1. POETIC LICENSE: The liberty taken by an artist or a writer in deviating from conventional form or fact to achieve a desired effect.
A license to break free from conventional writing constraints such as grammar, proper usage, or even punctuation.
HOWEVER
The usage of your words and punctuation becomes more important. Poetry is all about impacting other people and can also be an emotional release for the writer.

2. Poetry Collection
Writer’s Notebooks (10 by the end of the marking period)
Use your WN as a place to collect your poetry.
However, any poetry we write in class will count as a writer’s notebook.
We will be writing every day that we discuss poetry. On many days you will choose the style poem that you would like to write.

3. Poetry Can Be Funny and Rhyme

5. Poetry Can Tear Down Grammatical Barriers
"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r " by E.E. Cumming

6. GRASSHOPPER, WHO, AS WE LOOK, NOW UPGATHERING INTO HIMSELF, LEAPS, ARRIVING TO BECOME, REARRANGINGLY, A GRASSHOPPER

7. Music is a Form of Poetry
Hello, it's me I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet To go over everything They say that time's supposed to heal ya But I ain't done much healing Hello, can you hear me? I'm in California dreaming about who we used to be When we were younger and free I've forgotten how it felt before the world fell at our feet

8. Simplistic Beauty that Speaks Volumes
"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams

9. Still Life with a Queen on a Starry Night by Tyler Malmstrom
(From Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night)
Not a black fire or a burning bush:
a castle.
The queen on its peak
looks down at the sleepy village.
The young children
walk the blue terrain
whistling jingles
heard on their radios.
Curfew bells ring
high up in the church.
Its steeple broadcasting
far across the wandering hills.
And the stars
graze like cattle
upon the silence.

10. Create a Poetic License

13. What’s on a license? Name (Real or Alter-Ego/Poetic Ego) Date of Issue
Expiration Date (whatever you want)
Address (Make one up or use school address)
Age
Defining Characteristics: what poetry do you like? Favorite songs? rhymes, types of poems
Signature
Picture/Creative Element
Seal or Illustrations
ON THE BACK
Write an “I Am” poem
The poetic license and “I am” poem will be due next Wednesday.
Start writing some poetry in your writer’s notebooks!

14. Sample
I am growing old I wonder if my best years are ahead I hear the bell of time chime away I see so many roads of opportunity I want to know my destiny I pretend that I can control my fate I feel the swift breath of life I touch the music streaming through my ears I cry for those that suffer alone I understand that I must occasionally alter my course I say that life is a great, yet confusing experiment I dream about people as stars, each vying for their own spot in the sky I try my hardest to convey kindness and make others happy I hope it rubs off on others

15. I am driven and determined
I wonder how many more miles are left in this race that never ends
I hear my peers encouraging me to keep going
I see myself winning a medal in the near future
I want my every task to be perfect
I pretend that my nerves are just in my imagination
I feel the adrenaline squirt through my veins
I touch my heart and feel it pounding like the beat of a drum
I worry that I will let my team down
I feel my eyes water at the thought of losing
I understand that everything happens for a reason
I say and repeat that I can get through the race
I dream about grasping onto a gold medal
I try to finish the race before my opponent  
I hope that I will finish the race in the long run

16. I am inquisitive and complex like an unsolved mystery,
I wonder If dreams are the doors to our imagination?
I hear the lonely moon calling out for a friend for I am lonely too,
I see life in the constellations,
I want to travel to all untouched wilderness and free open seas,
I pretend to sit in the clouds and watch the world below me,
Hustling and bustling with their lives and they’ll never even know me,
I feel the warm wind washing out my hair and the adrenaline rush in my gut!
I touch the clouds and they turn to rain,
I fall to the earth safe and sound again,
I worry that my loved ones will leave and I’ll go mentally insane,
I cry for the unloved and unwanted souls,
I understand I must grow up,
I say Peter Pan come save me,
I reminisce about the past and I speculate if it will effect my future,
I try to please my parents and sustain my grades,
I hope the broken past becomes history,
I am inquisitive and complex like an unsolved mystery.

