What is Poetry?

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What is Poetry?

• Creative Writing
• Ms. Bilskemper

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Websters 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.
• Lets translate

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Concentrated

• Poetry is usually concise and doesnt take up
  pages and pages

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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 thats carefully
  crafted

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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.

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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.

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Sound and rhythm

• The flow and music of lines and sentences is what
  makes a poem a poem

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Poetic Techniques
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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

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Blank Verse

• Unrhymed poetry
• Usually iambic pentameter
• Captures the natural rhythm of speech

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Catalogue Technique

• Its nothing more than a list, but used wisely ?

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Figurative Language

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

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Image

• A word that appeals to one or more of the senses

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Meter

• A poems rhythmical pattern
• Foot a pattern of stressed and unstressed
  syllables (either two or three)
• Most common iambic pentameter
• 1 stressed, 1 unstressed 5 feet

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Onomatopoeia

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

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Rhyme

• Internal rhyme
• End rhyme

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Poetic Forms
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Ballad

• A story told in song form
• Words are simple
• Has a strong beat
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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Epics

• Long narratives in an elevated style
• High born characters that go on adventures
• Depict key event in history
• Homers Iliad, Odyssey

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Free Verse

• Poetry without a regular rhyme and meter

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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

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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

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Lyrical Poetry

• Short, emotional poems
• Most poems of all natures fall into this
  category.

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Narrative Poetry

• Tells a story through a storyline or through a
  dramatized situation

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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

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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.