Poetry Class
Introduction
Aiden Yeh, Ph.D.
Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages
Lesson Outline
 What
Poetry is and what it is not: An
Introduction
 How to write poetry
 How to read poetry
 How to memorize poetry
 Workshop: Creating individual blogs
Becoming a poet
http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/w/writing_poetry.asp
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m8d5tiNmDK1rt7wb5o1_1280.jpg
What is Poetry?
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but
an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape
from personality. But, of course, only those
who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these
things. T.S. Eliot
Can everyone write poetry?
Most people ignore most poetry because most
poetry ignores most people.
Adrian Mitchell
Can you force it on people?
Ordering a man to write a poem is like
commanding a pregnant woman to give birth
to a red-headed child. Carl Sandburg
What’s the Catalyst?
At the touch of love everyone becomes a
poet. Plato
Can you write it?
Poetry is a deal of joy and pain and wonder,
with a dash of the dictionary. Kahlil Gibran
Can you make a living out of poetry?
There's no money in poetry, but there's no
poetry in money, either. Robert Graves
Indeed…
Poetry is not a profession, it is a
destiny. Mikhail Dudan
Poetry isn’t a profession, it’s a way of life. It’s
an empty basket; you put your life into it and
make something out of that. Mary Oliver
So why write poetry?
We don't read and write poetry because it's
cute. We read and write poetry because we
are members of the human race. And the
human race is filled with passion. And
medicine, law, business, engineering, these
are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain
life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love,
these are what we stay alive for.
from Dead Poet's Society
Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life.
William Hazlitt
How do you write poetry
 Poetry,
unlike other literary forms, focuses
most sharply on language itself. The music
of words, how they sound, how their sounds
flow and mix and form musical patterns are
vital to poetry.
How do you write poetry
 Writer A.S.
Rosenthal said, “Far from being
incidental, qualities of sound and rhythm
give a poetic work its organic body.”
A Silly Poem
Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?
 Spike
Milligan
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-silly-poem/
How do you write poetry
 Poets
must use all the physical attributes of
words: their sound, size, shape, and
rhythms.
Imagery
 If
the music of poetry is its life-blood, images
give poetry its soul.
 Although
you can write a successive poem
without imagery, the best poems come alive
with simile, metaphor, symbolism, and use
of personification.
Imagery
 Keep
in mind that imagery is the language
of dreams.
 When you write with imagery you bring the
magic and mystery of dreamscapes to your
writing.
 As poet, William Greenway, said “images
can communicate the unsayable, so show
don’t tell.”
http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/275/710/275710786_640.jpg
Rhythm

Rhythm can be defined as the flow of stressed and
unstressed syllables to create oral patterns. To
achieve rhythm, English poets have traditionally
counted three things:
1. the number of syllables in a line
2. the number of stressed or accented syllables
3. the number of individual units of both stressed
and unstressed syllables.
Rhyme

According to Webster’s Dictionary, rhyme is “ a regular recurrence of
corresponding sounds” which occurs usually at the end of a line. There
are three main types of end-rhymes:
1. True rhyme (also called masculine) occurs exactly on one stressed
syllable.
EX. car, far
2. Feminine rhyme uses words of more than one syllable and occurs
when the accented syllable rhymes.
EX. buckle, knuckle
3. Off-rhyme or Slant Rhyme occurs when words sound very similar but
do not correspond in sound exactly
EX. down, noon
From: http://www.bloomington.in.us/~dory/creative/class5.html
Additional Reference: http://www.electpress.com/loveandromance/page100.htm
THE VEGGIE LION
BY SPIKE MILLIGAN
I’m a vegetarian Lion,
I’ve given up all meat,
I’ve given up all roaring
All I do is go tweet-tweet.
I never ever sink my claws
Into some animal’s skin,
It only lets the blood run out
And lets the germs rush in.
I used to be ferocious,
I even tried to kill!
But the sight of all the blood
made me feel quite ill.
I once attacked an Elephant
I sprang straight at his head.
I woke up three days later
In a Jungle hospital bed.
Now I just eat carrots,
They’re easy to kill,
‘Cos when I pounce upon them,
They all remain quite still!
6 Traits of Poetry Writing
1. The Idea – the heart of your poem, point of your message
2. The Organization – the internal structure
3. The Voice – evidence of the writer behind the message
4. The Word Choice – the vocabulary or terminology used
5. The Fluency – the rhythm and flow - how it plays to the ear
6. The Form – the mechanical structure and correctness there
of
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1. A poem should flow naturally - be flowing and
easy reading
2. It should have rhythmic symmetry – there
should be a correspondence rhythm with in the
poem
3. Effective rhyming add to overall beauty and
quality of poem – finding the correct corresponding
rhyme makes for a better poem
http://amydot90.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/20120318-173650.jpg
Get down on it!
The Subject
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/writing-poetry-how-to-write-a-poem.html
The Feeling
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/writing-poetry-how-to-write-a-poem.html
The Mood
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/writing-poetry-how-to-write-a-poem.html
The Style
The Audience
Helpful Tips
Helpful Weblinks
 http://www.rhymezone.com/
 http://thesaurus.com/
 http://www.forvo.com/
difficult words)
(pronunciation of
Get down on it!
Aiden Yeh
Procrastinate!
That’s what I do.
When things get blurry
I don’t know what to doMaking me feel totally inadequate!
How do I write poetry
When words escape me,
running off the mill
Leaving me with nothing
But a brain that’s empty.
To write or not to write,
Perhaps, I’d better stop and call it a night.
There’s no point of feeling uptight.
Tomorrow may be a better day to get down on it,
And finally do it right!
12:27
Kaohsiung
Read it out loud

