- [Instructor] Hello readers,
let's talk about poems.
Poetry is a special kind of writing.
If ordinary writing is like talking,
then poetry is like singing.
Poetry is a way of
making art with language.
Poems can express huge ideas or feelings
that can be about the sound
or rhythm of language.
Or they can be goofy little jokes.
It's like any other kind of writing.
Poems can be about everything
or they can be about nothing at all.
They can be funny or sad, or sweet.
They can rhyme.
They can very much not rhyme.
And all of that is, in my
opinion, absolutely wonderful.
I think of some poems as condensed ideas
that contain a lot of ideas
in small amounts of text.
So every word matters a lot.
Those are little light
bulbs representing ideas.
So I'm gonna look at a
couple of poems today
in order to describe some parts of a poem.
Let's begin with the poem,
Cat by Marilyn Singer.
Goes like this.
Cat, I prefer warm fur,
a perfect fire to lie beside,
a cozy lap where I can nap,
an empty chair when she's not there.
I want heat on my feet,
on my nose, on my hide.
No cat I remember
dislikes December inside.
So, the person who wrote
this poem, Marilyn Singer
is the poet.
For stories, the person
who writes the poem
is an author, but for
poems, the writer is a poet.
But who is telling the
poem, who's speaking?
The person whose voice we hear in a poem
is called the speaker.
Which is another thing
I like about poetry.
When you're having trouble
understanding a poem,
read it aloud.
Part of the pleasure of poetry, for me,
is hearing the words bounce
around as you say them.
And in this poem, I'm pretty
sure the speaker is a cat.
Now you'll notice there
are only three sentences
in this poem, but they're
separated in to 15 lines.
You can see these lines have anywhere
from one to four words in them.
Lines can be as long or
as short as a poet likes.
But here the poet is
creating these line breaks
to indicate pauses and rhythms.
Right, like, normally we wouldn't start
a new line here if this were prose,
which is what we call all
other forms of writing.
Prose uses normal
sentences and paragraphs.
Right, the poet is choosing
to create line breaks
in order to change the way the sentence
or the line looks on the page.
Poetry's not just about how it sounds.
Sometimes it's about how
it looks as it's written.
Now, in addition, the
poet is also using spaces
to scoot these three phrases over,
as well as this word, inside.
The words themselves are scooted in.
They're curled up and feeling cozy.
Like a cat by a fire in
the middle of December.
You'll also notice that some, but not all
of the lines rhyme with each other.
And let's take a moment
to think for a second,
what is rhyming, really?
One way to think about it
is when the ending sound
of a word matches the other
ending sound of a word,
like lap and nap.
Or when a bunch of sounds match each other
throughout a pair of words
like remember and December.
I wanna be super clear about this part,
because I was already out of high school
before I learned this thing.
But, poems don't have to rhyme.
They can, but they
definitely don't have to.
I have one more poem
part to describe to you.
And to do it, I wanna use
Billy Collins poem, Litany.
Which sounds like a fancy poem at first,
but then becomes much more conversational.
I'll end by reading the
first three stanzas,
which are these paragraph-looking things.
Not all poems are broken in to stanzas,
but this one is.
So, those are some parts of the poem.
To review, a poet writes lines.
The place where each line
ends is called a line break.
And a group of lines
together in a paragraph
is called a stanza.
The voice that tells us the
poem, the poem's narrator,
is called the speaker.
Some poems rhyme, others don't; cool.
Here's a snippet of
Litany by Billy Collins.
Litany; you are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
However, you are not
the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly
not the pine-scented air.
There was just no way that
you are the pine-scented air.
It is possible that you are
the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon
on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
There's more, but I'd love
it if you looked it up
and read it aloud yourself.
You can learn anything; David, out.
