Poetry Project
To complete your poetry requirement, complete any 2 or more of the following exercises.
Option 1: Doomed Republics
Write a free verse poem about some significant, puzzling, terrifying, or otherwise intriguing event, person, or place in your childhood.. Rely almost exclusively on concrete language and images, letting the details speak for themselves. Do not editorialize about your subject or explain it; simply describe or reenact it as accurately and as vividly as you can, using your senses.
Be sure especially to avoid sentimentality: writing which evokes predictable, obvious, and pre-digested emotion; writing which is trite, cheesey, or cute; writing in which emotion "is in excess of its object." Write a poem instead which discovers NEW feelings and surprises your reader (and yourself).
Option 2: The Luminous Object
At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement.
(Ray Carver, "On Writing.")
Write a free verse poem about an object. Describe it with as much specific, intense, concrete detail as possible, using all of your senses. Keep reflection and explanations to a minimum. Simply make the object vivid and present through language, respecting its thingness. Help your reader (and yourself) see this thing as never before.
It might be interesting (but isn't mandatory) to imagine your chosen object from some very unusual perspective—that of an animal, for instance, or someone from another country or planet. (A creative writing student once wrote about a rifle, for example, from the perspective of a deer, calling it "a branch that barks." )
Another tip: pick an object which intrigues you or puzzles you or even bugs you in some way. DO NOT pick something whose meanings to you are obvious.
Option 3: The Love Poem
Write a poem addressed to a person, place, or thing that you love.
Option 4: The Hate Poem
Write a poem addressed to a person, place, or thing that you hate. Your objective is to make your reader love the thing you hate.
Option 5: In My Craft or Sullen Art
Write a sonnet, a sestina, or a villanelle. Or write a poem in blank verse, at least 25 lines long. (See Form and Poetry.)
Option 6: In My Craft or Sullen Art (II)
Make up your own fixed form for a poem, limiting yourself in terms of at least four of the following items:
1) number of lines per stanza
2) rhyme scheme
3) pattern of stresses in each line
4) pattern of syllables in each line
5) repeated words
6) repeated lines
7) mandatory words or phrases
First describe the rules of your invented form, then
write a poem accordingly.
Option 7: The Big Country
Take one of your already-completed free verse poems and rewrite it with completely different line and/or stanza breaks. (You might try completely arbitrary breaks, as well as breaks which adhere to some definite principle.) Reflect a bit on why you broke the lines the way you did in the original version, then consider what this rewrite does to help or harm the poem. And be sure to draw on our discussion of form in free verse for your reflective comments.
Hand in both the original, the rewrite, and a short paragraph discussing what happened to the piece in its new version.
Option 8: The Visual Tradition
Like oral verse, visual poetry has also been around since antiquity. Early in the 20th century, Brazilian "concretists" gave the genre a big kick, and it is now flourishing in the form of electronic, new media poetry-art. The resources of digital media are of course really great for any kind of visual art, and new media poets are now experimenting with poems that include animation, audio, and interactivity with the reader.
We'll do a quick electronic survey of this sort of poetry in class, and for this option you'll create your own new media work. This means that you can produce anything from a visual poem with simple, hardcopy paper materials—to a complex work produced in Photoshop and Flash, and meant to be viewed on a computer screen. (If you decide to do the latter, be sure to get an early start, as this kind of work can be time-consuming and sometimes glitch-prone.) If your work includes a CD or DVD, you'll simply add that to your semester portfolio. (If would be good, too, to present this to the class.)
Check out some interesting resources here.
Option 9: Ham Sandwich
Taking into account class discussion on surrealism, and after exploring the topic in a good encyclopedia and on the Web, write a surrealist poem.
Helpful links:
Surrealism (from the Literary Encyclopedia)
Option 10: Ekphrasis
Write a poem based on a work of visual art. Your poem can interpret, reflect on, free-associate from, or simply describe the art work in some interesting way. It's up to you— just try for a thoughtful, surprising, and intense response to the work of art.
Option 11: Governor's School: The Low-Down
Write a poem about your Gov School experience. Provide good, interesting SPECIFIC details, avoid clichés, and be honest (while remaining sensitve to your audience!).
back to Gov School CW Schedule