Read the poem slowly. Most adolescents speak
rapidly, and a nervous reader will tend to do the
same in order to get the reading over with.
Reading a poem slowly is the best way to ensure
that the poem will be read clearly and understood
by its listeners. Learning to read a poem slowly will
not just make the poem easier to hear; it will
underscore the importance in poetry of each and
every word. A poem cannot be read too slowly,
and a good way for a reader to set an easy pace is
to pause for a few seconds between the title and
the poem's first line.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-howtoread.html
 Read
in a normal, relaxed tone of voice. It is
not necessary to give any of these poems a
dramatic reading as if from a stage. Read in
a natural and colloquial style. Let the words
of the poem do the work. Just speak clearly
and slowly.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-howtoread.html

Use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words and
hard-to-pronounce words. To read with conviction,
a reader needs to know at least the dictionary
sense of every word. In some cases, a reader
might want to write out a word phonetically as a
reminder of how it should sound. It should be
emphasized that learning to read a poem out loud
is a way of coming to a full understanding of that
poem, perhaps a better way than writing a paper
on the subject.
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-howtoread.html

Read it more than once. Listen to your voice, to
the sounds the words make. Do you notice any
special effects? Do any of the words rhyme? Is
there a cluster of sounds that seem the same or
similar? Is there a section of the poem that seems
to have a rhythm that’s distinct from the rest of the
poem? Don’t worry about why the poem might use
these effects. The first step is to hear what’s going
on. If you find your own voice distracting, have a
friend read the poem to you.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19882
What determines where a line stops
in poetry?
 Lines
are often determined by meaning,
sound and rhythm, breath, or typography.
 The relationship between meaning, sound,
and movement intended by the poet is
sometimes hard to recognize, but there is an
interplay between the grammar of a line, the
breath of a line, and the way lines are
broken out in the poem—this is
called lineation.
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19882
 Lines
that end with punctuation, called endstopped lines, are fairly simple.
 In that case, the punctuation and the
lineation, and perhaps even breathing,
coincide to make the reading familiar and
even predictable.
But lines that are not end-stopped present different
challenges for readers because they either end
with an incomplete phrase or sentence or they
break before the first punctuation mark is reached.
 The most natural approach is to pay strict attention
to the grammar and punctuation. Reading to the
end of a phrase or sentence, even if it carries over
one or several lines, is the best way to retain the
grammatical sense of a poem.
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Talking back to a poem
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Who is the speaker?
What circumstances gave rise to the poem?
What situation is presented?
Who or what is the audience?
What is the tone?
What form, if any, does the poem take?
How is form related to content?
Is sound an important, active element of the poem?
Does the poem spring from an identifiable historical moment?
Does the poem speak from a specific culture?
Does the poem have its own vernacular?
Does the poem use imagery to achieve a particular effect?
What kind of figurative language, if any, does the poem use?
If the poem is a question, what is the answer?
If the poem is an answer, what is the question?
What does the title suggest?
Does the poem use unusual words or use words in an unusual way?
http://www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/howtoreadpoem.pdf
Shel Silverstein
Reading Practice
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19883
http://acerminaro.blogspot.tw/2012/01/red-wheelbarrow.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173068
1759-1796
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jggPFamB9Ok
How to memorize poems
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Read and say the poem over, slowly, aloud.
With an index card, cover everything but the first line of the
poem. Read it. Look away, see the line in air, and say it.
Look back. Repeat until you’ve “got it.”
Uncover the second line. Learn it as you did the first line,
but also add second line to first, until you’ve got the two.
Then it’s on to three. Always repeat the first line on down,
till the whole poem sings.
With the poem now internalized, you are freed to perform it.
This is to find the voice(s) of the poem, to find yourself
there, and the poet, and to relate to the audience.
http://poetry.about.com/cs/textarchives/ht/howmemorizepoem.htm
Task:
Try Memorizing
‘Mask’
by Shel Silverstein
Tasks
 Create
a blog account: blogger.com
 On your blog, try writing a short poem about
the following themes:
Difficulty in writing
Writing poetry
Feelings toward this course
Or on something relevant to what we discussed
in class
References
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Basic Elements of Poetry : Rhythm, Rhyme and Imagery, http://www.poemsand-quotes.com/article.html?id=398
Quotes about poetry,
http://www.educationoasis.com/curriculum/Lang_Arts/quotes/quotes_about_po
etry.htm
50 definitions of poetry, http://poetinthecity.wordpress.com/2011/03/16/what-ispoetry-50-definitions-and-counting/
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/writing-poetry-how-to-write-a-poem.html
Literary Analysis: http://writing.wisc.edu/Handbook/ReadingPoetry.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/245464
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19882
http://www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/howtoreadpoem.pdf
(fun to read: http://www.shmoop.com/poetry/how-to-read-poem/how-toread.html )