Poetry Exercise: January 28, 2013
For today’s Poetry Exercise, I’d like to play with the most basic tool in a poet’s toolbox: language.
The English language is an incredibly wacky thing. We have amazing freedom when it comes to sentence structure. We can take liberties with tense, case, and person. It seems like for every grammar rule there are at least a few exceptions, and that’s before you get to “poetic license”. And then there are the words themselves, an eclectic collection begged, borrowed or stolen from just about every other language in existence. It’s amazingly difficult to learn, but gives poets and writers quite a lot to work with!
Take homophones, for example. These are words that have different meanings, but sound the same. Homophones may be spelled the same (rose/rose) or differently (hear/here).
Your task for this week is to choose one or more homophone pairs (or triplets - there are a lot of those), and use them as the focus for a poem. Consider the meanings of each word, say them aloud a few times, and see what comes out of it. You can use your homophones as the root of a strange metaphor (how does a rose relate to the concept of rising, such that a rose rose?), or a pun, or just a lyrical set of words strung together. Play around with these, and have fun!
Your homophone poem can be any length, any style. Your entries are due by 11:59 p.m. CST on Monday February 4th. Post in your journal, and then comment here with a link to your entry. Remember to give your piece a title!
The English language is an incredibly wacky thing. We have amazing freedom when it comes to sentence structure. We can take liberties with tense, case, and person. It seems like for every grammar rule there are at least a few exceptions, and that’s before you get to “poetic license”. And then there are the words themselves, an eclectic collection begged, borrowed or stolen from just about every other language in existence. It’s amazingly difficult to learn, but gives poets and writers quite a lot to work with!
Take homophones, for example. These are words that have different meanings, but sound the same. Homophones may be spelled the same (rose/rose) or differently (hear/here).
Your task for this week is to choose one or more homophone pairs (or triplets - there are a lot of those), and use them as the focus for a poem. Consider the meanings of each word, say them aloud a few times, and see what comes out of it. You can use your homophones as the root of a strange metaphor (how does a rose relate to the concept of rising, such that a rose rose?), or a pun, or just a lyrical set of words strung together. Play around with these, and have fun!
Your homophone poem can be any length, any style. Your entries are due by 11:59 p.m. CST on Monday February 4th. Post in your journal, and then comment here with a link to your entry. Remember to give your piece a title!