Advice essential!

[_riotproof]

My honors poetry assignment is to write a weekly paper in any format concerning the question 'What is poetry?'. I wrote a paper last week that the teacher didn't like. Because of that and other reasons, I'm in threat on being kicked out of class. Anyway, I decided to do Tuesday's paper as a poem. It needs to be fantastic because not only am I already being a failure, this teacher is writing my college rec.

There are footnotes to sources given to us in a twenty two page packet on poetry (mostly consisting of poems).

Some of this poem is similiar to what I had before...but I needed to work off something!

Mr. Sternstein is my teacher's name.

Please help me!

So This is What Makes A Poem… - By Rachel

You told me to write

Is it really that simple?

Syncopated meter

Word choice. Let the Words be you.

Or be them. See I’m seventeen. At twelve I confused

a poem with anarchy. I fell in love. It was brutal. I believed

that words could be fingered to best suit my needs.

But words finger you instead

If you can’t find the balance between definition

and discontent.

Speaking of which, we want poems to be beautiful.

At the same time we’re wanting them True[1].

See, “Contemporary sculpture knows no boundaries[2]”

Yet it’s avant-gardes whom make them. Still, the boundaries of Williams[3]

are not frivolous. I used to think to throw indents around

to add to a sense of asceticism.

There’s no

such thing

as an arbitrary

indent

Nor do I find shallow metaphors

in the abstraction of Locklin[4] lettuce,

Randall’s[5] jukebox, O’Hara’s[6] friend’s

favored Sardines.

A poet makes colloquially an expression.

A poem is consistence in ambiguity,

playing

boundaries

Writing with the reader while also writing

with the mind

And so you said Write!

I am no Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas

Mr. Sternstein.

At seventeen, I know little ‘cept

the way the words move

on the tip of my tongue .

the synrosities of rhetoric and breath

the Negative Capability[7]

of poetic intensity.

…I suppose you can call a poem a conscious revolution.

[1] [Comment] W.H. Auden

[2] Is Sculpture Too Free for it’s Own Good? - Ken Johnson (New York Times)

[3] William Carlos Williams - Asphodel, that Greeny Flower

[4] The Iceberg Theory - Gerald Locklin

[5] A Poet Is Not A Jukebox- Dudley Randoms

[6] Why I am Not A Painter - Frank O’Hara

[7] [Comment] John Keats