Poetry in Motion…in Class

 

After completing the previous unit in Humanities class (on worldviews and religions), I thought we were done with it. I was quite mistaken, as another course came up on poetry, specifically worldview poetry. A substitute teacher came in for a week and taught us all about poems, terms, and how to apply our worldviews. In total, I wrote nine poems, everyone about a different part of my worldview. Throughout the whole time, everyone worked on a book that contained all these poems, featuring different creations from apps. As well as a book, we also all kept a running list of all the terms we would learn over the course of the next week.

 

The class began with looking at similes and clichés, and how they can be clever or expected. Taylor and I did a quick activity on making new similes, and it ended up silly, just like everyone else’s. The poem I wrote featuring similes was how I would explain parts of your worldview, and comparing them as best I could.

Following similes were metaphors, extended metaphors, in fact. An extended metaphor is basically an excuse for excessive writers (like myself) to go a long tangent about comparing two things in the form of poetry. The class read a couple of great examples, then I set to work on creating my own poem. Of course it was on worldview, so I related mine to a castle.

Haaaaaiiiiiiikuuu was next up. If you’ll remember correctly, these are just short, three line poems following the syllable pattern of 5, 7, 5. I actually found haikus one of the harder ones to write because I use way to many words, and limiting them is seems impossible sometimes. Managing to write three in the end, my haikus were about my friendships and family.

We then moved right on to something called a found poem. These are quite fun to write, or find more appropriately because these poems are made from already exit sign pieces of literature that aren’t poetry. Below is an example of a poem made from the book Holes, taking certain words and arranging then to make poetry. After scouring the web for people talking about their worldviews, I came across an article explaining how to talk to other people who don’t have the same beliefs as you. Thinking this was good enough, I set to work find words I thought best described the definition of worldview and a bit of my own as well.

The fifth poems we looked at were ones all about imagery and writing about all five senses. The class looked at some poems and tried to find examples of alliteration, assonance, repetition and mood. I circled some then answered some questions that got me thinking how I would present a clear mental image to whoever would read my imagery poem. I write about being in Paris at night.

Probably the funniest poems out there are sound poems. These use euphony, cacophony and onomatopoeia. They feel silly just saying them out loud. I know this because the class got in groups and received a poem to read out. All my groups consisted of was the words ping pong repeated five times. For my own poem, I decided that since living in the city of Vancouver shaped a large part of my worldview it would be cool to write some sounds I hear when going out.

The next poems we looked at were experience poems and how they conveyed moods. After reading examples and answering questions, I set to work on my own experience poem about the night of a concert I had been working hard on. I chose this experience because music is a large part of my worldview.

Growing close to the end of this project, the class encountered to poetic personification poem (a bit of alliteration there). If you aren’t familiar with the term, it means to give objects how man characteristics. For example; “The tall weeping willow stretched its long fingers out to the running wind”. We read a couple more poems about this theme then proceeded to become personifiers ourselves. I thought taking the reader through normal day in my life would be interesting, but I wrote it as though my worldview was a person following my body around.

Last and most selfish is the self-portrait poem! Quite self-explanatory, the final 25 line poem I made was all about myself (like the rest of the book wasn’t already). I didn’t go into very deep levels, and instead just wrote about things I like and dislike using alliteration.

All right, so nine poems later, I was done! I thought being made to wrote about our beliefs and ideas was good thing in the end because it forced me to make actual sentences out of the many thoughts all jumbled in my head. Poetry has never been my favourite, yet I don’t detest it either, and making my own book from scratch was fun as well. Maybe after reading this, you learned something too, like I did over and over again in this unit.