Writing 201: Poetry

And begins the most excited and awaited course, WRITING 201: Poetry (16 Feb 2015). This page links to all the carried out assignment for the course.

** Index **

1. Haiku (Water)

2. Life, The Journey

3. TRUST

4. Social Animal

5. Fog and Away

6. A Ballad for Ghost

7. The Five Fingers

8. Oh My Drawers

9. Landscape In a Week

10. The Future Prospects

Assignment 01:
Task: Write a poem about water. And/or a haiku. And/or use a simile.
My Submission: Haiku (Water)

Notes:
The structure of haiku is: three lines containing five, seven, and five syllables, respectively:

The first line goes here.
The second one is longer.
Then it’s short again.

Device: A simile like its name suggests, makes a connection or introduces the idea of similarity between two concepts that aren’t intrinsically connected, leaving an interesting mental image in its wake.

Assignment 02:
Task: Write a poem about anything that word evokes for you, from the excitement of a trip you’re about to embark on, the mental progress you witnessed someone make, or the struggles, pleasures, and extreme emotions that travel can bring about.
My Submission: Life, The Journey

Notes:
Use the form limerick for the poem. Example:

It rarely takes a lot of time

To make the first two verses rhyme.

The third line is short.

The fourth? A mere snort.

You can sell limericks three for a dime.

Device: Alliteration, is all about using the same consonant multiple times in close proximity. Example: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Assignment 03:
Task: write a poem in which you address, reflect on, or tell a story about the feeling of trusting or being trusted by another Or about distrusting them.
My Submission: TRUST

Notes:
Use the form, the acrostic, highlights the fact that poetry, at heart, is wordplay. There have been two prevalent ways to create acrostics. In one, you follow the sequence of the alphabet, beginning each verse in your poem with a different one from A to Z. The other type of acrostic is one in which the first (or last) letter of each verse together spell out a message. Example:

An Acrostic

Elizabeth it is in vain you say
“Love not” — thou sayest it in so sweet a way:
In vain those words from thee or L. E. L.
Zantippe’s talents had enforced so well:
Ah! if that language from thy heart arise,
Breathe it less gently forth — and veil thine eyes.
Endymion, recollect, when Luna tried
To cure his love — was cured of all beside —
His folly — pride — and passion — for he died.

Device: Internal Rhyme. Example:
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues

Assignment 04:
Task: Find a way to include an animal in your poem. Or write about a situation that can bring out the animal in you Or dig deeper into the word’s etymology. One way or another, give us a beast of a poem.
My Submission: Social Animal

Notes:
Use the form, concrete poetry. Also known as shape poetry, the idea here is to arrange the words on the screen so that they create a shape or an image. The meaning of the image can be obvious at first glance, or require some guesswork after reading the poem.

Device: Enjambment. It may sound like a mouthful. But what it describes is a really simple phenomenon: when a grammatical sentence stretches from one line of verse to the next. Example:

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

Assignment 05:
Task: Clear the mind and pen down the fog.
My Submission: Fog and Away

Notes:
Use the form, elegy. It started out as a poem that could be about almost any topic, as long as it was written in elegiac couplets (pairs of verse, with the first one slightly longer than the second). Over the centuries, though, it became something a bit more specific: a (more often than not) first-person poem on themes of longing, loss, and mourning poem.

Device: Metaphor.  A metaphor brings together two terms that aren’t normally connected, yet make sense once they are. Example:

Baby, you’re a firework
Come on, show ‘em what you’re worth
Make ‘em go, “Aah, aah, aah”
As you shoot across the sky-y-y

Assignment 06:
Task: Whether it’s a hero or a heroine, poem should focus on a person with an outsized personality — someone who makes a splash whenever he or she crosses others’ path.
My Submission: A Ballad for Ghost

Notes:
Use the form ballad. Ballads were all about telling dramatic, big stories.

Device: anaphora and epistrophe. Anaphora simply means the repetition of the same word (or cluster of words) at the beginning of multiple lines of verse in the same poem. Epistrophe is its counterpart: the repeated words appear at the end of lines. Example:

Cause if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it
If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it
Don’t be mad once you see that he want it
If you liked it then you should’ve put a ring on it

Assignment 07:
Task: Write a poem relating or describing ‘fingers’
My Submission: The Five Fingers

Notes:
Use the form prose poem. A prose poem, by definition, has no fixed rules. Whether a reader sees the prose or the poetry in it hinges on a variety of factors beyond the control.

Device:  assonance, the strategic repetition of vowels in close proximity to each other. Assonance is subtler than alliteration, but can have a profound cumulative effect on a poem, especially when the repeated sound resonates somehow with the topic you’re writing about. Example:

He opens his mouth, but the words won’t come out
He’s choking how, everybody’s joking now
The clock’s run out, time’s up, over, bloah!
Snap back to reality, Oh there goes gravity
Oh, there goes Rabbit, he choked
He’s so mad, but he won’t give up that
Easy, no

Assignment 08:
Task: write about something in your drawer. Any thing.
My Submission: Oh My Drawers

Notes:
Use the form ode, started out as a fairly fixed form: a three-part stanza written in certain meters. It is any poem celebrating the good qualities of people, objects, places, and personal traits.

Device: apostrophe, can produce such a striking effect in a poem: it occurs when the speaker in the poem addresses another person or an object directly. Example:

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come let me clutch thee,
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.

Assignment 09:
Task: write about landscape, explore your whereabouts and translate your thoughts into a poem
My Submission: Landscape In a Week

Notes:
Use the form: Found poetry, is the language-based variety. Like a blackmail letter in a sordid crime novel, a found poem is made up of words and letters others have created. Find them (hence the name), extract them, and rejig them into something else: your poem.

Device: enumeratio —  As its name might suggest, it basically means constructing a list, a successive enumeration of multiple elements in the same series.Example:

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

Assignment 10:
Task: Write a poem inspired by your vision of the future.
My Submission: The Future Prospects

Notes:
 Use the from sonnet. It’s a form that’s has endured dozens of vogues, backlashes, and comebacks. In some ways, the sonnet is easy: we get 14 lines of verse, usually grouped into four stanzas of 4-4-3-3 lines each and any number of established rhyming schemes. (Example: Shakespeare’s abab cdcd efef gg)

Device: chiasmus.  At its simplest, a chiasmus is essentially a reversal, an inverted crossing. Example:

The two most engaging powers of an author, are, to make new things familiar, and familiar things new.