Weekly Poetry Assignment 1: Compilations and Love Poems
October 12, 2007 by John Hewitt · 27 Comments
As we discussed at the end of 30 Poems in 30 Days, I would like to continue in the spirit of the project by posting a weekly poetry assignment along with at least a few words about a poetry-related topic. The form of these posts is going to be similar, but not identical to the 30 Poems in 30 Days posts. I will still discuss poetry every week, but the topic will probably be more free form and a little less instructory. I just made that word up, do you like it? I thought about instrutorlicious, but that word had some connotations I wasn’t quite comfortable with. My point is that the topic will be poetry, but beyond that, I am giving myself some space to wander. I will also replace the “recommended poet” section with a “for further reading” section that will give me a little more flexibility there as well. These posts will appear on Fridays or Saturdays because people generally have more time to write on the weekend. With all of that said, here we go with my first new post, followed by an assignment…
I am in the process of assembling poems for a poetry collection. This was one of my goals when I started the 30 Poems in 30 Days project. I have already discussed chapbooks as an inexpensive way to publish your poetry. For myself, however, I am planning to use a print-on-demand publisher to create a paperback book with a glossy cover. I’m doing this because I want something that I can advertise and sell through the website and I want it to look as good as possible. I have a little money to spend (currently a budget of $800 but I can free up more if I need it) and I am leaning towards using Lulu, a print-on-demand service with a good reputation and a lot of options. I have also found an excellent photographer, David Hwang, to help me in the creation cover art. I encourage you to check out his work.
Choosing poems for my collection has been an interesting experience in time travel. I have never published a book, so I feel like I need to consider all of my poems (or at least all that I can find) for this collection. Unfortunately, my perspective on some of the poems is skewed. The poems I wrote about love and relationships before I met my wife now seem dated and unfamiliar. My perspective has changed. That doesn’t necessarily mean the poems are good or bad. It just means that they don’t express what I feel now. This makes them hard to judge. Will I leave a good poem out because I don’t feel like it doesn’t match my current thinking? That’s a risk, and demonstrates why it is important to publish regularly rather than occasionally.
I currently have about 25 poems that I am sure I want in the book and another 30 or so that I am also considering. I figure I’ll publish around 40 once I make my final decisions. That should make for a reasonable length without pushing expenses too high. For now I need to keep rereading my work, making some edits and removing a few more poems from the list until I get a collection I am comfortable with. With luck, by next week I will have settled on the collection and start working with Lulu. I also have a photography session for the cover coming up. More on that next week…
This Week’s Poetry Assignment
Write a syllabic verse poem about a love or relationship topic. It may have as many stanzas as you like, but the composition of each stanza should be:
8 syllables
8 syllables
6 syllables
6 syllables
4 syllables
4 syllables
Good luck. I look forward to reading everyone’s work!
For Further Reading:
You can read more about syllabic verse at Wikipedia. You may also be interested in learning more about the study of verse form in this article about Prosody and Metrics. If you are looking for a place to submit and read poetry, check out Web Del Sol, the best collection of poetry magazines on the web.
30 Poems in 30 Days Index
October 4, 2007 by John Hewitt · 6 Comments
Below is an index to our 30 Poems in 30 Days Project.
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Why you should write poetry
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Writing About Yourself
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Writing About Issues
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Poetry of Place
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Persona Poems
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Developing Your Voice
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: About Forms and Lists
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Elegies and Memories
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: A Brief Glossary of Meter
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: The Good the Bad and the Meter
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Courting Controversy
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Syllabic Verse
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: What is Your Writing Process?
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Repetition
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Imagism
- 30 poems in 30 Days: Review Your Old Work
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: The Constraint as a Tool
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Joining the Community
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: About the Line
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Staying Positive
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Progression
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Breaking the Rules
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Confessional Poetry
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Say What You Want to Say
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Poetry Contests
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Free Verse
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Finding New Ways To Stay Inspired
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Word Choice
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: A Little Advice
- 30 Poems in 30 Days: Collaboration
30 Poems in 30 Days: Imagism
September 18, 2007 by John Hewitt · 22 Comments
This is Day 15 of 30 Poems in 30 Days
The Imagism Movement
For the past week or so we have been discussing meter and rhythm as a framework for creating poetry. Today I want to move in another direction. The use of the image as the primary driving force behind your poem. Image driven poetry began with the Imagism movement in the early twentieth century. The movement began with poets such as Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and eventually dovetailed into the Modernist movement as exemplified by T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for which Ezra Pound was the editor.
