The Joy of Words
 Raw
 Clean
 w/
 Rhyme
or w/out
rhyme
 Patternless?
 Random
 Off the wall
 Informal
schemes
 Follows rules
 Patterns
 Orderly
 Not so crazy
 Formal
 Personification
 Simile
 Metaphor
 Irony
 Satire
 Hyperbole
 Understatement
 Overstatement
 Paradox
 The
wind whispered in his ear, “Be still. . .
Be still.”
 Raindrops kissed the dry earth bringing hope
to the whole town.
 Motley thought, “I hope we stop here. I
really have to go.” He sniffed the fire
hydrant as Billy talked to Sally. Sally didn’t
have Gracie with her today. Man, he loved
that little white poodle.

Nikki Giovanni
the world is not a pleasant place
to be without
someone to hold and be held by
a river would stop
its flow if only
a stream were there
to receive it
an ocean would never laugh
if clouds weren’t there
to kiss her tears
the world is not
a pleasant place to be without
someone

William Wordsworth
I wondered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and
hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The waves beside them danced; but
they
Outdid the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had
brought
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
 Her
eyes glittered like moon beams flickering
off the lake.
 The pain ripped through him like a flame
torturing his soul.
 Joy filled the room as if it were tangible. . .
as if it were soft swirlings of cotton candy
floating around and around.
– May Swenson
Beneath heaven’s vault
have keenness in the nostril
remember always walking
through halls of cloud
down aisles of sunlight
or through high hedges
of the green rain
walk in the world
highheeled with swirl of cape
Give your eyes
to agony or rapture
Train your hands
as birds to be
brooding or nimble
Move your body
as the horses
hand at the swordhilt
of your pride
Keep a tall throat
Remain aghast at life
sweeping on slender hooves
over crag and prairie
with fleeing manes
and aloofness of their limbs
Enter each day
as upon a stage
Take earth for your own large room
and the floor of earth
lighted and waiting
for your step
Crave upward as flame
carpeted with sunlight
and hung round with silver wind
for your dancing place
 His
hands were claws digging into my flesh. I
was his prey; he was the hunter.
 My fear was a heavy load of everyone else’s
packages: their expectations were
overwhelming me.
 The book was an exciting journey into the
realm of Egyptian tombs.

Vachel Lindsay
In the Beginning
The sun is a huntress young,
The sun is red, red joy,
The sun is an Indian girl,
Of the tribe of the Illinois.
Noon
The sun is a wounded deer,
That treads pale grass in the skies,
Shaking his golden horns,
Flashing his baleful eyes.
Mid-morning
The sun is a smoldering fire,
That creeps through the high gray plain,
And leaves not a bush of cloud
To blossom with flowers of rain.
Sunset
The sun is an eagle old;
There in the windless west,
Atop of the spirit-cliffs
He builds him a crimson nest.
 An
ad for cigarettes right next to an ad for
help with cancer
 Saying something is beautiful when it’s
actually an awful thing that has happened
 Saying something is “sick” when it’s actually
beautiful or neat

John Updike
Pearl Avenue runs past the high-school lot,
He never learned a trade, he just sells gas,
Bends with the trolley tracks, and stops, cut off
Checks oil, and changes flats. Once in a while,
Before it has a chance to go two blocks,
As a gag, he dribbles an inner tube,
At Colonel McComsky Plaza. Berth’s Garage
But most of us remember anyway.
Is on the corner facing west, and there,
His hands are fine and nervous on the lug wrench.
Most days, you’ll find Flick Webb, who helps Berth out.
It makes no difference to the lug wrench, though.
Flick stands tall among the idiot pumps—
Off work, he hangs around Mae’s Luncheonette.
Five on a side, the old bubble-head style,
Grease-gray and kind of coiled, he plays pinball,
Their rubber elbows hanging loose and low.
Smokes those thin cigars, nurses lemon phosphates.
One’s nostrils are two S’s, and his eyes
Flick seldom says a word to Mae, just nods
An E and O. And one is squat, without
Beyond her face toward bright applauding tiers
A head at all—more of a football type.
Of Necco Wafers, Nibs, and Juju Beads.
Once Flick played for the high-school team, the Wizards.
He was good: in fact, the best. In ‘46
He bucketed three hundred ninety points,
A county record still. The ball loved Flick.
I saw him rack up thirty-eight or forty
In one home game. His hands were like wild birds.
 Jonathon
Swift’s, “The Perfect Proposal”
 Scary Movie




Spoofing
Mocking
Mimicking
Impersonating
Shel Silverstein
My dad gave me one dollar bill
‘Cause I’m his smartest son,
And I swapped it for two shiny quarters
‘Cause two is more than one!
And then I took the quarters
And traded them to Lou
For three dimes—I guess he don’t know
That three is more than two!
Just then, along came old blind Bates
And just ’cause he can’t see
He gave me four nickels for my three dimes,
And four is more than three!
And I took the nickels to Hiram Coombs
Down at the seed-feed store,
And the fool gave me five pennies for them,
And five is more than four!
And then I went and showed my dad,
And he got red in the cheeks
And closed his eyes and shook his head—
Too proud of me to speak!
 His
hatred consumed to the point where it
burnt holes into my soul.
 His love overtook my every movement; my
life was forever dedicated to his requests.
 School is beyond boring; it’s like watching a
tree grow a new leaf—you may never see the
beginning or the end.
 Lunch today was so exuberantly disgusting; I
thought I was on the season premiere of Fear
Factor eating eggs of some not so exotic
bird.

