ENGL 190 Introduction to Creative Writing

Details:
For your second assignment, you will submit 3 pages of poetry. These 3 pages may be made up of one long poem or 2 or 3 shorter poems so long as your submission takes up 3 pages in total. Your writing may stem from and elaborate on prompts we’ve done in class or you may take inspiration from our lessons, readings and discussions.

 

Your poems should showcase your understanding and command of the forms and skills we’ve covered in our poetry unit. Your writing may engage and experiment with lyric, time, the poetic “I”, the epistolary mode, address and the “you” of poetry, stanzas, line breaks, enjambment, end-stopped lines, spacing, sound, rhythm, tone, metaphor, simile, and imagery. I know poetry can feel daunting in its mysteriousness. I want to encourage you to

Directions to take your poems:
An alternate timeline:
Reimagine the outcome of an experience you’ve lived through.

Epistolary poem (letter):
Select someone you know and address a poem to them in the form of a letter. How does your unique relationship colour and shape your language choices? How will you convey the relationship between the “I” of poetry and the “you” of poetry?

Set of directions or instructions:
Drawing from the examples set by Frost, Parker and Simpson in their instructional poems, compose a set of directions or instructions that lead to a mysterious/fantastical/curious/strange place or walk your reader through a mysterious/fantastica/curious/strange activity or series of activities.

A lyric poem on the topic of your choosing:
How will you wield language in the service of expression? What feelings and ideas can you explore when you allow your poetic “I” to step outside of the constraints of linear time?

- How may I explore language in the service of expression rather than narrative?

- What can the “I” of my poem do and say that I can’t do and say in regular life?

- How does the poetic “I”/speaker come across in the poem?

- Who is the “you” of my poem? How do I address the “you”?

- How have I conveyed the relationship between the “I” and the “you”?

- How may I craft unique metaphors that bring unlikely things together to unearth an emotional truth?

- How might structure, like stanzas and line breaks, support my ideas?

- How might I play with sound (assonance, rhyme, alliteration) to support my ideas?

- How should my voice come across in my writing?

- What tones will I use in the poem? Casual or formal? Mysterious or direct? Plain or ornate?

- How have I engaged with imagery and language? Have I avoided clichés and well-worn idioms in favour of imaginative images and innovative language? If I wield clichés and wellworn idioms, do I rework them in surprising ways?

Evaluation:
I am looking for imagination and care in your poetry, both in the overall concept and at the levels of the line and word choice. I want to see you experiment with techniques and concepts we’ve studied in thoughtful ways.

 

Your assignment should critically engage with lyric, time, the poetic “I”, the epistolary mode, address and the “you” of poetry, stanzas, line breaks, enjambment, end-stopped lines, spacing, sound, rhythm, tone, metaphor, simile, and imagery.

 

And by critically engage I mean, you have thought carefully about these features in your writing and have decided how to (or how not to) integrate these features into your poetry.