There are three basic rules that the imagists followed:
- Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective.
- To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
- As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome.
Ezra Pound’s most famous application of this concept was the poem:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
The concept, as exemplified in Metro, was to reduce a poem down to its most essential images, leaving out all the chaff that traditional poetry, especially iambic pentameter, seems so prone to. This does not mean that most poems should only be two lines, but rather that poetry should not waste time or space.
The Imagist and Modernist movements began the path that eventually led to today’s widespread use of free verse over meter and rhyme. While the Imagist movement itself was fairly short-lived and not widely embraced (Wallace Stevens famously commented that “Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this”) it opened up the possibilities of poetry and influenced future movements such as the Objectivists and the Beats.
Today’s Poetry Assignment
Write a poem that follows the three rules of the imagists.
Today’s Featured Poet
Jane Gentry is the poet Laureate for the state of Kentucky, and her poetry is strongly influenced by the region. She writes poems about nature, family, and the everyday world. I felt she was appropriate for today discussion because the title poem of her newest work, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig, is a reference to one of the original modernists, James Joyce.
Books
Portrait of the Artist As a White Pig
Sample poems, including Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig
30 Poems in 30 Days: Syllabic Verse
September 15, 2007 by John Hewitt · 22 Comments
This is Day 12 of 30 Poems in 30 Days
As previously discussed, there are many types of poetic meters and forms. One of the most straightforward is syllabic verse. Syllabic verse sets a specific number of syllables per line or per stanza, but does not focus on stressed or unstressed feet. This type of meter has been more popular in languages with less of a focus on stressed syllables, such as Japanese and Spanish. Haiku, with its pattern of five, seven and five syllables, is one of the most common examples of syllabic meter.
The benefit of syllabic meter in English language poetry is that it is less restrictive than meters that focus on stressed and unstressed feet. Syllabic verse gives a poem structure, but avoids the patterned, sometimes singsong qualities of popular English meters such as iambic or dactyl. Syllabic meters can be as simple as ten syllables per line and can grow quickly in complexity from there.
Those who dislike syllabic meter feel that it doesn’t provide real structure, that the English language is far more focused on stressed and unstressed syllables than on the number of syllables. Their contention is that most people don’t notice the number of syllables in a line, only the number of stresses, therefore, determining line length solely by the number of syllables is meaningless.
In my opinion, syllabic meter is a reasonable poetic compromise between image-based lines and metered poetry. While length-based word choice still enters into consideration when writing syllabic verse, you don’t have to torture yourself trying to replace the most appropriate word with one that fits the meter. Syllabic verse “looks” like poetry because the line length is patterned, but it allows you the freedom to experiment within the line.
Today’s Poetry Assignment
Write a poem using syllabic verse. You can assign length ether by line or stanza. If you are stuck for a way to begin, start with this two-word ten-syllable line:
Incompatible Participation
Today’s Recommended Poet
Jon Anderson was one of my first poetry instructors when I was in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. He doesn’t publish as often as I wish he would, but his 2001 book, Day Moon
On the web:
Exiled On Mountain, Bewail Fate & Praise Autumn
30 Poems in 30 Days: The Good the Bad and the Meter
September 13, 2007 by John Hewitt · 23 Comments
This is Day 10 of 30 Poems in 30 Days
Thoughts on Meter
I rarely focus on meter when I write poetry. In my college days I took many of my style cues (though not my content cues) from William Carlos Williams, Charles Bukowski and others who wrote in an imagistic style. Meter will always have a place in poetry, but in the 20th century the move was away from forms and meter and towards less structured styles. The beauty of poetry though, is that there is room for everyone. If you want to write sonnets, you are still welcome at the party. If you want to write stream-of-consciousness free verse, that’s fine too. People who rhyme? Well that’s kind of like inviting smokers to the party. You still like them; you just wish they would stop (that’s a joke).
Here are some arguments for and against the use of meter and form:
What are the reasons to use meter?
- It adds structure. It is a framework on which you can build a poem.
- It forces you to think about word choice and word order. This helps you develop and reinforce language skills.
