English 283

Beginning Verse Writing

Course Introduction

Welcome to English 283DL, Beginning Verse Writing. This class is designed to introduce you to the elements of quality poetry writing and to allow you to practice those elements through exercises and by writing your own poetry.

The text we will be using, Western Wind, (Nims, John Frederick. Western Wind. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1999. ISBN 0-07-303180-1) is the finest of its kind that I have read. It is actually two books in one: an introduction to verse writing and an anthology of poems from the fifteenth century to the present.

The online course material is designed to supplement the material discussed in Western Wind. My greatest contribution to the course will be my responses to your written work.

Course Objectives

When you have completed this course, you will be able to

• recognize how abstract language and concrete imagery work in poetry
• use personification, simile, metaphor, and synesthesia effectively in your poetry;
• recognize the way symbols work in poetry and use them effectively in your own work;
• employ techniques of oxymoron, paradox, and showing versus telling in your work;
• recognize and employ enjambment, nontraditional punctuation, white space, varying line and stanza lengths, and varying line and stanza breaks in free-verse poetry;
• identify the various metric feet and compose in strict forms; and
• revise your poetry effectively using techniques learned in this course.

Structure of the Course

The course consists of eight lessons and eight assignments. A brief outline of the course structure follows.

Lesson One: Abstract and Concrete Language

In this lesson, you will explore how to balance your writing using both abstract and concrete images. Assignment 1 will concentrate on abstract and concrete language, and on the "additional feelings or ideas" concrete words can evoke.

Lesson Two: Means of Comparison

Lesson Two will focus on how to incorporate various means of comparison (simile and metaphor, analogy, synesthesia, allusion, and mythology) into your verse. You'll practice using these means of comparison in Assignment 2.

Lesson Three: Symbol

This lesson beings with a brief look at metonymy and synecdoche. Together, we'll develop your understanding the general intent of the two and how to incorporate them naturally in your writing. A portion of Assignment 3 will ask you to write a poem using an object, animal, or plant as a symbol.

Lesson Four: Showing Rather Than Telling

Up to now, we've worked with simile and metaphor, with imagery and symbol, all of which can add depth and richness to your verse. To a point. In this lesson we'll work on knowing where to stop. For Assignment 4, you will develop your skills at showing rather than telling, and will demonstrate what you've learned so far in the course by critiquing a poem.

Lesson Five: Personal Images; the Role of Words in Poetry

Now that you have some tools and tricks in your writing inventory, we'll looking more closely at your word choices and how they effect emotion. Assignment 5 concerns your personal images, images that have an emotional meaning for you personally.

Lesson Six: A Closer Look at Free Verse and Patterns of Sound

In this lesson, we'll look at how poets use form in their verse to fit subject matter. We consider questions of line length, line breaks, stanza length, stanza breaks, and punctuation, as well as all of the techniques we have studied so far. The assignment will require you to look carefully at word choices, and to practice with iambic pentameter.

Lesson Seven: Formal Structure

Lesson Seven delves more deeply into the mechanics of structure in poetry, examining how sentence structure affects mood, tone, and the flow of verse. Your assignment will include writing a poem in a strict form.

Lesson Eight: Sculpting Your Poems

I've talked about, and you've begun to use, some of the techniques for writing free verse, including the manipulation of line and stanza length, enjambment, and nontraditional punctuation. In this lesson, we'll turn to the use of white space within the poem—that is, how the poem looks on the page. Your assignment will be to revise one of the poems that you have written for the course.

How to Use The Online Course Material

Because this online course material is a supplement to the class text, it's important that you read the assigned chapters in Western Wind before you read my comments. The online course material does not redefine terms already defined in the text. It elaborates on information within the text when helpful. All of your assignments are included in the online course material.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communicating with Your Instructor and Student Peers

Online discussion forums, designed by the University of Washington's award-winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.

You can use e-mail to ask your instructor a question, or preferably post your question on the General Discussion Forum. Your instructor will reply to all discussion forum questions on the forum, and to e-mail questions via e-mail. If you ask a question that may be of interest all students, your instructor will post the question—with your name omitted—and my answer on the General Discussion Forum

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability .

Submitting Assignments

There are eight graded assignments in this course. Do not submit more than one assignment at a time and do not submit an assignment until the preceding one has been returned to you. For more information on assignment submission, see the "About Your Instructor" page linked on the class syllabus.

