Teaching

Poetry-Writing
Why Creative Writing?
What’s your definition of
poetry?
Jorge Luis Borges:
Poetry is something that
cannot be defined without
oversimplifying it. It would be
like defining love, the color
yellow, the fall of leaves in
autumn.
Wallace Stevens:
poetry is revelations of
words by means of words
Ben Jonson:
poetry is the craft of
making.
William Carlos Williams:
a small or large machine
made of words
W.H. Auden:
a poem is a verbal artifact
which must be as skillfully
and solidly constructed as a
table or motorcycle
Philip Sydney:
poetry is counterfeiting, a
figuring forth, to speak
metaphorically, the end of
which is to teach and delight
Coleridge:
synthetic and magical power
to which we have exclusively
appropriated the name of
imagination
Shelley:
the record of the best and
happiest moments of the
happiest and best minds
Marianne Moore:
imaginary gardens with
real toads in them
Edgar Allan Poe:
the rhythmical creation of
beauty
Langston Hughes
Poetry is the human soul
entire, squeezed like a lemon
or a lime, drop by drop, into
atomic words.
Roman Jakobson: poeticity is present
when the word is felt as a word,
and not as a mere representation
of the object being named or an
outburst of emotion, when words,
their composition, their meaning,
their external and internal form
acquire a weight and value of their
own instead of referring
indifferently to reality
Elements:
* Differs from prose by its
compression

* Frequent employment of the

conventions of meter and
rhyme

* Reliance upon the line as a

formal unit
Elements:
* Heightened vocabulary

* Freedom of syntax

* Use of metaphor and simile

Difference from prose:
1. Use of metaphorical or
figurative language
2. Concreteness, particularity,
sensuous shape (imagery)
3. Music/rhythm
4. Should not be read on its
literal sense alone
some techniques/strategies of poetry
writing:
 Subjectifying the object. Objectifying the
subject.
 Line donne.
 Unique voice. Unexpected perspectives.
 Irony.
 Tension.
 Feel for connotation.
 Imagery. Sensuous.
 And in the end….
To break all these rules at will.
That is poetry!