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- [Instructor] Hello, readers.

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Let's talk about poems.

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Poetry is a special kind of writing.

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If ordinary writing is like talking,

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then poetry is like singing.

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Poetry is a way of
making art with language.

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Poems can express huge ideas or feelings.

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They can be about the sound
or rhythm of language,

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or they can be goofy, little jokes.

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It's like any other kind of writing.

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Poems can be about everything

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or they can be about nothing at all.

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They can be funny, or sad, or sweet.

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They can rhyme.

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They can very much not rhyme.

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And all of that is, in my
opinion, absolutely wonderful.

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I think of some poems as condensed ideas

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that contain a lot of ideas
in small amounts of text.

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So every word matters a lot.

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There's a little light
bulbs representing ideas.

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So I'm gonna look at a
couple of poems today

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in order to describe some parts of a poem.

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Let's begin with the poem "Cat"

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by Marilyn Singer.

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It goes like this.

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Cat.

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I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire

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to lie beside a cozy lap,

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where I can nap,

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an empty chair when she's not there.

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I want heat on my feet,

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on my nose, on my hide.

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No cat I remember
dislikes December inside.

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So the person who wrote this poem,

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Marilyn singer, is the poet for stories.

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The person who writes
the poem is an author,

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but for poems, the writer is a poet,

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but who is telling the poem?

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Who's speaking?

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The person whose voice we
hear in a poem is called

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the speaker, which is another
thing I like about poetry.

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When you're having trouble
understanding a poem,

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read it aloud.

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Part of the pleasure of poetry
for me is hearing the words

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bounce around as you say them.

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And then this poem,

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I'm pretty sure the speaker is a cat.

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Now you'll notice there
are only three sentences

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in this poem, but they're
separated into 15 lines.

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You can see these lines

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have anywhere from one
to four words in them.

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Lines can be as long or
as short as a poet likes,

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but here the poet is creating
these line breaks to indicate

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pauses and rhythms, right?

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Like normally we wouldn't
start a new line here,

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if this were prose,

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which is what we call all
other forms of writing.

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Prose uses normal sentences
and paragraphs, right?

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The poet is choosing to create line breaks

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in order to change the way the sentence

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or the line looks on the page.

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Poetry is not just about how it sounds.

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Sometimes it's about how
it looks as it's written.

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Now, in addition,

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the poet is also using spaces
to scoot these three phrases

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over as well as this word inside.

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The words themselves are scooted in.

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They're curled up and feeling
cozy, like a cat by a fire

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in the middle of December.

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You'll also notice that some
but not all of the lines

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rhyme with each other.

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And let's take a moment
to think for a second.

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What is rhyming really?

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One way to think about it is
when the ending sound of a word

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matches the other ending sound
of a word like lap and nap,

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or when a bunch of sounds match each other

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throughout a pair of words
like remember, and December,

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I want to be super clear about this part

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because I was already out of high school

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before I learned this thing,

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but poems don't have to rhyme.

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They can, but they
definitely don't have to.

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I have one more poem
part to describe to you.

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And to do it, I wanna use
Billy Collins poem "Litany"

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which sounds like a fancy poem at first,

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but then becomes much more conversational.

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I'll end by reading the
first three stanzas,

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which are these paragraph looking things.

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Not all poems are broken into
stanzas, but this one is.

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So those are some parts of the poem.

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To review, a poet writes lines.

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The place where each line
ends is called a line break

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and a group of lines
together in a paragraph

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is called a stanza.

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The voice that tells us the poem,

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the poem's narrator is called the speaker.

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Some poems rhyme, others don't.

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Cool.

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Here's a snippet of
"Litany" by Billy Collins.

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Litany.

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You are the bread and the knife,

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the crystal goblet and the wine.

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You are the dew on the morning grass

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and the burning wheel of the sun.

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You are the white apron of the baker

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and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

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However, you are not
the wind in the orchard,

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the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.

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And you are certainly
not the pine scented air.

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There is just no way that
you are the pine-scented air.

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It is possible that you are
the fish under the bridge.

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Maybe even the pigeon
on the General's head,

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but you are not even close

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to being the field of
corn flowers at dusk.

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There's more, but I'd love
it if you looked it up

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and read it aloud yourself.

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You can learn anything. David out.