"This Compost"-base
d poem. Due next class.
Assignment: Write a free-verse poem about something sublimely wonderful rising out of something foul. Start concrete and go abstract. You are encouraged to experiment with the Whitmanesque poetic characteristics that we discussed in class: parallel structure, long, fluid and free-rolling lines with no set rhyme scheme, and juxtaposition of images. Embrace/explore contradictions like Whitman did. It is evidence that you, like nature, "contain multitudes." Type the final poem or present it creatively/artistically on standard size paper.
Some ideas to get you started ...
- Identify the foul thing that leads to something sublime and establish how/why this occurs. What is your feeling about this relationship or process?
- Start the poem with the thing itself: the hardshness, the corruption, the threat, baseness and/or the sweetness, awe, positive attributes of nature.
- Describe concrete images/objects and then connect them to a big idea (microcosm to macrocosm). You may choose to go back to the microcosm, the zoom effect.
- Juxtapose positives with their opposites.
- Be full of surprises — like nature, not oversimplified.
- Play with and examine contradictions in nature.
- The poem can "rise" from identifying a "corruption" in nature to praising nature, like Whitman's poem, but this need not happen. You may express a praise of nature in some tiny image, left unexplained (such as a patient, noiseless spider).
Above all, experiment and enjoy your own ideas and language use, as well as the fluidity allowed by long rolling lines of free-verse. You are not being assessed on how well you write poetry, just how willing you are to explore an idea of Whitman's in his style. Minimum length: 150 words.
