Exploring Poetry

A word about answers:

Exploring Poetry is intended to be used as a creative discovery and writing guide, and as such, many of the questions and exercises require individual thought, interpretation, and expression. In many cases, there is no right or wrong answer. Keep this in mind as you assess your student’s progress and use the answers below as a guide.

Section 1: What is poetry?

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  3. writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language, chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound and rhythm
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  7. a color slide; a bee hive; a maze; a room; water/a lake
  8. LOOK: hold it up to the light; LISTEN: press an ear to it; EXPLORE: walk inside of it and feel around; ENJOY: water-ski on it
  9. it makes one think creatively and openly about poetry; it’s not like other writing and it’s not something just to be analyzed; it encourages one to approach it in many different ways and with many senses
  10. a little twig with a bud at the end of it
  11. poetry has to be experienced, enjoyed and tended to; it needs to be out in the open, like a tree, and not just put away and forgotten
  12. a poet has to be willing to nurture and take care of their budding ideas to turn them into something larger
  13. palpable, mute, dumb, silent, wordless, motionless in time, leaving, equal to: not true, it should just be
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  16. a piece of fruit
  17. bite in, juice run down chin, ripe, core, stem, rind, pit, seed, skin
  18. you should dig into poetry enthusiastically like a delicious piece of ripe fruit—even better because it doesn’t have any wasted parts; it’s all good! she also wants to teach us that at any time, it is ready to fully experience
  19. everywhere! wherever he looks: hawks hovering over the cornfields, rusting cars in a junk yard, art gallery, music, etc.
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  22. there are a lot of repeating words and phrases
  23. he writes about it as if it is a person, or alive
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  25. “a place hidden inside where dreams can hide and thoughts fly freer than kites in the sky”
  26. start by just sitting and thinking, then follow that thought on and on…to a place where no one has ever been before
  27. being different feels painful and lonely in this poem; regardless of what people say or do, the feeling doesn’t go away; being different is also what pushes the speaker to write (answers vary)
  28. that it is a way to live the life that is meant to be yours (answers vary)
  29. it’s who knows how to live, who’s wide awake, who’s ready to embrace the beauty, challenges, and mysteries of life; who celebrates living on a daily basis and who finds joys in ordinary moments
  30. in book bags, in snowflakes, in trees, in games, in stories we tell, in secrets, etc.
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  32. there is rhyme
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Section 2: Words & Phrases

  1. a brief expression; a group of two or more words that express a single idea but do not form a complete sentence
  2. the ordinary language that people use when they speak or write; a literary medium distinguished from poetry
  3. a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based
  4. a grouping of lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of meter and rhyme
  5. love them, play with them, find meanings, make meanings up, experiment, invent, harness, fish, express
  6. read other poet’s poems; learn from them, delight in them
  7. possible answers: legs are skin and bone/skinny legs; bathers have a hole/torn bathing suit; teeth are quite misshapen/crooked teeth; chest is thin and weak/not big and strong
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  10. maggie/milly/molly/may; shell that sang so sweetly; stranded star; blowing bubbles
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  14. travelling/a journey
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  17. “Skier”: like the flourish of a pen; “Oranges”: tiered like bleachers; fog hanging like old coats between the trees
  18. “Skier”: wind is his one competitor; incandescent feet (comparing feet to light); white foam, white fire (comparing snow to foam & fire) “Oranges”: I peeled my orange that was so bright against…Someone might have thought I was making fire in my hands (comparing an orange to fire)
  19. a list poem takes the simple form of a list in order to describe something in detail
  20. it details and precise language to show the reader more about a thing, person, or situation
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Section 3: Imagination

  1. creative ability; the act or power of forming a mental image of something not present to the senses or never before wholly perceived in reality
  2. profound, inexplicable, or secretive quality or character
  3. the truth about a subject that isn’t obvious, that’s under the surface
  4. digging for mystery is the act of searching for the things about something that are not so readily obvious and using those things to create poetry
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  6. feelings, experiences, snippets of dreams, details of moments, imaginings
  7. when she pays attention to the world
  8. a persona poem is written from the point of view of the subject of the poem, it is sometimes called a “mask poem”
  9. a maple leaf that has fallen from the tree
  10. traveller who hadn’t planned to stay, wanted to look around, dizziness, dozed off
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  13. personification is used to bring the idea of words to life, they are described as crouching, hiding, being awake, hearing
  14. he imagines exciting and unexpected things like a flying saucer landing in his back yard, giants, ogres, and dragons; volcanoes, earthquakes, peacocks on his shoes
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  17. a three lined poem that usually includes 17 syllables arranged in lines of 5-7-5; usually describes nature
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  19. a poem with the same pattern as a haiku but it’s about human nature rather than the natural world
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  21. a tanka is five lines instead of three; you don’t need to count the total number of syllables in the poem; may contain metaphors and similes
  22. a cinquain has a set number of syllables (22) and per line count of 2-4-6-8-2
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Section 4: Image

