1. Your Poetry Portfolio  I want this to be an opportunity not only to express yourself through poetry…  but also to experiment with different poetic forms and tools, and improve your poetic skills.  Remember that poetry is an art, one in which you can develop with practice.  We celebrate great poets for a reason: their mastery at taking passionate feelings and profound thoughts and expressing them in a new, creative, defamiliarizing, artful way.

2. Poets to Model  William Carlos Williams  ee cummings  Carl Sandburg  Langston Hughes

3. What is Needed  4 poems (the two Imagist count as 1)  * At least 12 lines each  * Deals with an issue from or responds to any of the Modernist poets we studied  * Is “Modern” in style or theme  Cover page w/art and design  * have a hand-written rough draft and a typed final draft (with significant revision)

4. How To Revise  Consider:  Word choice  Meter  Rhyme scheme  Line breaks  Stanza breaks  Traditional vs. Unconventional?

5. D e f a m I l I a r I z I n g Your Poem, Man unless there's one thing seen suddenly against another--a parsnip sprouting for a President, or hailstones melting in an ashtray-- nothing really happens. It takes surprise and wild connections, doesn't it? A walrus chewing on a ballpoint pen. Two blue tail- lights on Tyrannosaurus Rex. Green cheese teeth. Maybe what we wanted least. Or most. Some unexpected pleats. Words that never knew each other till right now. Plug us into the wrong socket and see what blows--or what lights up. Try untried unless there's one thing seen suddenly against another--a parsnip sprouting for a President, or hailstones melting in an ashtray-- nothing really happens. It takes surprise and wild connections, doesn't it? A walrus chewing on a ballpoint pen. Two blue tail- lights on Tyrannosaurus Rex. Green cheese teeth. Maybe what we wanted least. Or most. Some unexpected pleats. Words that never knew each other till right now. Plug us into the wrong socket and see what blows--or what lights up. Try untried circuitry, new fuses. Tell it like it never really was, man, and maybe we can see it like it is. circuitry, new fuses. Tell it like it never really was, man, and maybe we can see it like it is.

6. Concise and Precise 6-Word Novels

7.  Ernest Hemingway: "For sale: baby shoes, never used."

8.  Robert Olen Butler: "Saigon hotel. Decades later. He weeps."

9.  Augusten Burroughs: "Oh, that? It's nothing. Not contagious."

10.  Clown car, burning. Forty dead? Fifty?

11. YOU MUST!!!!!!!! YOU MUST!!!!!!!!  Have fun  Try new things  Challenge yourself  Be creative  Above all else…avoid being cliché or boring

12. For the Quiz…  Poets’ background info  Their style, techniques, unique features  Titles of their poems  Be able to analyze the poems we’ve studied  Identify poems you have not yet seen  Identify the following: Modernism, Imagism, Harlem Renaissance