WEBVTT 00:00:00.840 --> 00:00:01.920 - [Instructor] Hello, readers. 00:00:01.920 --> 00:00:04.380 Let's talk about poems. 00:00:04.380 --> 00:00:07.100 Poetry is a special kind of writing. 00:00:07.100 --> 00:00:09.250 If ordinary writing is like talking, 00:00:09.250 --> 00:00:11.520 then poetry is like singing. 00:00:11.520 --> 00:00:15.140 Poetry is a way of making art with language. 00:00:15.140 --> 00:00:18.400 Poems can express huge ideas or feelings. 00:00:18.400 --> 00:00:21.470 They can be about the sound or rhythm of language, 00:00:21.470 --> 00:00:23.520 or they can be goofy, little jokes. 00:00:23.520 --> 00:00:25.660 It's like any other kind of writing. 00:00:25.660 --> 00:00:27.190 Poems can be about everything 00:00:27.190 --> 00:00:29.520 or they can be about nothing at all. 00:00:29.520 --> 00:00:32.230 They can be funny, or sad, or sweet. 00:00:32.230 --> 00:00:33.150 They can rhyme. 00:00:33.150 --> 00:00:35.270 They can very much not rhyme. 00:00:35.270 --> 00:00:39.053 And all of that is, in my opinion, absolutely wonderful. 00:00:39.970 --> 00:00:44.320 I think of some poems as condensed ideas 00:00:44.320 --> 00:00:47.520 that contain a lot of ideas in small amounts of text. 00:00:47.520 --> 00:00:49.903 So every word matters a lot. 00:00:51.790 --> 00:00:54.400 There's a little light bulbs representing ideas. 00:00:54.400 --> 00:00:56.280 So I'm gonna look at a couple of poems today 00:00:56.280 --> 00:00:59.650 in order to describe some parts of a poem. 00:00:59.650 --> 00:01:01.380 Let's begin with the poem "Cat" 00:01:01.380 --> 00:01:03.130 by Marilyn Singer. 00:01:03.130 --> 00:01:04.440 It goes like this. 00:01:04.440 --> 00:01:05.770 Cat. 00:01:05.770 --> 00:01:09.770 I prefer warm fur, a perfect fire 00:01:09.770 --> 00:01:12.370 to lie beside a cozy lap, 00:01:12.370 --> 00:01:13.890 where I can nap, 00:01:13.890 --> 00:01:16.530 an empty chair when she's not there. 00:01:16.530 --> 00:01:18.680 I want heat on my feet, 00:01:18.680 --> 00:01:21.260 on my nose, on my hide. 00:01:21.260 --> 00:01:25.180 No cat I remember dislikes December inside. 00:01:25.180 --> 00:01:27.180 So the person who wrote this poem, 00:01:27.180 --> 00:01:30.760 Marilyn singer, is the poet for stories. 00:01:30.760 --> 00:01:33.010 The person who writes the poem is an author, 00:01:33.010 --> 00:01:36.030 but for poems, the writer is a poet, 00:01:36.030 --> 00:01:37.780 but who is telling the poem? 00:01:37.780 --> 00:01:39.260 Who's speaking? 00:01:39.260 --> 00:01:42.130 The person whose voice we hear in a poem is called 00:01:42.130 --> 00:01:46.170 the speaker, which is another thing I like about poetry. 00:01:46.170 --> 00:01:48.710 When you're having trouble understanding a poem, 00:01:48.710 --> 00:01:50.210 read it aloud. 00:01:50.210 --> 00:01:53.550 Part of the pleasure of poetry for me is hearing the words 00:01:53.550 --> 00:01:55.560 bounce around as you say them. 00:01:55.560 --> 00:01:56.393 And then this poem, 00:01:56.393 --> 00:01:58.233 I'm pretty sure the speaker is a cat. 00:01:59.200 --> 00:02:01.490 Now you'll notice there are only three sentences 00:02:01.490 --> 00:02:05.750 in this poem, but they're separated into 15 lines. 00:02:05.750 --> 00:02:06.720 You can see these lines 00:02:06.720 --> 00:02:09.490 have anywhere from one to four words in them. 00:02:09.490 --> 00:02:12.923 Lines can be as long or as short as a poet likes, 00:02:13.960 --> 00:02:17.400 but here the poet is creating these line breaks to indicate 00:02:17.400 --> 00:02:19.890 pauses and rhythms, right? 00:02:19.890 --> 00:02:23.040 Like normally we wouldn't start a new line here, 00:02:23.040 --> 00:02:24.520 if this were prose, 00:02:24.520 --> 00:02:27.080 which is what we call all other forms of writing. 00:02:27.080 --> 00:02:30.300 Prose uses normal sentences and paragraphs, right? 00:02:30.300 --> 00:02:32.860 The poet is choosing to create line breaks 00:02:32.860 --> 00:02:35.250 in order to change the way the sentence 00:02:35.250 --> 00:02:37.573 or the line looks on the page. 00:02:38.460 --> 00:02:40.280 Poetry is not just about how it sounds. 