Week 3: Creative Writing Assignments – Due Monday, 4/25
All 4 poems to your teacher: 2 or more to your writing group.
Review the “ideas for writing” in The Poet’s Companion at the end of the chapters
Read the chapters “The Music of the Line” (113-114) and “Voice and Style” (127128) before doing the writing assignments due on Monday. The assignments are
taken from both chapters.
1. Revisit one of the poems you’ve encountered in the last few weeks, in either
Poet’s Companion or Totems to Hip-Hop. (Don’t use one you already
annotated; choose a new one.) Do a stylistic analysis of the poem, using the
list of qualities on p. 118 – 121 in Poet’s Companion: subject matter, diction,
point of view, syntax and grammar, form, imagery, other patterns. Write this
up – a paragraph or two of description is fine.
Then write a poem in the style of that poem – imitate the writer’s
style, but use you own subject matter and concerns. (These are sometimes
called “imitations.”) Hand in both the brief analysis and the poem you wrote.
2. Take something that happened to you, and tell it in the third person (instead
of “I crashed the truck into the tree” you might say “she crashed the truck
into the tree”).
3. Write a poem in the voice of a famous person, living or dead. Try to give the
reader an intimate glimpse of this person, one that couldn’t be gotten from
the media or history books.
4. Take a draft of a poem you’ve written in the last 3 weeks. Rewrite it by
revising the line lengths significantly. You may also find it necessary to
change other things about the language – changing the line lengths will
change the importance of words and sounds, and you’ll notice different
things about the poem. You might try one of the following strategies:
a. very short lines
b. very long lines
c. some length in between
d. in 3-line, 4-line, or 5-line stanzas
Remember that all your creative assignments should have a title!
Hand in to me all 4 creative assignments by Monday, April 25.
 Stylistic analysis of a poem (say which one!)
 A poem in the style of the poem you analyzed
 Something that happened to you, in the third person.
 A poem in the voice of a famous person.
 A revision of an earlier draft, with changes to the line/stanza structure.