Myths About Poetry

Seven Myths about Poetry

Today there are many myths about poetry. Late last century a surge took place among young people, teens began writing more and more poetry due to new concepts like slam poetry and rap music. However, many notions about poetry were formed and seen as truth. Here are seven myths about poetry:

    * Poetry must rhyme. In fact, poetry doesn't have to rhyme. Poetry doesn't have to do anything--normally it is just good practice to have rhythm and meters. However, there are exceptions to all rules.

    * Poetry must be a set length. A poem can be as short as one letter or as long as one billion. It just doesn't matter. Actually, poetry doesn't even have to have words or letters at all. A picture or photograph, even a drawing could be considered a poem in the right circumstance.

    * Poetry requires no thinking. Actually, it does. Just like any art really. There are some people who can write poems right off the top of their head and make perfect poems; however, most of us can't. We need to think before we write and think about what we wrote, then edit, then edit some more and write some more.

    * The best poetry is written when authors are depressed. You could make the argument that more poetry is written while authors are depressed, thus the chance of better poetry due to the amount. However, even this might not be true. Many famous poets have written their best works while in love--Rumi for example.

    * Poetry must make sense. Not entirely. Most forms of poetry do need to make sense. However, dada doesn't.

    * Poetry must have correct grammar. Not even close. Of course, many who have listened to music within the past decade know this already.

    * Big words make better poems. Edgar Allan Poe is a great example to dismiss this notion. Big words should only be used when they are absolutely necessary, unless of course your purpose is to make a poem which isn't.

http://www.poemofquotes.com/articles/myths-about-poetry.php

Poem of Quotes.com

Found Poetry -- Example in The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/04/found-poetry-from-times-100-most-influential-people-list/390705/

Poem: Let Evening Come

Let Evening Come
BY JANE KENYON

Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.

The Railway Children

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like a lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

Seamus Heaney (b. 1939)

Mr. Heaney died August 30, 2013.

In 2008, Heaney told All Thing Considered that "I have always thought of poems as stepping stones in one's own sense of oneself. Every now and again, you write a poem that gives you self-respect and steadies your going a little bit farther out in the stream. At the same time, you have to conjure the next stepping stone because the stream, we hope, keeps flowing."

Poetry!

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Happy Ground Hog Day!   For breaking news, see http://www.groundhog.org/

Self-Starter:

Picture Prompts -- Children's Books?  

Finish Me-Bags

Create a Storyboard for your child's book.

View a slideshow.

Computer Lab 201
Look on the internet for poems to present.  Use the links below, or look up favorite poets.
http://www.webenglishteacher.com/poetrycollections.html


Poetry Resources for Teens  
http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/394

http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/youngpeople/

Funny Poetry for Kids
http://www.gigglepoetry.com/

http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=top_poems

Scroll down for poems to recite:

http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/86

Poetry Links for Middle School Students:  (Notice that some of these are intended for teachers and others for students.)

http://www.vrml.k12.la.us/cc/poetry/poetryms.htm


Middle School Poetry
http://middleschoolpoetry180.wordpress.com/the-poems/

Poetry 180 -- aimed at high school students
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/

Poetry from Scholastic: 

http://teacher.scholastic.com/poetry/

Look at Shel Silverstein's official site.

http://www.poetry-archive.com/collections/

More:
Selections from a book of poetry about middle school: 
http://www.kristinegeorge.com/swimming_upstream.html

Gary Soto (Look for a book of poems by Gary Soto in our classroom:  A Fire in My Hands
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/230

A poem about poetry:
http://www.educationalrap.com/song/poetry-for-life.html

And more --
http://poetry.eserver.org/
http://www.poemhunter.com/

http://brodbagert.com/pages/view/303/Unpublished-poems-Brod-wants-you-to-have

It's Poetry Month!

Here's a poem by U.S. Poet laureate, Billy Collins from  http://www.edutopia.org/trouble-poetry

The Trouble with Poetry: A Poem of Explanation

A U.S. poet laureate shares.

by Billy Collins

Billy Collins

Credit: Corbis Images

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night --
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.