00:02:40.280 --> 00:02:43.330 Sometimes it's about how it looks as it's written. 00:02:43.330 --> 00:02:44.500 Now, in addition, 00:02:44.500 --> 00:02:48.670 the poet is also using spaces to scoot these three phrases 00:02:48.670 --> 00:02:51.710 over as well as this word inside. 00:02:51.710 --> 00:02:53.770 The words themselves are scooted in. 00:02:53.770 --> 00:02:58.010 They're curled up and feeling cozy, like a cat by a fire 00:02:58.010 --> 00:02:59.340 in the middle of December. 00:02:59.340 --> 00:03:02.200 You'll also notice that some but not all of the lines 00:03:02.200 --> 00:03:03.260 rhyme with each other. 00:03:03.260 --> 00:03:05.160 And let's take a moment to think for a second. 00:03:05.160 --> 00:03:07.510 What is rhyming really? 00:03:07.510 --> 00:03:10.540 One way to think about it is when the ending sound of a word 00:03:10.540 --> 00:03:14.620 matches the other ending sound of a word like lap and nap, 00:03:14.620 --> 00:03:16.460 or when a bunch of sounds match each other 00:03:16.460 --> 00:03:20.450 throughout a pair of words like remember, and December, 00:03:20.450 --> 00:03:22.150 I want to be super clear about this part 00:03:22.150 --> 00:03:24.100 because I was already out of high school 00:03:24.100 --> 00:03:25.770 before I learned this thing, 00:03:25.770 --> 00:03:29.000 but poems don't have to rhyme. 00:03:29.000 --> 00:03:31.913 They can, but they definitely don't have to. 00:03:33.890 --> 00:03:36.660 I have one more poem part to describe to you. 00:03:36.660 --> 00:03:40.160 And to do it, I wanna use Billy Collins poem "Litany" 00:03:40.160 --> 00:03:42.280 which sounds like a fancy poem at first, 00:03:42.280 --> 00:03:44.850 but then becomes much more conversational. 00:03:44.850 --> 00:03:47.570 I'll end by reading the first three stanzas, 00:03:47.570 --> 00:03:50.400 which are these paragraph looking things. 00:03:50.400 --> 00:03:53.840 Not all poems are broken into stanzas, but this one is. 00:03:53.840 --> 00:03:56.610 So those are some parts of the poem. 00:03:56.610 --> 00:03:59.980 To review, a poet writes lines. 00:03:59.980 --> 00:04:03.080 The place where each line ends is called a line break 00:04:03.080 --> 00:04:05.250 and a group of lines together in a paragraph 00:04:05.250 --> 00:04:06.763 is called a stanza. 00:04:07.630 --> 00:04:09.530 The voice that tells us the poem, 00:04:09.530 --> 00:04:12.370 the poem's narrator is called the speaker. 00:04:12.370 --> 00:04:15.140 Some poems rhyme, others don't. 00:04:15.140 --> 00:04:16.390 Cool. 00:04:16.390 --> 00:04:19.313 Here's a snippet of "Litany" by Billy Collins. 00:04:20.200 --> 00:04:21.033 Litany. 00:04:21.870 --> 00:04:24.100 You are the bread and the knife, 00:04:24.100 --> 00:04:26.470 the crystal goblet and the wine. 00:04:26.470 --> 00:04:28.470 You are the dew on the morning grass 00:04:28.470 --> 00:04:30.700 and the burning wheel of the sun. 00:04:30.700 --> 00:04:32.910 You are the white apron of the baker 00:04:32.910 --> 00:04:36.310 and the marsh birds suddenly in flight. 00:04:36.310 --> 00:04:38.970 However, you are not the wind in the orchard, 00:04:38.970 --> 00:04:41.520 the plums on the counter, or the house of cards. 00:04:41.520 --> 00:04:44.340 And you are certainly not the pine scented air. 00:04:44.340 --> 00:04:47.790 There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air. 00:04:47.790 --> 00:04:50.260 It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge. 00:04:50.260 --> 00:04:53.060 Maybe even the pigeon on the General's head, 00:04:53.060 --> 00:04:54.610 but you are not even close 00:04:54.610 --> 00:04:57.223 to being the field of corn flowers at dusk. 00:04:58.270 --> 00:05:00.590 There's more, but I'd love it if you looked it up 00:05:00.590 --> 00:05:02.870 and read it aloud yourself. 00:05:02.870 --> 00:05:05.303 You can learn anything. David out.