Human/Nature

Poetry Project
Due: Thursday, Feb. 27
th
and Tuesday, March 4
th

15% of overall grade
This assignment will allow you to explore and express your personal view of nature using
the artistic medium of poetry. In order to help you do this, you will be led through a
number of exercises in mentor session that will help you create a variety of poems. For
the final project will be you selecting one to two poems to be included in a mentor poetry
book.
The specific exercises that will enable you to get at the skills needed for effective poetry
writing are:
the picture frame exercise which will help you develop the descriptive power of
language.
the metaphor exercise in which a disparate object is used as a metaphor for nature to
help you make abstract ideas of nature more concrete.
the creative exercise where you will describe the natural by creatingdescribing a
creature that is not natural. In essence, helping you understand something by looking
at its opposite.
the model exercise in which you will take an existing poem and write your poem on
top of it paying attention to parts of speech and word forms.
From these exercises you should be able to create a number of poems. !s a mentor
session, you should come up with at least "# poems with each student contributing at
least one poem to the project. These "# poems should have some common idea or theme
which emerges from them. Then as a collective, you should compile these poems in a
book of poems decorated and organi$ed as you see fit to reflect this theme.
%ecause I want you to explore and feel free to go where you need to with this, your grade
will be based on the satisfactory completion of the project as a mentor session rather than
an individual assessment of the poems within the book. The grading will be based on
whether I can tell that thought and effort went into the construction of the book as well as
the presentation of the poems themselves. &ach poetry project should coalesce into some
metaphor that emerges from the poems you chose.
These books will be presented and the poems read in class on Thursday, Feb.'(
th
and
Tuesday, )ar. *
th
.