Week 3: Creative Writing Assignments – Due Monday, 4/25
3 poems and the style analysis to your teacher: any 2 poems 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. Take a draft of a poem you’ve written in the last 3 weeks. Rewrite it by
revising the line lengths significantly, as well as making additions and
changes that reflect what you’ve discovered or feedback you’ve received.
Changing the line lengths will change the relative 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. regular 3-line, 4-line, or 5-line stanzas
e. A different structure of rhyme or rhythm, or changing a rhymed poem
to an unrhymed one.
Remember that all your creative assignments should have a title!
Hand in to me all 4 creative assignments by Monday, April 25.
1. Stylistic analysis of a poem (say which one!),
2. PLUS a poem in the style of the poem you analyzed,
3. Something that happened to you, in the third person, and
4. A revision of an earlier draft, with changes to the line/stanza structure.
& post two poems to your writing group, also by Monday 4/25.