Assignment | Objectives |
1. FINDING INSPIRATION | Read and study W.H. Auden's poem "Musee de Beaux Arts." Find a painting and derive your own poem, like Auden's, from your observations in and off the painting. |
2. DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: WRITING BEHIND A MASK | To recognize the effect of voice and persona on shifts in tone and a poem's mood. To write a poem in which you modulate the poem's voice and create variations in its tone or mood. |
3. EMOTION/MOTION/ OCEAN/SHUN | Read, listen to, and be able to identify different types of rhyme, rhyme scheme, and sonorous effects, such as consonance, assonance, alliteration, and onomatopoeia. Write a poem endowed with various rhyming and sonorous effects. |
4. ANGLO-SAXON LINES | Read, listen to, and be able to discern stresses in a line, various metrical feet, and to develop skill at scansion. Write a poem with particular attention paid to stresses and the rhythm in the lines. |
5. SAPPHIC STANZAS | Read, listen to, and be able to identify lineation features, such as caesura, enjambment, and end-stops, and their effects on tempo, mood, and imagery. Write a poem with particular attention paid to lineation. |
6. POETIC FORMS | Read, listen to, and be able to identify a variety of poetic forms, including villanelle, sestina, and variations of the sonnet. Write a poem in one of these forms. |
7. IMAGERY: POETRY'S ANSWER TO "THE FORCE" | To understand imagery, both in the way it captures meaning and the effect it has on a poem's tone. To recognize the connections between image, mind, and body. To write a poem composed of nothing more than a list of things. To arrange the list so that juxtaposed images create a cinematic effect. |
8. PRODUCING VARIATIONS IN TONE | To understand how imagery is interwoven with other elements of poetry in ways analogous to filmmaking. To arrange a poem's imagery in order to create cinematic effects: directing the mind's eye of the reader like a camera, adding voiceover and other sensual detail (color, sound, smell, texture), and producing a poem with variations in tone. |
9. POETIC STRUCTURE | To begin perceiving how structures in a poem enact (i.e., act out, dramatize) by the way they evolve into a dynamic form what a poem conveys by way of assertion. To understand the structures of a poem are the intellectual or logical shapes into which its thoughts are organized. To write a poem in which there is an overarching structure with several substructures. |
10. REVISION | To revise an earlier poem by enhancing the concreteness and palpability of its imagery, adjusting its syntax, culling unnecessary words and phrases, and/or condensing what's said to maximum poetic effectiveness--that is, a composition of verses with multiple layers of meaning. |