And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,


and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.


But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

Billy Collins, the U.S. poet laureate from 2001 to 2003, is the author of seven collections of poetry and is a distinguished professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He serves as the poet laureate of New York State.

This article originally published on 10/18/2006

Looking for Poetry on the Internet

Some places to look for poetry:
Poetry Links
1. http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/poemiddle.htm
2. http://www.poetry4kids.com/links
3. http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/wip/types.html
4. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-list.html
5. http://www.kristinegeorge.com/swimming_upstream.html  Look at the Fold Me A Poem Poems
6.  http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/58
      Check out Gary Soto 
        If you have a dog, you might like Nelson, My Dog.
7. http://middleschoolpoetry180.wordpress.com/  Look at the categories in the right margin.
8. A rap about poetry  http://www.educationalrap.com/song/poetry-for-life.html

9. http://www.poetry-archive.com/collections/ 

10.  http://poetry.eserver.org/


11. http://www.webenglishteacher.com/poetrycollections.html

12. http://www.infoplease.com/spot/pmsites1.html


13.  http://www.bartleby.com/verse/


14. Baseball poetry   http://www.baseball-almanac.com/poems.shtml

15  http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com



Here's a poetry word you may not know: (extra credit if you can tell me about doggerel)
doggerel
a low, or trivial, form of verse, loosely constructed and often irregular, but effective because of its simple mnemonic rhyme and loping metre. It appears in most literatures and societies as a useful form for comedy and satire. It is characteristic of children's game rhymes from ancient times to the present and of most nursery rhymes.  from dictionary.com   

Select at least three poems to paste (with each URL)  on your Finding Poetry page on our class wiki.
Go to our class wiki at
http://cavewriting2011b3.pbworks.com
or
http://cavewriting2011b4.pbworks.com

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Bell-Ringer:  Bingo Prompt   B3 did Bingo A3, B4 did Bingo B2.

What is Poetry?
Today students read about, read, listened to, and viewed poetry, and created group posters to teach others about poetry.  If you are absent, create a mini-poster (8 1/2 x 11")  that is neat and legible that defines what poetry is and is not.  It could use brief examples.   

Start looking for a poem for our Poetry and Chocolate Day on February 15.  Select a poem that you REALLY like.  Song lyrics work if they are in poetic form.  (Most are!)  You will be able to look for poems on the Internet (at selected sites) for part of the time on the 9th and 11th.

November 30, 2010

Today students wrote Tritinas. These are free verse poems, each with a particular format.
Tritina comes from the Latin word for three. The poet selects three words that can hold much meaning. Those most important words are placed at the ends of lines in a specified pattern.
There are three stanzas and an envoy.
Find instructions for writing a tritina at http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/form/tritina.htm

Example:   from http://awrungsponge.blogspot.com/2007/06/beach-tritina.html

Beach Tritina

Rain, Sea, Sand

Mist rises up the beach at the edge of rain.
Surf fingers draw long scrolls of foam from the sea.
Three friends come from the city to walk across the sand.

It’s no mystery why they want to bury their toes in the sand,
Why they will drive for hours in the rain,
Why they are drawn to the sea.

Eyes fixed on the curling edge of a bottle green sea,
These three walk toward the surf over the shell-strewn sand,
Believing the sky will lighten, believing the end of rain.

They stand on the sand in the rain, staring longingly at the sea.

-Andromeda Jazmon
June 2007
 _______________________________________________

A Tritina  for Mom
You've always made time to check on me at bedtime
and to be there whenever I worry.
And I knew I could definitely count on a great dinner.

All right, so maybe I didn't always love the dinner.
And it's possible that you weren't there for every bedtime,
and there were plenty of times I made you worry.

But then, isn't it part of a mother's job to worry?
To alwayscome through, breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
And then, at the end of a long day, to be rewarded with a hug at bedtime?