NOTE: Save all of the poems you write for this class. You'll be asked to rewrite them later and the original poems must be handed in with the rewrites.

Sharing Your Poems

Receiving feedback about your poetry from others is an important part of improving your writing. In addition to the feedback that you receive from your instructor, you will also be required to share with your fellow students four poems that you write for this course.

Please post the poems that you write for Assignments 3, 4, 5, and 7 (part 3, the villanelle) to the course electronic discussion forum. See the "Online Environment "section earlier in this introduction for general information and guidelines about using the forum.  Please also see Assignments 3, 4, 5, and 7 for details.  Note: Failure to post your poems for these four assignments to the discussion forum will result in a 0.3 deduction in your final course grade.

Responding to the Poems of Your Fellow Students

In addition to posting your own poems to the course electronic discussion forum, you will be required to provide constructive feedback about the poems of your fellow students.

You will be required to provide feedback about the poems of your fellow students a minimum of three separate times throughout the course. Although your contributions will not be graded, failure to participate will negatively affect your overall course grade (between a 0.1 and 0.3 deduction). The quality of your participation, however, is more important than the frequency (provided that you participate at least three separate times).

When you compose your comments about the poems of your fellow students, use the knowledge you have gained about abstract and concrete language, comparison, symbols, imagery, verse, sound, structure, and other aspects of verse writing.

Providing constructive, balanced feedback is most essential.  While it is important to note areas where a poem may lack strength, clarity, or structure, it is equally important to provide positive suggestions for improvement and encouraging words about the aspects of a poem that you find attractive and compelling.

About Your Grade

It is always difficult to grade creative work. I've learned to evaluate verse writing less on its subject than on how well it reveals that subject. Looking at your assignment, I ask myself, "How well does this piece use the element of craft covered in this lesson? Does it apply the techniques taught in the text? Those in the online lesson?" I also ask, "Has the author made these techniques his or her own so that there's room for a bit of creativity? Can I feel, because the author put forth the effort, how much the author cares about or enjoys this subject?"

After answering these questions, and mentally comparing the answers to those I've arrived at thousands of times for other students, I give my comments. I sum them up in a numerical grade. This number combines two aspects of my thinking.

First, I evaluate your performance. For example, you may be born to display brilliant imagination and provide insights that trickle shivers down the spine. Or you may be, by nature, a basically able writer but not yet capable of such dizzying achievements. Everyone starts out at a different level, and by the time we get to college these starting levels can be widely separated. The level at which you start unquestionably affects performance.

Natural ability, however, only gets one part of the way to success. So the second factor that I evaluate is learning. Learning shows itself in the quality of the writing, as well as in the type of questions you ask; in how well you solve problems that defeat other students; and in a variety of other ways that will be reflected in your writing. If you learn how to learn about poetry writing, once this course ends you won't need my help to continue becoming a better writer. If that happens, my grade can confidently announce that ability to you, to your transcript, and eventually to the larger world that your transcript addresses.

So your grades for the eight individual assignments reflect how well you

• did the reading and learned from it,
• thought through issues involved in the lesson,
• wrote naturally when you first started this course, and
• expanded your native ability because you worked hard and learned, as reflected in your final assignment.

Please note: Failure to post your poems for Assignments 3, 4, 5, and 7 (part 3, the villanelle) to the course discussion forum will result in a 0.3 deduction in your final course grade. Failure to post feedback to the discussion forum about the poems of your fellow students a minimum of three separate times will also result in a 0.1 to 0.3 deduction in your final course grade.

In assigning a final grade for the course, I weight all of the assignments equally. There are no examinations.

About You

I want this class to be a rewarding experience for you, and it will help if I know a little about you. Please complete the student information form that is linked to your course syllabus page before you turn in your first assignment.

About the Developer: Linda Bierds

Linda Bierds is an associate professor in English at the University of Washington, where she has taught since 1989. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and magazines including Seattle Review, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. Ms. Bierds has received numerous grants and awards, some of the most recent of which include a Guggenheim fellowship (1995); a Pushcart Prize (1995); and a Special Recognition for Teaching Award from the University of Washington (1995). Her book publications include Flights of the Harvest-Mare (1985); The Stillness, the Dancing (1988); Heart and Perimeter (1991); and The Ghost Trio (1994).

 

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