Pablo Neruda
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.
Write, for example, “The night is shattered and the blue stars shiver in the
distance.”
The same night whitening the same trees.
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me to.
Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.
She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.
To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.
What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.
This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.
Another’s. She will be another’s. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.
Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.
 The
break-up was like stubbing a toe (he
actually put his fist through a window and
needed 12 stitches)
 Their love was a prick in my side (when his
infatuation with her was all-consuming)
 Winter in Pennsylvania can be chilly (after a
week of below 25 temperatures)
 The TV reception is annoying (when no
channels will stay in & everything comes in
with static)

Gary Soto
Today it’s going to cost us thirty-five dollars
To live. Six for a softball. Eight for a book,
A handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus fare, rosin for your mother’s violin.
We’re completing our task. The tip I left
For the waitress filters down
Like rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps, a belligerent cat that won’t let go
Of a balled sock until there’s chicken to eat.
As far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You buy crayons from a stationer, a bag of apples
From the farmer’s market, and what dollars
Are passed on help others buy pencils, a guitar,
Tickets to a matinee movie.
If we buy a goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A tip, a small purchase here and there,
And things just keep going. I guess.
 You’ve
got it all
 She has the most beautiful voice you’ll ever
hear
 He was so mean; He was a Hitler
 Their romance is as dangerous as Romeo and
Juliet’s
 All of the problems in this country have been
caused by Democrats (or Republicans)
 Emily
Dickinson
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one’s name— the livelong June —
To an admiring Bog!
 Will


Divergence or variation in the word bite
Bite would normally mean with teeth; this means
with the tread of the tires
 It’s


bite when cornered (ad for a tire)
a Sucker (ad for a vacuum cleaner)
Divergence or variation in the word sucker
Sucker would normally mean someone who is
easily tricked; this means to actually suck in the
dirt
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them

Denise Levertov
for finding what
I can’t find,
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
What line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
 Enjambment
 Onomatopoeia
 Alliteration
 Assonance
 Consonance
 Repetition
 Rhyme
 Imagery
 The
continuation of a sentence from one line
of a poem into the next
 A run-on line
 Makes the reader’s eye follow the line
 Can help with the poem’s meter & flow
 Is, however, used in organic poetry, too
Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in this beauty on the water, and the great heron
feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 Sound








words
Crash
Bang
Toot
Bleep
Sizzle
Swish
Pow
Whack
Carl Sandburg
It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
The cartoonists weep in their beer.
Ship riveters talk with their feet
To the feet of floozies under the tables.
A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:
"I got the blues.
I got the blues.
I got the blues."
And . . . as we said earlier:
The cartoonists weep in their beer.

 Repetition

Must have two or more words with same sound
 Tongue



twisters
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
Shelly picks sea shells at the sea shore
 Calls

of same sound in a poem
attention to certain words
He who laughs last laughs first.
Time and tide wait for no man.


By Edgar Alan Poe
I (of IV)
Hear the sledges with the bells Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.
 Repetition
of VOWEL sounds in words that
are close to each other
 John Betjeman's 'A Subaltern's Love Song'

"westering, questioning settles the sun / On your
low-leaded window”
I know
this rose is only
an ink-and-paper rose
but see how it grows and goes
on growing
beneath your eyes:
a rose in flower
has had (almost) its vegetable hour
whilst my
rose of spaces and typography
can reappear at will
(your will)
whenever you repeat
this ceremony of the eye
from the beginning
and thus
learn how
to resurrect a rose
that’s instantaneous
perennial
and perfect now
By Charles Tomlinson
 repetition
of similar consonant sounds,
especially at the ends of words


lost and past
confess and dismiss

By Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
This poem provides a good example of Assonance and Consonance. The “s” sound.
http://www.types-of-poetry.org.uk/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening.htm

Harrison Fuller
Repetition can be good
Repetition can be bad
Repetition can make you smile
Repetition can make you mad
To repeat a specific word
That is repetition
Repetition can take a hold
That is the repeating mission
Repetition is
Repetition is
Repetition is
Repetition is
used in life
used in speech
used in writing
in reach
To repeat a repeatable word
Gives speech a repeatable rhyme
The repeatable rhyme has a
repeatable pattern
Which is not a repeatable crime
Repetition can be annoying
Repetition can be a pain
Repetition can get better
Repetition can repeatedly gain
When an intelligent word is
repeated
It repeatedly loses its awe
Repeating it often loses value
But mild repetition adds more
Repetition will reappear
Repetition will come round
Repetition will be seen again
Repetition’s a familiar sound
I’ll repeat what I said at the
beginning
And I’ll repeat it at the end
Repetition may do some good
But it’ll send you repeatedly round
the bend
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/repetition/
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
Come on
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;
Get a clue
You know how to rhyme
Robins will wear their feathery fire
You do!
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
The adjacent poem is written by
Sarah Teasdale and is titled,
“There will come soft rains”
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Each couplet has an end rhyme.
 Words
paint pictures
 Makes experience more real for reader
 Impact of meaning enhanced
 Every word counts



Active verbs
Fun words
Meaningful adjectives
By Mary O. Fumento, 1999
Pink petals passing
Scents above so high
Painted porcelain perfection
Blossoms caress the sky
Swaying silent shroud
Suitors strolling by
Pink petals passing
Lover's gentle sigh
Pastel hues falling
Slow fluttering grace
Pink petals passing
Lining streams in lace
Pink petals passing
Smoothest transit by
Soft essence floating
In most subtle lullaby
Inducing springtime slumber
Upon a satin shore
Sailing with the current
Pink petals pass before

http://www.maryfumento.com/poetry/imagery.html
 Haiku
 Cinquain
 Limerick
 Free
verse