Poetry Project #3
As for our previous poetry projects, you have a choice of several options here. The aim here is to get you thinking a bit about poetry and form, and the relationship of form to content. See Form and Poetry for help with this project.
Option 1: 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 2: 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 3: 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 4: 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.