Okay. Exercise two.

Part one: Join a scene and an emotion in a paragraph or poem, using images to describe it in great detail. The scenes and emotions you can pick are listed. I picked high noon on the river, and… sinister. I’m not sure if I did well, the teacher wasn’t sure if I had picked dangerous or sinister. >__>

Part two: write a bad poem. Like, bad poetry, the worst that you can imagine. Then explain what’s so terrible about it.

Part three: Take a paragraph that was given to us, and space it out to turn it into a poem. In a poem, timing is everything, so the spaces were important. Then write a paragraph explaining your reasoning on the spaces. Then at the end of that paragraph, define the difference between prose and poetry.

I got 100% on this assignment~.I just want to apologize for any formatting errors beforehand…

1 -
The sun loomed high in the cloud-shadowed sky; the bridge’s black iron casting glaring reflections on the char-colored trees surrounding the dirt road. The river slithered along, a murky shade easily mistaken for green, too slow to be noticed until you were upon the bridge itself; then a harsh glint would nick your periphreal vision like a trickster shadow, appearing and vanishing just as you looked, and there was the water all unnoticed before. The shadows concealed themselves directly under their creators, almost as if crouched and waiting to spring out at something. The sunlight did not hide the path leading away from the bridge; rather, it offered the path, a cracked paved road winding mischievously this way and that, daring the onlooker to get lost on it.

2 –
I’m positive that if I fail this assignment in any way, it will be here.

Poetry is like
Chess - there is no such
Thing as holding back.
Or maybe that was
Checkers.

Okay, what’s bad here? First, it’s very literal and clear. I mean, you can have literal and clear poems, but they aren’t as… poetic as abstract ones. This is way more like prose writing with line breaks than poetry. Second, all the pauses or line breaks are in weird places. They cast emphasis on the wrong words (like, such, was) and the emphasis ends up without meaning. It’s a little frustrating to be left thinking “was what??”. Third, there’s… like… no sense of rhythm at all, even for free verse. Free verse at least has a sort of conversational rhythm, but in a conversation “chess” would still belong in the first string. There would not be any separation in rhythm there And just after the word “chess”, how exactly does “there is no such” have rhythm? How would you say that? It’s hard to imagine any rhythm fitting this without rearranging where the line breaks are.
But seriously, I have no idea how to write bad poetry. I have an idea how to write good poetry… but bad escapes me.

3 –
The town does not exist except
where one black-haired tree
slips up like a drowned woman
into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils
with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night!
This is how I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive. Even the moon
bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god
from its eye. The old unseen serpent
swallows up the stars. Oh starry starry night!
This is how I want to die: into that rushing beast
of the night, sucked up
by that great dragon, to split
from my life
with no flag, no belly, no cry.

I basically put in the line segments for one of two reasons. One of the reasons – for the lines that end with things like “drowned woman”, “hot sky”, “boils”, “like a god”, “to split”, and “sucked up” – was to place emphasis upon a certain image. By pausing at the end of an image or simile, such as “slips up like a drowned woman/”, you force the mind to, just for a split second, imagine a drowned woman. It forces that image upon you so that the comparison or the metaphor or the desired image is very easy to see; the tone flows much easier through the images and their wording. For images such as “The old unseen serpent/swallows up the stars”, putting a break at the end of the object allows you to picture it; once you have pictured it, you read the action, and your mental picture performs that action also. The second reason is to begin a new image, such as the line that ended with “except” at the very beginning. It served as a divider, allowing the image below it to flow. That particular example was also used to create tension (it didn’t exist EXCEPT – it causes suspense, making you want to see what the exception is). The breaks after “oh starry starry night!” are placed as they are to put emphasis on the cry, as well as putting emphasis on the line below it, “this is how I want to die”.