I'm sorry I made you worry and haunted your dreams at bedtime, but I love you (and dinner, too).
-- by Marica Conley Carter -- from Nancy Atwell  -- Lessons That Change Writers



Another site for tritinas.

November 30, 2010

We read/listened to more poetry and students had time to discuss their children's books.

Thirteen Ways Poem

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens

---

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Document URL: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html

November 3, 2010

1. Bell-ringer:  Make a list of as many children's books (books for preschool and elementary age you have known and perhaps loved) as you can.
We shared lists.

2. Examples of Children's book and possible types of books

3. About our fieldtrip to Legacy on next Tuesday, November 9. 

4. We practiced interviewing.
 
5. We began reading Love That Dog to learn more about poetry.   We got through Frost's "Stopping By Woods. . . "
   Students have written two imitation poems in their composition books -- one for "The Red Wheelbarrow" and the other for "Stopping By Woods. . . "

October 6, 2010

1. Bell-Ringer: Create a Halloween poem using five words or phrases you draw from the envelope.  You may add words, and use the words in any order.
2. Receive Word Bank Packets -- add color words if appropriate
3. Share poems (Return word slips.)
4. Read (in small groups) short stories from The Haunted House: A Collection of Short Stories edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenberg
5. Turn in poems.
6. Discuss Word Choice:   Dead Words and Wonderful Words
7. Collecting wonderful words
8. Write a short scene inspired by great words -- one from each category except Dead Words  -- Make sure you don't use any dead words.

Scary Short Story due October 22.  We will be able to use the computer lab October 12 and 20 to get these done.

Discuss books for children.

September 1, 2010

Don't forget to bring your Me-Bag if you signed up for today:
Liam
Hannah
Rachel
Karla
Megan
Brogan
Brice
Monica
Kennedi

Bell-Ringer:  Students read a poem called "A Slice of Life" and responded to it in their composition books.
2.  We discussed the Writing Process, and students wrote about their own writing process.
3.  Students presented Me-Bags.

February 29, 2008

February 29, 2008
More poetry!
Self-starter: In your notebook, List 15 objects that are important to you.

1. About Odes.
Odes
Odes were invented around 500 B.C. by Pindar, a Greek poet.
Back then odes followed a complicated pattern of stanzas.
They were serious,
dignified,
choral songs, performed to celebrate victories,
like in the Olympic games.
In the 20th century, Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet, turned the ode upside down. [Odes to Common Things, 1994]
He
abandoned dignified topics,
discarded rules about stanzas and meter,
and sang the praises of ordinary things and everyday life:
a pair of socks, onions, apples, a tomato, ironing,
soap, a yellow bird, a spoon, French fries, a storm,
laziness.

Best advice:
You almost can’t be too extreme in your praise, so pick an object that you genuinely admire and wish to exalt.
Part of the fun lies in choosing an everyday object that we aren’t accustomed to inflating with glory.
Don’t pick stars or roses.
You could select cars or noses.
(Adapted from Nancy Atwell's Lessons That Change Writers – Lesson 43, pg. 151-152)

2. Students wrote an Ode to a Jelly Bean. (And they got to eat it!)
3. The teacher shared odes by students, herself, and by the master of the modern ode, Pablo Neruda.
Find a sampling of odes by Pablo Neruda at
http://sunsite.dcc.uchile.cl/chile/misc/odas.html

4. Students wrote and typed odes.
Here are the directions:
Writing “Irregular” Odes (Like Pablo Neruda did) Tape-In
➢ First, decide what object you would like to celebrate. Look around your classroom, visualize outside, or think of things you have around your home, or of places you visit. This works best if you choose an object you have strong feelings about.

➢ Once you’ve picked an object, think about what makes it special. How do you feel about it, and why? Be prepared to describe the object inside and out.

➢ Exaggerate its admirable qualities, until it seems to become central or necessary to human existence.

➢ Use metaphors and similes.

➢ Usually you directly address the subject of the ode: “Oh, sausage sizzling in your succulent fat,. ..”
“your crispy softness, your fierce fragrance. . . .”

