1. By Winona Siegmund Stafford County Public Schools Fall 2016
The Poem’s the Thing
By Winona Siegmund
Stafford County Public Schools
Fall 2016

2. Objectives Students will be able to do all of the following:
Analyze poetry for poetic devices, concerns of the speaker, and theme
Scan and create anapestic and iambic meter
Recognize and create metaphors
Organize ideas around a theme
Create a children’s poetry book

3. Repetition and variation attract us to poetry
Repetition and variation attract us to poetry. Structure, Sound and Sense, 9th ed.

4. What is Poetry?

5. “I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is prose: words in their best order; - poetry: the best words in the best order.”
~ S.T.Coleridge,

6. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Emily Dickinson,

7. ~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered
“Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air.  Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable.  Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.” 
~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered
living-on

8. “Poetry is life distilled.” ~Gwendolyn Brooks

9. “Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful
“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”  ~Rita Dove

10. “If it doesn't work horizontally as prose
“If it doesn't work horizontally as prose... it probably won't work any better vertically pretending to be poetry.” ~Robert Brault,

11. Bob Dylan, 2016 Nobel Prize Winner,
“Everybody has their own idea of what's a poet. Robert Frost, President Johnson, T.S.Eliot, Rudolf Valentino - they're all poets. I like to think of myself as the one who carries the light bulb.”
Bob Dylan, 2016 Nobel Prize Winner,

12. What is poetry’s function?

13. Cathy Park Hong
“I always believed that poetry is capable of being anything and prefer to keep that question open-ended. It's more that my ideas have changed about what poetry should do. When I was younger, I used to be more idealistic about poetry's function in society—that political action and intervention were possible via restructuring of language.

14. But now, I think maybe it's enough that poetry can nourish individual consciousness or, to put it another way, maybe it's enough that poetry's primary purpose is to make people feel things. Then I change my mind.”

15. Rhythm = “the flow of actual pronounced sound” (All definitions are from Perrine’s Structure, Sound and Sense, 9th ed. by Thomas Arp)
Meter = “the patterns that sounds follow when a poet has arranged them into metrical verse”

16. Duple = 2 beat meters = iambic and trochaic
Triple = 3 beat meters = anapestic and dactylic

17. Stressed syllables are marked with an ictus = /
Unstressed syllables are marked with a breve = u

18. Reminders for Scansion
u / = Iambs = persuade, beside, pursue
/u = Trochees = mostly, frequent
// = Spondee = hobnob
uu/ = Anapest = understand, comprehend
/uu = Dactyls = beautiful, destiny
Feet names = 2 – dimeter; 3 – trimeter; 4 – tetrameter; 5 – pentameter; 6 - hexameter

19. Tips:
When working on scansion, read the line aloud – more than once if possible.
If you unsure about a word’s pronunciation, look it up on a website such as dictionary.com where there is pronunciation available.
Count the syllables. Be sure in counting the syllables that you pronounce the word correctly—an on-line dictionary will help.

20. When creating your own anapestic or iambic lines, you want to focus on one and two syllable words (you may use longer words where appropriate)
Establish a rhyme scheme
Establish the number of feet in a line—most use tetrameter, but pentameter will also work.

21. Other Devices to Review & Include
Musical devices = alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia
Imagery = visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory
Key Figurative Devices = metaphor, simile, irony, personification, paradox
Rhyme Scheme = repeating letters for matching sounds = run/fun, aa

22. To quote Dr. Seuss... “Congratulations! Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!”