1. Welcome! February 15th, 2016 Wednesday
Do Now
Find your seats! If you don’t remember where you sit, ask me.
Write the date at the top of a new page in your journal.
Once the bell rings, begin the freewrite.
Prompt: If you could change one thing about your personality, what would it be? Why?

2. Poetry Portfolio
As our study of poetry comes to a close, your final job is to create a portfolio of the highlights of your writing. For this assignment, you will choose your five best poems you’ve written for this class, revise them, and incorporate them into a portfolio (a word document you will share with me via ). You will also choose one of those five poems to share with your classmates next Thursday during our poetry slam.
Let me walk you thought what each part of this project requires.

3. Poetry Portfolio: Introduction
1. An introduction (12 points)
Your introduction (at least 200 words) should prepare the reader for what they are going to find in your portfolio. A good introduction should include:
A brief introduction to who you are and why you made a poetry portfolio (3 points)
Your thought process as you picked your poems (how did you choose your favorites? Why were these poems in particular selected?) (3 points)
An explanation of your writing style – what can your reader expect to find in your portfolio? What kind of poems do you write? (3 points)
A moment where you reach out to your reader - What do you hope they’ll take away from your poetry? (3 points)

4. Poetry Portfolio: Your Poems
2. Your Poems (25 points)
The body of your portfolio should include the five poems (or more, if you’d like) that you think are your best. Be sure to:
Include a title for each poem (1 point each)
Have each poem be at least eight lines (1 points each)
At least one of the five revision techniques have clearly been attempted. (3 points each)

5. Poetry Portfolio: Poem Revision
Search for form. One of the first things I like to do after “finishing” a first draft is to count syllables to see if I’ve written a poem in a certain form. Sometimes, I’ll even do this mid-draft if I get the feeling that a form is establishing itself. By form, I don’t mean traditional forms, though sometimes that can happen. A form could be as simple as 8- syllable lines or a pattern of 7-, 9-, and 5-syllable lines (which happened to me over the weekend). The nice thing about form is that it acts as the skeleton for the poem–the structure that gives shape to the body of the poem.
Look for ways to cut. One quality I love about poetry versus other forms of writing is the genre’s concision. The best way to make a poem concise is to cut out all the extra fat of a poem. This might include prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs. It might also include cutting lines that “explain” what a poem means or is getting at.
Pay attention to line breaks. While every word in your poem should have a purpose, readers place more emphasis on the ends and beginnings of lines–the places where the lines break. For me, I try to find ways to surprise readers here. Of course, every line doesn’t have the potential for enjambment or clever turns of phrase, but every poem I write gets a thorough line break inspection.
Listen for sounds. I mentioned concision as a quality I love about poetry, but the chief quality I love about poetry (and this is showing my own bias) is the musical nature of poetry. When done well, I think poetry–including poetry that doesn’t rhyme–reads (and can be read) as music. As such, I already try to write first drafts with sound in mind, but then I go through the drafts looking for potential end rhymes, internal rhymes, and consonance. For this step, I do read the poem aloud at different times of the day and in different moods (and even voices).
Make things concrete. This step does not involve “spelling out” the meaning of the poem. Instead, I look for any abstract words that made it into the poem (words like “love,” “hate,” and “fear”) and try replacing them with concrete words and images. At times, I even replace concrete words with more specific (or unusual) concrete words.

6. Poetry Portfolio: Your Slam Plan
3. Your Poetry Slam Plan (15 points)
Once you have identified and included your five best poems, you need to choose one to share with your classmates. On the final page of your portfolio, respond to the following questions (3 points each):
1. What poem are you going to recite for your classmates?
2. What tone are you trying to achieve in your poem? What mood do you want your classmates to feel when they listen to your piece?
3. What words or phrases are most important to your poem?
4. Where will you speed up and slow down while reading your poem? What phrases or lines should be faster or slower than others?
5. When will you change volume? What phrases or words should be louder than others?

7. Poetry Portfolio: Goals for Today
Log into Gmail password is hallpass)
Create a Google Doc and share it with me
Look through your poems. Determine which five are your *best* and begin typing them up. (Make sure you give each a title and put some space between each poem).
Begin choosing and applying one (or more) revision technique to each poem. Make sure there is a significant enough difference between your rough draft and your revised poem that I can give you points for the revision process. 