➢ Tell your feelings about the subject and give exalted descriptions of its qualities: a balance.

➢ Choose strong words: language that’s packed with meaning and cut to the bone (no excess words)

➢ Keep the lines short. Make it look like a poem on the page.

➢ Now, put your creative thoughts on paper. Remember, odes can be funny or serious – it’s all up to you as the poet!
Dorsey – Creative Writing – Feb. 2008

And here is an ode by the teacher --

Ode to My Dishwasher

Standing silent
under the counter
You wait for me to
fill you
with the pots
and pans
and plates
and bowls
and forks
and spoons
we've used
to cook
and eat.
Then I add powder
like an offering
to the god of cleanliness.
I press the button
and you rumble,
swish.
You work
while I go off
to read
or play
or do my own work.
You free me from
the drudgery of
dreaded handwashing.
I can even leave the house
and you continue your
watery work,
You create a work of art --
clean, shining ceramic,
metal,
plastic.
You even sanitize,
protecting me from
disease, discomfort.
Oh, Dishwasher,
you help and save me.
I praise and thank you
after every meal.
-- C. Dorsey

February 27, 2008

February 27, 2008
We finished reading Love That Dog.
Students typed up three "inspired by" or other original poems.

Students, you should still be looking for the "perfect" poem to present for our Poetry Slam.

February 25, 2008

February 25, 2008
Students presented "Poems for Two Voices" with partners (obviously).
We read more from Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, and students wrote one or more "inspired by poems."

Write one poem "inspired by" Walter Dean Myers "Love That Boy." It could be a "Love that ___ like a ____ loves to ____." or "Hate that ______ like a ____ hates _______." or "Eat that _______ like a _______ eats _______." Follow the format of the poem -- one stanza, seven lines. Notice the rhyme scheme, too.

Love That Boy

Love that boy,
like a rabbit loves to run
I said I love that boy
like a rabbit loves to run
Love to call him in the morning
love to call him
“Hey there, son!”

by Walter Dean Myers

-- Students should be looking for (or writing) a poem to present in our Poetry Slam.

February 21, 2008

February 21, 2008
Students wrote a poem in response to the picture on the overhead (a painting).
It should be at least 4 lines.
It may or may not rhyme.
If you were absent, find a painting that intrigues you (in a book, on the Internet, etc.) and write a poem about it, meeting the above requirements, or use the painting we did by viewing it at ttp://www.bbc.co.uk/history/trail/wars_conflict/art/art_frontline_03.shtml

1. Computer Lab
We went to the computer lab today. Students who hadn't done it yet prepared their covers for their "creativity collage" packets.
Students did a Poetry Web Search. Each student was to find three poems they liked, place them on a document in Word, and print them up. See below.

2. If we had time, we read more from Love That Dog.

Creative Writing Class -- Poetry Web Search
Your mission is to find at least three poems you like by going to any of the following websites.
Copy poems you like into a Word document, and select three to print. Make sure your name and period are one the printed page(s). Save your document in your folder under
[your last name]poems.

Poetry Links
Type these exactly.
1. http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/poemiddle.htm
2. http://www.poetry4kids.com/links
3. http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/wip/types.html
4. http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-list.html
5. http://www.kristinegeorge.com/swimming_upstream.html
6. http://www.poetryamerica.com/teen-poetry-contest.asp

October 4, 2007

October 4, 2007
Students received a tape-in of "My Rambling Autobiography," and wrote a rambling biography for the self-starter.

We finished reading Love That Dog. Each student should have at least one "Inspired by" poem to type and post on the 9th.
They also received assignments for "If I Ruled the World," and "I Am From" poems. These will also be typed up next time.

October 2, 2007

October 2, 2007

Students described three different types of crackers as thoroughly as they could.

We read from Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, and imitated some of the poetry quoted there.
We'll finish reading it next time.
If you were absent, make sure you get one of the sheets of poems to imitate.