1. Creative Writing Ms. Bilskemper
What is Poetry?
Creative Writing
Ms. Bilskemper

2. Webster’s dictionary definition…
Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.
Let’s translate…

3. Concentrated
Poetry is usually concise and doesn’t take up pages and pages

4. Imaginative
Poetry is not a factual report. If you do report on something, you must do it in an unusual or compelling way, with language that’s carefully crafted

5. Chosen and arranged
You choose the words you use in a poem and think hard about why you use them; certain words may flow together better, certain sounds may evoke a particular emotional response.

6. Emotional
A poem should elicit an emotional response. Anyone can put lines on a page, but few people can elicit an emotional response from a stranger.

7. Sound and rhythm
The flow and music of lines and sentences is what makes a poem a poem

8. Poetic Techniques

9. Alliteration
Repetition of initial consonant sounds in several words in a sentence or line of poetry
Used to create musical effects, link related ideas, stress certain words, or mimic specific sounds

10. Blank Verse Unrhymed poetry Usually iambic pentameter
Captures the natural rhythm of speech

11. Catalogue Technique
It’s nothing more than a list, but used wisely 

12. Figurative Language
Words and expressions not meant to be taken literally.
Appeal to the imagination
Similes
Metaphors
Hyperbole
Personification

13. Image
A word that appeals to one or more of the senses

14. Meter A poem’s rhythmical pattern
Foot – a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables (either two or three)
Most common – iambic pentameter
1 stressed, 1 unstressed – 5 feet

15. Onomatopoeia Use of words to imitate the sound they describe
Used to create a musical effect and to reinforce meaning

16. Rhyme
Internal rhyme
End rhyme

17. Poetic Forms

18. Ballad A story told in song form Words are simple Has a strong beat
“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

19. Epics Long narratives in an elevated style
High born characters that go on adventures
Depict key event in history
Homer’s Iliad, Odyssey

20. Free Verse
Poetry without a regular rhyme and meter

21. Haiku Japanese poetic form with three lines that total 17 syllables
1,3 lines have 5 syllables
2 line has 7 syllables
Often about nature, spiritual insight

22. Limerick One type of humorous poetry
Five lines and a strong rhyme: a-a-b- b-a
Rhyming words sometimes misspelled to create humor
Usually bawdy and involve buckets and girls from Nantucket…

23. Lyrical Poetry Short, emotional poems
Most poems of all natures fall into this category.

24. Narrative Poetry
Tells a story through a storyline or through a dramatized situation

25. Sonnet Lyric poem of 14 lines written in iambic pentameter
PETRARCHAN / ITALIAN
Octave – the first 8 lines that rhyme a-b-b-a, a-b-b-a
Present a problem
Sestet – last 6 lines that rhyme c-d-e, c-d-e
Resolve the problem

26. Sonnet cont… ELIZABETHAN / SHAKESPEREAN Same format as previous sonnet
Rhyme changed to a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g
First 12 lines describe the problem and the final couplet resolves the problem.