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The Poet’s Toolbox for Readers and Writers

teacher avatar Gwyneth Box, Poet, translator, lifestyle journalist

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      2:11

    • 2.

      What is a poem?

      6:19

    • 3.

      The poet's tools

      2:37

    • 4.

      An introduction to metre

      8:14

    • 5.

      Syllables and stress I

      7:32

    • 6.

      Syllables and stress II

      3:10

    • 7.

      Stress in the English language

      3:43

    • 8.

      Traditional poetry forms

      4:15

    • 9.

      The villanelle

      5:14

    • 10.

      The sonnet, blank verse and free verse

      8:43

    • 11.

      The Haiku and the SciFaiku

      8:09

    • 12.

      Introduction to rhyme

      8:32

    • 13.

      Imperfect rhyme & other sound techniques

      11:26

    • 14.

      Layout: the poet's special tool

      6:24

    • 15.

      The stanza

      8:22

    • 16.

      Linebreaks

      12:07

    • 17.

      Line length

      6:54

    • 18.

      Ambiguity

      6:30

    • 19.

      Front and end stress

      9:55

    • 20.

      Sound as a connector

      7:54

    • 21.

      Beyond sound

      11:23

    • 22.

      Conclusion

      6:27

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About This Class

For non-poets and for novice writers, modern poetry can seem very arbitrary: poor writers proclaim themselves poets and present us with chopped-up prose labelled as poetry. Unless we understand the poet's tools and techniques, we are powerless to discriminate between good and bad and recognise when we are being sold short.

This course aims to introduce some of the techniques used in modern English poetry and explain how they are used, leading to greater skill in writing and better appreciation when reading.

Learn to recognise and appreciate the techniques that lie at the heart of modern English poetry.

  • Discover what poetry is and how the definitions lead us towards the tools and techniques available to the poet.
  • Learn about the emotional effect of metre and discover the innate rhythm of the English language.
  • Take a closer look at sonnets, haiku and other poetic forms.
  • Explore the different types of rhyme and other sound effects.
  • Learn about format and layout, the poet's own specific tools, and discover how line breaks and line length affect the way a poem is read.
  • Explore other devices that bind a poem together and distinguish poetry from prose.

Whether you want to read or write poetry, enhance your enjoyment by increasing your understanding of the poet's tools.

Poetry is one of the oldest art forms, a way of expressing and channeling our emotions. For both readers and writers, poetry offers a means of exploring topics that may be difficult to talk about: we turn to poetry in times of grief and in times of celebration; we write it to comfort ourselves and to communicate our experience with others; we read it to better understand own feelings and to learn about the world beyond our own experience.

Benefits of writing poetry include improved verbal expression, articulation, self-awareness, spiritual growth, and enhanced linguistic skills, while reading poetry encourages empathy, and memorising poetry can help long-term brain function.

COURSE OVERVIEW:

The course contains more than 20 lectures and over 2 hours of video content. It is especially suited to novice poets and readers, as well as  writers of other genres who are interested in expanding their repertoire or in understanding their poetical colleagues.

Note: the course focuses on modern English poetry; it is non-technical and does not attempt to teach formal literary criticism.

I have been reading and writing poetry since I was a child; when I first started reading. I simply enjoyed the poems, although I didn't know why, so when I started to write, I just wrote what felt good to me. Sometimes one poem seemed more successful than another, but I didn't have any objective criteria by which to judge that success. Then, when I started to study the tools and techniques that are the essence of poetry, it was like adding a whole layer of meaning and it suddenly all became a whole lot more fun.

Later, I started to attend writing workshops and I realised that much of the time even writers of other genres don't really understand what is going on inside a poem: all too often, they would tell me they thought poetry was entirely a matter of personal taste and if I'd written my poem like that it must, automatically, be right.

I developed this course to shine a light on to some of the inner workings of poetry, to enable others to understand and appreciate what poets are doing, and to help them recognise when this is working. Like most things in life, poetry is more fun when you know what's going on: I hope that by taking the course, you, too, can share the fun.

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Meet Your Teacher

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Gwyneth Box

Poet, translator, lifestyle journalist

Teacher

Award-winning poet, writer, translator and businesswoman, with a career spanning IT, teaching, design and publishing, Gwyneth specialises in copy writing and transcreation, particularly in the fields of lifestyle, travel and technology.

As joint owner of the UK design agency Tantamount, Gwyneth works with businesses, educators and freelance creatives on projects that draw together the threads of publishing, design, technology and training.

As a writer, she is fascinated by the multi-layered aspects of language revealed through translation and poetry, and her creative writings explore the borderlands between writer and narrator, between translation and creation, and between memoir and invention.

