Poetry Portfolios

This afternoon, please read the short chapter on "Revision" by Mary Oliver. After reading silently and chatting a moment as a class, please complete the following tasks today:

CLASSWORK:
Last class we started this in pairs or small groups. Please return and complete the assignment, then move on to the "writing task" described below.

FOR EACH POEM, please analyze and write 3-10 sentences about what you found in the poem by identifying any of the following: SOUND devices (alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, rhyme), DICTION (tone, mood, voice, etc.), LINE (meter, enjambment, rhyme, stanza form), IMAGERY (metaphor, simile, personification, allusion, figurative language). After completing this analysis, please turn in your work for participation credit.

My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke   

  The whiskey on your breath
  Could make a small boy dizzy;
  But I hung on like death:
  Such waltzing was not easy.
 
  We romped until the pans
  Slid from the kitchen shelf;
  My mother's countenance
  Could not unfrown itself.
 
  The hand that held my wrist
  Was battered on one knuckle;
  At every step you missed
  My right ear scraped a buckle.
  
  You beat time on my head
  With a palm caked hard by dirt,
  Then waltzed me off to bed 
  Still clinging to your shirt.

From: The Eve of Saint Agnes by John Keats 

I.   ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told	5
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Preludes by T.S. Eliot

I THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps	5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,	10
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer	15
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,	20
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms. WRITING TASK/Completing your revisions & poetry portfolio: Collect ALL your poems you wrote for exercises in MODULE 1 or during Marking Period One. Print out each poem and call these draft 1. THEN: after printing your work, go back through your written poems and add imagery, sound devices, fix diction, add tone, create line and meter patterns, and/or REVISE your work. Call these poems draft 2. You may, of course, ask a partner or trusted ally to give you some feedback between draft one and two. By helping each other, you are helping yourself. Of course, you may find that your "partner" is not really helping you, but distracting you. Try to notice the difference. HOMEWORK: None.