1. Stow your backpack and/or all personal belongings under your desk.
MUSICAL CHAIRS
Take out your poem and make sure your name is clearly visible on the front.
Clear everything off your desk except your poem and a clean sheet of notebook paper.
Stow your backpack and/or all personal belongings under your desk.
All aisles must be clear. 1

2. What do you notice about the poem? What do you think or feel about it?
MUSICAL CHAIRS
Walk around the room and examine the poems. When the music stops, sit down and respond for 2 minutes to the poem:
What do you notice about the poem?
What do you think or feel about it?
What questions do you have for the poet?
Sign your name to the response. 2

3. A Man
By Nina Cassian
While fighting for his country, he lost an arm
and was suddenly afraid:
“From now on, I shall only be able to do things by halves.
I shall reap half a harvest.
I shall be able to play either the tune
or the accompaniment on the piano,
but never both parts together.
I shall be able to bang with only one fist
on doors, and worst of all
I shall only be able to half hold
my love close to me.
There will be things I cannot do at all,
applaud for example,
at shows where everyone applauds.”
From that moment on, he set himself to do everything with twice as much enthusiasm.
And where the arm had been torn away
a wing grew.

4. Free Verse

5. Free Verse
Free verse poetry is poetry that doesn’t have a set rhythm or meter and uses irregular line lengths. Writers of free verse disregard traditional poetic conventions of rhyme or meter relying on imagery, parallelism, repetition, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday language.

6. Parallelism
Parallelism is a device used to emphasize ideas or images by using grammatically similar constructions.

7. Example of Parallelism
We forgot--we worshipped, we parted green from green, we sought further thickets, we dipped our ankles through leaf-mould and earth, and wood and wood-bank enchanted us-- and the feel of the clefts in the bark, and the slope between tree and tree-- and a slender path strung field to field
and wood to wood and hill to hill and the forest after it.
From “The Helmsman” by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

8. Example of Parallelism
We forgot--we worshipped, we parted green from green, we sought further thickets, we dipped our ankles through leaf-mould and earth, and wood and wood-bank enchanted us-- and the feel of the clefts in the bark, and the slope between tree and tree-- and a slender path strung field to field
and wood to wood and hill to hill and the forest after it.
From “The Helmsman” by H. D. (Hilda Doolittle)

9. Poems “Child on Top of Greenhouse” “The Lesson of the Moth”
“What is Success?”

10. Write a response: What do you think and feel about it
What do you notice about it
Parallelism
Imagery
Metaphors/Similes
Poetic Shift
Connotation/Denotation
Sound Devices
What questions do you have about it
What meanings did you discover 10