  1. within arms reach; in your pocket, on pizza, floating down a gutter, in her cat’s ear, etc.
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  3. round, deep, cool, pool, stone on stone, a little round sky; insects drone, warm with the breath of horses, dust from loft runs in streams down the walls, sheep snoring softly, hum of computers, stacked to the ceiling, spiderwebs anchor, runs squeaking, moon floats (answers vary)
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  5. a found poem contains words that weren’t originally intended to be poetry, arranged on the page as a poem that create snapshot images.
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Section 5: Mood

  1. a distinctive emotional quality or character; a prevailing emotional tone or general attitude
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  3. 1. exaggerate 2. make the ordinary special 3. absurd conclusions
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  5. rocks start avalanches (answers vary)v
  6. flower beds burst into flames (answers vary)
  7. pigs peel off their skins (answers vary)
  8. an ode celebrates a person, animal or object, it has no formal structure, it celebrates something
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  10. an aubade laments or celebrates the coming of the dawn; it has no formal structure
  11. freshness, hope, celebration, beauty (answers vary)
  12. praise, springing, fresh, sweet, sunlit, dewfall, sweetness, sprung, completeness, sunlight, heaven, born, Eden, play, elation, new
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Section 6: Rhyme & Rhythm

  1. a word that ends with the same or approximately the same sound as another word
  2. movement marked by the regular repetition of accent, beat, or the like
  3. a couplet is a two-line poem or stanza that usually rhymes
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  5. a tercet is a three-line poem or stanza; all three lines usually rhyme
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  7. a quatrain is a four-line poem or stanza, usually rhymed AABB or ABAB, it is the most common stanza in English poetry; can also be unrhymed
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  9. quatrains
  10. night/candle-light; way/day; see/tree; feet/street; you/blue play/day
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  12. lighthearted frustration (answers vary)
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  14. Stanza 1:
    Line 1: 11 syllables – A
    Line 2: 12 syllables – A
    Line 3: 12 syllables – B
    Line 4: 13 syllables – B
    Stanza 2:
    Line 5: 11 syllables – C
    Line 6: 11 syllables – C
    Line 7: 9 syllables – D
    Line 8: 11 syllables – D
  15. weather/together; town/down; hat/fat; cheese/delicaciesv
  16. all of the lines are very close in length; this creates a strong steady rhythm
  17. the poem is made up of rhyming couplets
  18. Stanza 1:
    Line 1: 11 syllables – A
    Line 2: 7 syllables – B
    Line 3: 10 syllables – A
    Line 4: 8 syllables – B
    Line 5: 11 syllables – C
    Line 6: 8 syllables – B
    Stanza 2:
    Line 7: 9 syllables – D
    Line 8: 7 syllables – B
    Line 9: 11 syllables – E
    Line 10: 7 syllables – B
    Line 11: 11 syllables – F
    Line 12: 6 syllables – B
  19. the syllables alternate between long lines and shorter lines (answers vary)
  20. it gets more complex as the poem progresses; lines 7, 9 and 11 don’t rhyme with any other words in the stanza
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  24. heard/bird; storm/warm; sea/me
  25. feathers/words; soul/all
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Section 7: Read, Write, Revise

  1. it’s a vast treasury, free for the taking; it’s a subtle and supple instrument in the hands of a poet; words have history, color, rhythm and sound; connects the past and present
  2. “May Fly:” a connection is made between the short life of the May fly and how “time flies”
  3. “Pick Up Your Room:” word play is used with the literal meaning of common expressions
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  5. in the bathroom because you can finish two things at once
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  7. become a lifelong reader
  8. a never-ending cruise
  9. chewing food
  10. thirty-two
  11. nothing succeeds like failure (answers vary)
  12. fill up on verbs; go sparingly on adjectives
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  14. rewriting, rewriting, rewriting
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  17. writing is a practice, cultivate it daily; use a journal every day; read all you can, read books about writers
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  19. it is hard to do; often, poets write poetry to describe poetry
  20. slippery as fish
  21. big, clumsy bear (poet) trying to catch those fish (words)
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