17. Poetry Can Stand For a Cause
“Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell
“Justice” by Langston Hughes

18. “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wing in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky. But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage can seldom see through his bars of rage his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn and he names the sky his own But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing. The caged bird sings with a fearful trill of things unknown but longed for still and his tune is heard on the distant hill for the caged bird sings of freedom.

19. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

20. “Justice” by Langston Hughes
That Justice is a blind goddess Is a thing to which we black are wise: Her bandage hides two festering sores That once perhaps were eyes. 

21. Martin Espada “Alabanza” by Martin Espada
9/11 Poem about food service workers that passed that day.
Martin Espada reflects on success of social change in our country.

22. Ways to Create An Effect With Your Poetry
Image concentration:
Ekphrastic Poetry(write about a picture or painting), “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Play with the form and structure of your poems:
"r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r “, “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Reflect your feelings about a topic through symbolism or concentration on an image
“Alabanza”, “Justice”, “The Death of the Ball Turret “Gunner”, Caged Bird”
Reminders: Use voice, think of the intended effect you want to have on your reader. How can you achieve that effect?

23. Emotions and Symbols Through Personification
______________by Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.  Whatever I see I swallow immediately  Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.  I am not cruel, only truthful ‚  The eye of a little god, four-cornered.  Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.  It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long  I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.  Faces and darkness separate us over and over.  Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,  Searching my reaches for what she really is.  Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.  I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.  She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.  I am important to her. She comes and goes.  Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.  In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman  Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

24. Personification Poetry
An Unsold Guitar’s Lament I want to intoxicate the world
with my music;
but now
I am unloved.
In my dark tomb I wait.
and wait,
and
wait.
to have the strings of my heart
plucked,
strummed,
even pulled violently.
The pain becomes so great
as my screws and bolts
begin to rust.
My skin cracks
and my neck
strains
under the pressure of
my heart strings
and fleeting dreams.
Spring becomes winter,
leaves part from their trees,
and lovers part from each other
to find someone else;
it seems only I am left
tortured by
loneliness.

25. Humor and Deep Thinking
Billy Collins
“Simile” “Oh, My God” 7:25
Oh, My God
Not only in church and nightly by their bedsides do young girls pray these days Wherever they go, prayer is woven into their talk like a bright thread of awe Even at the pedestrian mall outbursts of praise spring unbidden from their glossy lips.

26. THE LANYARD by Billy Collins
The other day as I was ricocheting slowly off the blue walls of this room bouncing from typewriter to piano from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor, I found myself in the "L" section of the dictionary where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard.  No cookie nibbled by a French novelist could send one more suddenly into the past. A past where I sat at a workbench at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake  learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard.  A gift for my mother. I had never seen anyone use a lanyard.  Or wear one, if that’s what you did with them.  But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand  again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white lanyard for my mother.  She gave me life,  and I gave her a lanyard 
She nursed me in many a sick room,  lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,  set cold facecloths on my forehead then led me out into the airy light and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her with a lanyard.  "Here are thousands of meals" she said,  "and here is clothing and a good education."  "And here is your lanyard," I replied, "which I made with a little help from a counselor."  "Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,  strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the world." she whispered. "And here," I said, "is the lanyard I made at camp." "And here," I wish to say to her now,  "is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,  that you can never repay your mother,  but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hands, I was as sure as a boy could be  that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom  would be enough to make us even."

27. But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light
But now I am mostly at the window  watching the late afternoon light.  Back then it never fell so solemnly  against the side of my tree house,  and my bicycle never leaned against the garage  as it does today,  all the dark blue speed drained out of it.  This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,  as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.  It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,  time to turn the first big number.  It seems only yesterday I used to believe  there was nothing under my skin but light.  If you cut me I could shine.  But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,  I skin my knees. I bleed. 
On Turning Ten by Billy Collins The whole idea of it makes me feel  like I'm coming down with something,  something worse than any stomach ache  or the headaches I get from reading in bad light--  a kind of measles of the spirit,  a mumps of the psyche,  a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.  You tell me it is too early to be looking back,  but that is because you have forgotten  the perfect simplicity of being one  and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.  But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.  At four I was an Arabian wizard.  I could make myself invisible  by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.  At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.