Poetry

Overview

Whatever you write has sound. People hear your words in their heads, and so the sounds you create can draw people’s attention to your message. Poets use a range of musical and figurative devices to achieve their effects. Some of these effects relate to the rhythm and metre of the words. The study of rhythm, stress, and pitch in speech is called prosody. In poetry, the meter (or metre) is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse.

The process by which we create a poem may be more important than the actual poem we create.

Are we born with creativity or is it something that we can teach and develop? During the Poetry course at Warnborough College, we are going to encourage you to think about poetry and the ways in which you write. So this lesson will consist of a string of exercises that will encourage you to think about language, and how you use it. The way you use language in poetry is obviously different to the way that you talk. When talking, just like writing a poem, you use a wide vocabulary, but when writing poetry we tend to use more descriptive and emotive language.

There are a number of standard styles or formats which poems tend to follow. These include:

Poems Focused on Telling a Story:

• Ballad Style

• Monody

• Epitaph Style

Classic Styles:

• An Ode

• Sonnet

• Haiku

Haiku (also called nature or seasonal haiku) is an unrhymed Japanese verse consisting of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables (5, 7, 5) or 17 syllables in all. Haiku is usually written in the present tense and focuses on nature (seasons).

• Monorhyme

Fun & Trick Poems:

• Tongue Twister

• Limerick Style

• Shape Poetry

• Palindrome

Poems classified according to how lines are constructed & arranged:

• Quatrain Style

• Pantoum

• Acrostic Style

• Free Verse

• Villanelle