Poetry Class Introduction Aiden Yeh, Ph.D. Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages

Lesson Outline  What Poetry is and what it is not: An Introduction  How to write poetry  How to read poetry  How to memorize poetry  Workshop: Creating individual blogs

Becoming a poet

What is Poetry? Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. T.S. Eliot

Can everyone write poetry? Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. Adrian Mitchell

Can you force it on people? Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child. Carl Sandburg

What’s the Catalyst? At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. Plato

Can you write it? Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of the dictionary. Kahlil Gibran

Can you make a living out of poetry? There's no money in poetry, but there's no poetry in money, either. Robert Graves

Indeed… Poetry is not a profession, it is a destiny. Mikhail Dudan Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s an empty basket; you put your life into it and make something out of that. Mary Oliver

So why write poetry? We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. from Dead Poet's Society

Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life. William Hazlitt

How do you write poetry  Poetry, unlike other literary forms, focuses most sharply on language itself. The music of words, how they sound, how their sounds flow and mix and form musical patterns are vital to poetry.

How do you write poetry  Writer A.S. Rosenthal said, “Far from being incidental, qualities of sound and rhythm give a poetic work its organic body.”

A Silly Poem Said Hamlet to Ophelia, I'll draw a sketch of thee, What kind of pencil shall I use? 2B or not 2B?  Spike Milligan

How do you write poetry  Poets must use all the physical attributes of words: their sound, size, shape, and rhythms.

Imagery  If the music of poetry is its life-blood, images give poetry its soul.

 Although you can write a successive poem without imagery, the best poems come alive with simile, metaphor, symbolism, and use of personification.

Imagery  Keep in mind that imagery is the language of dreams.  When you write with imagery you bring the magic and mystery of dreamscapes to your writing.  As poet, William Greenway, said “images can communicate the unsayable, so show don’t tell.”

Rhythm  Rhythm can be defined as the flow of stressed and unstressed syllables to create oral patterns. To achieve rhythm, English poets have traditionally counted three things: 1. the number of syllables in a line 2. the number of stressed or accented syllables 3. the number of individual units of both stressed and unstressed syllables.

Rhyme  According to Webster’s Dictionary, rhyme is “ a regular recurrence of corresponding sounds” which occurs usually at the end of a line. There are three main types of end-rhymes: 1. True rhyme (also called masculine) occurs exactly on one stressed syllable. EX. car, far 2. Feminine rhyme uses words of more than one syllable and occurs when the accented syllable rhymes. EX. buckle, knuckle 3. Off-rhyme or Slant Rhyme occurs when words sound very similar but do not correspond in sound exactly EX. down, noon From: Additional Reference:

THE VEGGIE LION BY SPIKE MILLIGAN I’m a vegetarian Lion, I’ve given up all meat, I’ve given up all roaring All I do is go tweet-tweet. I never ever sink my claws Into some animal’s skin, It only lets the blood run out And lets the germs rush in. I used to be ferocious, I even tried to kill! But the sight of all the blood made me feel quite ill. I once attacked an Elephant I sprang straight at his head. I woke up three days later In a Jungle hospital bed. Now I just eat carrots, They’re easy to kill, ‘Cos when I pounce upon them, They all remain quite still!

6 Traits of Poetry Writing 1. The Idea – the heart of your poem, point of your message 2. The Organization – the internal structure 3. The Voice – evidence of the writer behind the message 4. The Word Choice – the vocabulary or terminology used 5. The Fluency – the rhythm and flow - how it plays to the ear 6. The Form – the mechanical structure and correctness there of

 1. A poem should flow naturally - be flowing and easy reading 2. It should have rhythmic symmetry – there should be a correspondence rhythm with in the poem 3. Effective rhyming add to overall beauty and quality of poem – finding the correct corresponding rhyme makes for a better poem

Get down on it!

