Aim: How can we define the literary value of poetry?
Do Now: The do now from the lesson read as follows-
Consider your prior experiences you’ve had when reading poetry (good and bad).
What are some of the challenges you and/or others can experience while reading poetry?
Consider the following question:
What does poetry mean to you?
The class was given some time to think about the do now, and we then started a class discussion on the topic. After hearing some students’ answers, it was pretty evident that most of us had relatively the same opinion on poetry. Most people did not understand poetry and therefore, many people did not enjoy reading it. Some people found the figurative language most confusing, others found the complex vocabulary most difficult to understand, but we all relatively felt the same about poetry.
After wrapping up the class discussion, we watched a youtube video. We were able to see a lot of insight on what poetry really was:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwhouCNq-Fc&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=TED-Ed
The video starts off by talking about how Muhammed Ali gave a speech to Harvard about unity and friendship in 1975. Upon the end of his speech, the students requested a poem, and out came the shortest poem ever.
“Me, we”
Well if two words can make a poem, then what exactly is a poem?
Although most people and even most poets cannot tell you what a poem is, we are able to see certain characteristics in most, if not all, poems.
One of these characteristics is the emphasis of the language’s musical qualities. This is shown through rhyme, rhythm, and meter.
Two other characteristics are that poems use condensed language, and that poems often feature intense feelings, whether they be good feelings or bad ones.
Poetry can be written in many different forms; it has a way of challenging simple definitions. While early poems were written rhythmically, poems do not need to be lyrical. We see many poets, such as E.E. Cummings utilize shapes into their poems instead.
One other very noticeable aspect of poetry is the line breaks. These line breaks help the readers to navigate through the rhythms of the poem. But what if we removed those line breaks?
Well, the poem could still keep its essence. A type of poetry, called prose poetry, uses vivid images and wordplay, yet staying formatted in paragraphs.
Below is an example of a prose poem:
Being able to look at poetry as more of a concept rather than a form, we will be able to see the poetry all around us.
Poetry has developed greatly over the years, and the line between poetry, prose, song, and visual art has blurred.
Poets work with the bare materials of the world to form and write new understandings of the world. They write about what it is to be human in a way that only humans can.
After a brief discussion on the video, we moved on to talking about a new aspect of poetry- rhyming.
Contrary to popular belief, we learned that poems do not actually have to rhyme. It is only a literary choice that can be overlooked. It is not what makes a poem a poem.
A new type of poetry that we started looking into is free verse. Free verse is poetry without a fixed pattern of meter and rhyme.
We watched a short video on free verse to get more of an insight on what it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnlwOn94uJs&ab_channel=AaronPoems
Below is an example shown in the video:
The video tells us that free verse poetry does not base itself around rhyming, syllable count, or a certain number of lines. It is a form of a poet’s thoughts and expression, while shaping it in any way they personally prefer.
The poet may still use literary elements such as personification, alliteration, rhyme, and the rhythm of language to create feeling.
Free verse has no rules- it can be of any length and on any topic.
Upon finishing the video, we moved on to read other examples of free verse poems.
The first poem we read was “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman:
Stop this day and night with me, and you
shall possess the origin of all poems;
You shall possess the good of the earth and
sun... (there are millions of sun left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or
third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead,
nor feed on the spectres in books;
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides, and filter them from yourself.
We then read “Poetry” by Pablo Neruda while annotating diction, imagery, figurative language, and any other additional literary elements that stand out to us:
:
And it was at that age … poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
5 no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
10 among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
15 had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
20 and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
25 nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
30 unfastened and open,
planets
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
35 with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
40 likeness, image of mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Once we read both poems, we were put into breakout rooms in groups to discuss and complete this chart on different definitions of poetry we have seen:
Above is the chart that I filled out with the people in my group.
We were told to discuss what our class thought of poetry, and then what authors Whitman and Neruda thought of poetry, based off of the poems we read of theirs.
After 10 minutes, we were sent back to the main zoom lesson, and we had a whole class discussion on our answers. Most of us had written similar things for each column of the chart.
Reflection:
In today’s lesson, I was able to learn more about poetry. I learned that it is a broad concept that cannot be tied down to one definition. Poems show a person’s understanding of the world- their understanding of what it’s like to be human. But there are so many different aspects of poetry and different forms of poetry that we see written. Poems are a person’s expression of their thoughts and feelings, and it can be shown in any way shape or form. Poetry is not even an actual form, it’s a concept that it is worth understanding. We can see poetic forms of thought almost everywhere.
I also learned some types of poetry. One type of poetry is prose poetry, which are poems formatted in paragraphs. I would not have even thought that poems could be written that way. The other type of poetry we learned about is free verse, which I find to be a great form of poetry. It has no rules or standards, it is just the poet’s form of thought. Poetry is an amazing expression of art and of writing, which I had not considered learning about before this lesson.
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