1. POETRY
The Joy of Words

2. Organic vs. formulaic Raw w/ or w/out rhyme Patternless? Random
Off the wall
Informal
Clean
Rhyme schemes
Follows rules
Patterns
Orderly
Not so crazy
Formal

3. Figurative Language Personification Simile Metaphor Irony Satire
Hyperbole
Understatement
Overstatement
Paradox

4. Personification
The wind whispered in his ear, “Be still Be still.”
Raindrops kissed the dry earth bringing hope to the whole town.
Motley thought, “I hope we stop here. I really have to go.” He sniffed the fire hydrant as Billy talked to Sally. Sally didn’t have Gracie with her today. Man, he loved that little white poodle.

5. The world is not a pleasant place to be
Nikki Giovanni
the world is not a pleasant place
to be without
someone to hold and be held by
a river would stop
its flow if only
a stream were there
to receive it
an ocean would never laugh
if clouds weren’t there
to kiss her tears
the world is not
a pleasant place to be without
someone

6. I wondered lonely as a cloud
William Wordsworth
I wondered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

7. Simile Her eyes glittered like moon beams flickering off the lake.
The pain ripped through him like a flame torturing his soul.
Joy filled the room as if it were tangible as if it were soft swirlings of cotton candy floating around and around.

8. Earth your dancing place
– May Swenson Beneath heaven’s vault remember always walking through halls of cloud down aisles of sunlight or through high hedges of the green rain walk in the world highheeled with swirl of cape hand at the swordhilt of your pride Keep a tall throat Remain aghast at life Enter each day as upon a stage lighted and waiting for your step Crave upward as flame
have keenness in the nostril
Give your eyes
to agony or rapture
Train your hands
as birds to be
brooding or nimble
Move your body
as the horses
sweeping on slender hooves
over crag and prairie
with fleeing manes
and aloofness of their limbs
Take earth for your own large room
and the floor of earth
carpeted with sunlight
and hung round with silver wind
for your dancing place

9. Metaphor
His hands were claws digging into my flesh. I was his prey; he was the hunter.
My fear was a heavy load of everyone else’s packages: their expectations were overwhelming me.
The book was an exciting journey into the realm of Egyptian tombs.

10. An indian summer day on the prairie
Vachel Lindsay
In the Beginning
The sun is a huntress young,
The sun is red, red joy,
The sun is an Indian girl,
Of the tribe of the Illinois.
Mid-morning
The sun is a smoldering fire,
That creeps through the high gray plain,
And leaves not a bush of cloud
To blossom with flowers of rain.
Noon
The sun is a wounded deer,
That treads pale grass in the skies,
Shaking his golden horns,
Flashing his baleful eyes.
Sunset
The sun is an eagle old;
There in the windless west,
Atop of the spirit-cliffs
He builds him a crimson nest.

11. Irony An ad for cigarettes right next to an ad for help with cancer
Saying something is beautiful when it’s actually an awful thing that has happened
Saying something is “sick” when it’s actually beautiful or neat

12. Ex-basketball player John Updike
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
An E and O. And one is squat, without
A head at all—more of a football type.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ‘46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas, Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while, As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube, But most of us remember anyway. His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench. It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though. Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette. Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball, Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates. Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.

13. Satire Jonathon Swift’s, “The Perfect Proposal” Scary Movie Spoofing
Mocking
Mimicking
Impersonating

14. smart Shel Silverstein My dad gave me one dollar bill
‘Cause I’m his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
‘Cause two is more than one!
And then I took the quarters
And traded them to Lou
For three dimes—I guess he don’t know
That three is more than two!
Just then, along came old blind Bates
And just ’cause he can’t see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,
And four is more than three!
And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs
Down at the seed-feed store,
And the fool gave me five pennies for them,
And five is more than four!
And then I went and showed my dad,
And he got red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head—
Too proud of me to speak!

15. Hyperbole
His hatred consumed to the point where it burnt holes into my soul.
His love overtook my every movement; my life was forever dedicated to his requests.
School is beyond boring; it’s like watching a tree grow a new leaf—you may never see the beginning or the end.
Lunch today was so exuberantly disgusting; I thought I was on the season premiere of Fear Factor eating eggs of some not so exotic bird.

16. Tonight I can write . . . Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, “The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the distance.”
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me to.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

17. Understatement
The break-up was like stubbing a toe (he actually put his fist through a window and needed 12 stitches)
Their love was a prick in my side (when his infatuation with her was all-consuming)
Winter in Pennsylvania can be chilly (after a week of below 25 temperatures)
The TV reception is annoying (when no channels will stay in & everything comes in with static)

18. How things work Gary Soto
Today it’s going to cost us thirty-five dollars
To live. Six for a softball. Eight for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.
We’re completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go
Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy crayons from a stationer, a bag of apples
From the farmer’s market, and what dollars
Are passed on help others buy pencils, a guitar,
Tickets to a matinee movie.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.