The Subject

The Feeling

The Mood

The Style

The Audience

Helpful Tips

Helpful Weblinks    (pronunciation of difficult words)

Get down on it! Aiden Yeh Procrastinate! That’s what I do. When things get blurry I don’t know what to do- Making me feel totally inadequate! How do I write poetry When words escape me, running off the mill Leaving me with nothing But a brain that’s empty. To write or not to write, Perhaps, I’d better stop and call it a night. There’s no point of feeling uptight. Tomorrow may be a better day to get down on it, And finally do it right! 12:27 Kaohsiung

Read it out loud  Read the poem slowly. Most adolescents speak rapidly, and a nervous reader will tend to do the same in order to get the reading over with. Reading a poem slowly is the best way to ensure that the poem will be read clearly and understood by its listeners. Learning to read a poem slowly will not just make the poem easier to hear; it will underscore the importance in poetry of each and every word. A poem cannot be read too slowly, and a good way for a reader to set an easy pace is to pause for a few seconds between the title and the poem's first line.

 Read in a normal, relaxed tone of voice. It is not necessary to give any of these poems a dramatic reading as if from a stage. Read in a natural and colloquial style. Let the words of the poem do the work. Just speak clearly and slowly.

 Use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words and hard-to-pronounce words. To read with conviction, a reader needs to know at least the dictionary sense of every word. In some cases, a reader might want to write out a word phonetically as a reminder of how it should sound. It should be emphasized that learning to read a poem out loud is a way of coming to a full understanding of that poem, perhaps a better way than writing a paper on the subject.

 Read it more than once. Listen to your voice, to the sounds the words make. Do you notice any special effects? Do any of the words rhyme? Is there a cluster of sounds that seem the same or similar? Is there a section of the poem that seems to have a rhythm that’s distinct from the rest of the poem? Don’t worry about why the poem might use these effects. The first step is to hear what’s going on. If you find your own voice distracting, have a friend read the poem to you.

What determines where a line stops in poetry?  Lines are often determined by meaning, sound and rhythm, breath, or typography.  The relationship between meaning, sound, and movement intended by the poet is sometimes hard to recognize, but there is an interplay between the grammar of a line, the breath of a line, and the way lines are broken out in the poem—this is called lineation.

 Lines that end with punctuation, called end- stopped lines, are fairly simple.  In that case, the punctuation and the lineation, and perhaps even breathing, coincide to make the reading familiar and even predictable.

 But lines that are not end-stopped present different challenges for readers because they either end with an incomplete phrase or sentence or they break before the first punctuation mark is reached.  The most natural approach is to pay strict attention to the grammar and punctuation. Reading to the end of a phrase or sentence, even if it carries over one or several lines, is the best way to retain the grammatical sense of a poem.

Talking back to a poem  Who is the speaker?  What circumstances gave rise to the poem?  What situation is presented?  Who or what is the audience?  What is the tone?  What form, if any, does the poem take?  How is form related to content?  Is sound an important, active element of the poem?  Does the poem spring from an identifiable historical moment?  Does the poem speak from a specific culture?  Does the poem have its own vernacular?  Does the poem use imagery to achieve a particular effect?  What kind of figurative language, if any, does the poem use?  If the poem is a question, what is the answer?  If the poem is an answer, what is the question?  What does the title suggest?  Does the poem use unusual words or use words in an unusual way?

Shel Silverstein

Reading Practice

How to memorize poems  Read and say the poem over, slowly, aloud.  With an index card, cover everything but the first line of the poem. Read it. Look away, see the line in air, and say it. Look back. Repeat until you’ve “got it.”  Uncover the second line. Learn it as you did the first line, but also add second line to first, until you’ve got the two.  Then it’s on to three. Always repeat the first line on down, till the whole poem sings.  With the poem now internalized, you are freed to perform it. This is to find the voice(s) of the poem, to find yourself there, and the poet, and to relate to the audience.

Task: Try Memorizing ‘Mask’ by Shel Silverstein

Tasks  Create a blog account: blogger.com  On your blog, try writing a short poem about the following themes:  Difficulty in writing  Writing poetry  Feelings toward this course  Or on something relevant to what we discussed in class

References  Basic Elements of Poetry : Rhythm, Rhyme and Imagery, and-quotes.com/article.html?id=398http:// and-quotes.com/article.html?id=398  Quotes about poetry, etry.htm etry.htm  50 definitions of poetry, poetry-50-definitions-and-counting/ poetry-50-definitions-and-counting/   Literary Analysis:     (fun to read: read.html ) read.html