- By dividing a poem into beats and feet, you create the same patterns as music. For many, this musical quality is one of the primary reasons to listen to poetry.
- It was the choice of poetic masters for thousands of years and some consider it to be the only true poetry.
What are the reasons to avoid meter?
- Structure adds predictability. I love Emily Dickinson, but I am distracted by the fact that I can sing any of her poems to the tune of “Yellow Rose of Texas”.
- Meter can force you to avoid the most meaningful word or phrase in favor of a word that “fits”.
- Meter often forces people to use “padding” words to fill out a line.
- After 4000 years of iambic pentameter, we could use a little break.
There is nothing wrong with writing poetry in a metered form. Just don’t become a slave to the meter. Also, be bold enough to move beyond iambic pentameter to some of the lesser used and often more interesting styles of meter.
Today’s Assignment
Write a three or more stanza poem that uses a metered style for the first two stanzas and a non-metered format for the remaining stanzas. As always, feel free to post your poem in the comments section for others to see.
Today’s Recommended Poet
Sarah Vap is a new poet who published her first two books this year. Her poetry combines her knowledge of the rural west with spirituality and a distinct feminine perspective. Her language is direct and rich. While she does not write in forms, meter and rhythm clearly have a strong influence on her poetry.
Poems on the web:
Books:
American Spikenard
Dummy Fire
30 Poems in 30 Days: A Brief Glossary of Meter
September 12, 2007 by John Hewitt · 16 Comments
This is Day 9 of 30 Poems in 30 Days
Terms You Should Know
In order to have an intelligent discussion of meter, it is necessary to set forth a few preliminary definitions. These should be enough terms to get us started. You might also want to read the WRC article Rhythm and Stress by Gwyneth Box.
Poetic Meter: Word choices that create a pattern of sounds, stresses, word lengths, syllables, or beats that are repeated to create a line of poetry. In English the focus is generally on stresses and beats, but all patterns make for possible meters and other languages often focus on different types of patterns.
Beat: The smallest reducible part of a meter, such as a syllable.
Foot: A repeated unit of meter – usually two, three or four beats.
Stressed Syllable: The syllable a speaker emphasizes in speech. Shown here in Capital letters: CARpet, RABbit, oPEN, PATsy. Stressed syllables are also called long syllables.
Unstressed Syllable: The syllable a speaker demphasizes in speech. Shown here in lowercase letters: CARpet, RABbit, oPEN, PATsy. Unstressed syllables are also called short syllables.
Additional Terms
Amphibrach: A foot that consists of a stressed syllable between two unstressed syllables. This meter is most commonly seen in limericks. There ONCE was a HAPpy young PASTor.
Anapest: A foot that consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a long syllable such as Double UP double DOWN.
Choriamb: A foot that consists of four syllables: stressed,-unstressed,-unstressed,-stressed such as FIGHT for your RIGHTS.
Dactyl: A foot that consists of a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. HAPpily
Dimeter: A meter that consists of two feet.
Elegiac Meter: A meter that consists of two lines (a couplet) the first in dactylic hexameter and the second in dactylic pentameter.
Heptameter: A meter that consists of seven feet
Hexameter: A meter that consists of six feet
Iamb: A foot comprising an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable such as TYrant. This is the most commonly used foot in English poetic meter.
Iambic Pentameter: A meter that consists of five feet of iambs. This is the meter common to sonnets, epics and Shakespearian plays.
Molossus: A foot that consists of three stressed syllables such as SHORT SHARP SHOCK.
Octameter: A meter that consists of eight feet
Pentameter: A meter that consists of five feet
Tetrameter: A meter that consists of four feet
Trimeter: A meter that consists of three feet
Trochee: A foot that consists of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable such as PLAYpen.
Today’s Assignment
Write a poem using a specific meter. The meter can be of your own choosing or even your own making, as long as you put a pattern into place. As always, feel free to post your poem in the comment section of this post.
Today’s Recommended Poet
Diane Lockward is a poet, teacher and an active blogger. Her poetry is feminine and feminist. She is smart and funny. Here poetry probes the politics of family, motherhood and food with affection and a bit of exasperation.
What Feeds Us
Eve’s Red Dress
You might also want to read her blog enries about voice vs. tone here and here.
