each word on the list. Repeat for clarity of articulation. Work for precision with a minimum of tension. After you have accurately mastered the phrases for clarity, work for speed in repetition: Use the terms in sentences of your own.
Exercise 3. Repeat the following poem by Carol Levin over and over, speak on the nouns in the text. 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:
Shrouds and Other Obstructions
I don’t understand, oh wizard of art, how you can’t
remember the mountain village
after the tedious drive. Don’t
you recall dark snuck through
trees and we were nervous about the road?
Children chased us as we joined
the evening stroll in the merciful cool
they fidgeted practicing decrypted
English vying for attention.
Centered in the old village square
was a ghostly object, only
the polished pedestal visible.
I don’t know what compelled
you suddenly to stride to it,
lift the canvas cover, read
the plaque in Greek. How can’t you
remember the uproar:
the men, fear and anger
in their eyes and the women
calling in boys and girls early?
You remember, you saw?
Then you said it was a poet carved
in white stone. I can’t recall
his name but you knew.
Explained small details
of his words, politics
of his sympathies against
the reigning coup.
You are looking at me as if
to suggest it never happened.
The stone must have been long since
liberated by reversals of power
and I struggle to remember what you whispered:
was it Titos Patrikios,
or Manolis Anagnostakis?
See, I’m practicing words
draping our recalcitrant forgetfulness
in a white robe of forgiveness.
Exercise 4. Read the poem by James Joyce; transcribe and learn the new words. Use them in a dialogue with your neighbour. Remember that you are not in competition with anyone, and that you will progress at your own rate:
Flood
Goldbrown upon the sated flood
The rockvine clusters lift and sway;
Vast wings above the lambent waters brood
Of sullen day.
A waste of waters ruthlessly
Sways and uplifts its weedy mane
Where brooding day stares down upon the sea
In dull disdain.
Uplift and sway, O golden vine,
Your clustered fruits to love's full flood,
Lambent and vast and ruthless as is thine
Incertitude!
Exercise 5. Read the old Canadian song, translate and transcribe every line. Give three forms of the verbs. Use them in sentences of your own:
Sleep, baby, sleep!
Your father guards the sheep,
Your mother shakes the dreamland tree,
And from it fall sweet dreams for you,
Sleep, baby, sleep!
So, Sleep, baby, sleep!
Exercise 6. Pronounce the tongue-twister below. Repeat it over and over. Work for precision with a minimum of tension. After you have accurately mastered the phrases for clarity, work for speed in repetition:
Little lady Lily lost her lovely locket.
Lucky little Lucy found the lovely locket.
Lovely little locket lay in Lucy’s pocket.
Lazy little Lucy lost the lovely locket.
Exercise 7. Read the question below. Work for precision with a minimum of tension. After you have accurately mastered the phrases for clarity, work for speed in repetition. Make up a dialogue as if you were at the café. Add more words to describe your favourite cuisine:
Have you ever had a hot dog with mustard and mayonnaise, with ketchup and pickles, with garlic and onion, with pepper and salt?
Exercise 8. Continue the list of professions and occupations. Transcribe and translate every word. Repeat for clarity of articulation:
artist, art therapist, butcher, book-keeper, cashier, confectioner, dancer, dentist, dendrologist, dermatologist, doctor, economist, electrician, florist, phonetician, geologist, graphologist, guitar player, hairdresser, historian, linguist, make-up artist, mathematician, musician, musicologist, oboist, obstetrician, pediatrician, politician, psychologist, psychiatrist, sailor, speech therapist, stage hand, stylist, teacher, technician, translator, trend maker, violinist, ventriloquist, worker, yachtsman.
Exercise 9. You have lost your way. Ask the passer-by to help you. Begin your dialogue with the phrase “How can I get to…Use English street names and numbers. Repeat them for clarity of articulation.
Exercise 10. Read the poem. Continue the story. Describe the party you have recently visited or organized. Use more sentences in The Present Perfect Tense:
Asking About 1968 At Parties
The adrenaline clench of her fair maiden hands was Sadie’s answer,
a gesture across the kitchen counter as she crisply clicked off
King,: April 4th, dead, shot in the neck. Death: June 6th,
young Kennedy. She said she watched him on the TV
crumple in the pantry of the imposing Hotel Ambassador minutes past midnight.
She motioned, “Of course, the Chicago Democrats rampaged--”.
“Hard” Sadie said, “hard year that year ”. “How can you ask,
how can you imagine writing the deaths?”
Arranging platters of sushi, salmon spread, crackers and cheese
lighting candles, softening lamps: she continued to speak
taking a new tack all of the sudden, blurting
facts. Married a man she “didn’t love”. She said