19. Overstatement You’ve got it all
She has the most beautiful voice you’ll ever hear
He was so mean; He was a Hitler
Their romance is as dangerous as Romeo and Juliet’s
All of the problems in this country have been caused by Democrats (or Republicans)

20. I’m nobody! Who are you? Emily Dickinson I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name— the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!

21. Paradox Will bite when cornered (ad for a tire)
Divergence or variation in the word bite
Bite would normally mean with teeth; this means with the tread of the tires
It’s a Sucker (ad for a vacuum cleaner)
Divergence or variation in the word sucker
Sucker would normally mean someone who is easily tricked; this means to actually suck in the dirt

22. The secret the line, the name of the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Denise Levertov
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
What line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

23. techniques Enjambment Onomatopoeia Alliteration Assonance Consonance
Repetition
Rhyme
Imagery

24. enjambment
The continuation of a sentence from one line of a poem into the next
A run-on line
Makes the reader’s eye follow the line
Can help with the poem’s meter & flow
Is, however, used in organic poetry, too

25. The peace of wild things
Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in this beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

26. Onomatopoeia
Sound words
Crash
Bang
Toot
Bleep
Sizzle
Swish
Pow
Whack

27. Honky tonk in cleveland, ohio
Carl Sandburg
It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
Ship riveters talk with their feet
To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
"I got the blues.
I got the blues.
I got the blues."
And as we said earlier:

28. alliteration Repetition of same sound in a poem Tongue twisters
Must have two or more words with same sound
Tongue twisters
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
Shelly picks sea shells at the sea shore
Calls attention to certain words
He who laughs last laughs first.
Time and tide wait for no man.

29. The bells By Edgar Alan Poe
I (of IV) Hear the sledges with the bells - Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

30. assonance
Repetition of VOWEL sounds in words that are close to each other
John Betjeman's 'A Subaltern's Love Song'
"westering, questioning settles the sun / On your low-leaded window”

31. A rose for janet By Charles Tomlinson I know this rose is only
an ink-and-paper rose
but see how it grows and goes
on growing
beneath your eyes:
a rose in flower
has had (almost) its vegetable hour
whilst my
rose of spaces and typography
can reappear at will
(your will)
whenever you repeat
this ceremony of the eye
from the beginning
and thus
learn how
to resurrect a rose
that’s instantaneous
perennial
and perfect now
By Charles Tomlinson

32. consonance
repetition of similar consonant sounds, especially at the ends of words
lost and past
confess and dismiss

33. Stopping by woods on a snowy evening
By Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep. 
This poem provides a good example of Assonance and Consonance. The “s” sound.

34. repetition Harrison Fuller
  Repetition can be good Repetition can be bad Repetition can make you smile Repetition can make you mad To repeat a specific word That is repetition Repetition can take a hold That is the repeating mission Repetition is used in life Repetition is used in speech Repetition is used in writing Repetition is in reach To repeat a repeatable word Gives speech a repeatable rhyme The repeatable rhyme has a repeatable pattern Which is not a repeatable crime
Repetition can be annoying Repetition can be a pain Repetition can get better Repetition can repeatedly gain When an intelligent word is repeated It repeatedly loses its awe Repeating it often loses value But mild repetition adds more Repetition will reappear Repetition will come round Repetition will be seen again Repetition’s a familiar sound I’ll repeat what I said at the beginning And I’ll repeat it at the end Repetition may do some good But it’ll send you repeatedly round the bend

35. rhyme
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it done Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Each couplet has an end rhyme.
Come on
Get a clue
You know how to rhyme
You do!
The adjacent poem is written by Sarah Teasdale and is titled, “There will come soft rains”

36. imagery Words paint pictures Makes experience more real for reader
Impact of meaning enhanced
Every word counts
Active verbs
Fun words
Meaningful adjectives

37. Cherry blossoms adrift
By Mary O. Fumento, 1999
Pink petals passing Scents above so high Painted porcelain perfection Blossoms caress the sky
Swaying silent shroud Suitors strolling by Pink petals passing Lover's gentle sigh
Pastel hues falling Slow fluttering grace Pink petals passing Lining streams in lace
Pink petals passing Smoothest transit by Soft essence floating In most subtle lullaby
Inducing springtime slumber Upon a satin shore Sailing with the current Pink petals pass before

38. Types of poems
Haiku
Cinquain
Limerick
Free verse