During ... See full profile

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome to the Poets Toolbox. I'm Gwyneth Box, and I've been enjoying poetry as a reader and a writer since I was a child. I've had quite a lot of my poems published in anthologies and in magazines, and I've also won a few prizes for them. Now. I think poetry is very, very important. When you write poetry, you create new worlds. You take on personas that you can experience new things you can explore. You can explore topics which is sometimes very difficult right about in other genres. As a reader, when you read those words, you can find out how other people think, and you can begin to recognize things that you didn't realize you were thinking, too. So actually, poetry has an awful lot of power on one of things that gives it that power is the tools the poet uses. Now, on this course, we're going to look at five areas off the poets toolbox. We're going to look a meter Rhine form layout and sound on these five areas are they each have different tools in them on the poets elects from them to make the poem or effective. Now, if you follow the course at the end of it. As a reader, you'll be able to understand better how the poetry that you are reading is working. You'll be able to recognize what techniques are being used on. Appreciate how it's making the effect that it makes on you, how it's making you react. And as a writer, you'll be able to control that effect in your reader because you're know which of the tools you're going to select to make the poem work. So that's it. We're looking at these five areas of tools in the poets toolbox and how to make poetry more effective. I hope you enjoy the class. Thank you. 2. What is a poem?: Hello. We're going to be talking about the poets tools. But before we actually do that, let's have a look at what we mean by poetry. Let's have a definition of poetry. Well, actually, no, not just one definition, because there are so many definitions out there. What I've done is I've found some on the Web. Let's have a look at some of those a composition written in metrical feet forming rhythmical lines, an organization of lines of text on a page. Poetry is a form of art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities . In addition to or in lieu off its ostensible meaning, a work in meter or free verse employing figurative language, a composition inverse either in meter or in free verse. Don't get too worried about those those terms at the moment, because that's precisely the sort of thing we're going to be looking at later on. So a composition inverse either in meter or in free verse, characterized by the imaginative treatment of experience and a heightened use of language more intensive than ordinary speech. Four. A composition utilizing rhyme meter, concrete detail and expressive language to create a literary experience with emotional and aesthetic appeal, So that's quite a variety of definitions. On Day One. Mawr. If I didn't get off the Web, I got it out of a book by Ruth Podell. The book is 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem, and Ruth Fidel talks off poetry as the oldest, most passionate, concentrated literary form. So that's, uh, quite a quite a selection of definitions, isn't it? But one thing that's interesting is that most of these definitions have as part off hm. They focused on one or other of the tools that the poet uses. So actually, here we can see already some of the tools that will be looking at. Yes, I think that's a bit better, but let's have it as a list. It'll be easier. Okay, so we've got meter tourism layout aesthetic, evocative, heightened and expressive language, figurative language, imaginative use of experience, concrete detail, intense and concentrated language and rhyme. These are some of the tools that were going to be looking at later on in the course, but one thing that I want to look at first before we move on to the house I want to share my favorite quote from Phil Roberts. He talks off the most complex and adult word game off all the poem, and what I like about that is the fact that Phil Roberts describes the poem as a game. A lot of people studied poetry in school, and it became a chore. It was something that was obligatory. They had to study it. It was complicated, and I don't think it needs to be like that. I think that poetry can be a game, but whether you're watching a game or playing it, it's a lot more fun if you actually understand what's going on if you understand the rules of the game. But if you understand the equipment of the game and you can see whether people are using the equipment well or badly, how they could improve, and if you're playing the game, you understand how you can improve. So I think if we want to play this game of poetry, we need to understand the rules on the equipment. Well, maybe no rules, because actually, poetry doesn't have so many rules. It has guidelines. One of the things about poetry is that it isn't it doesn't have rules. It's not like maths. There's no teacher going to come along and say, Yes, you've got the right answer It's 100%. There's always going to be some disagreement, although there will be consensus about whether a poem is working or not. So, really, this workshop, it does come with a bit of a warning. There are no objectively correct answers in poetry, however. As we said, it's gonna be more fun if you understand the the the guidelines and the equipment. So, yes, it will help both as a reader and as a writer, if you know how to use the tools effectively. If you if you understand them as a writer, you'll be able to write better poetry. And as a reader, you'll be able to have an informed opinion, and you'll be able to understand whether the poet who you're reading, whether they've bean successful or not in what they're trying to do. So this is what we're going to be looking at in the later sections, 3. The poet's tools: wait. We've already defined and identified some of the tools that are in the poets toolbox. We've got a list now with Mita rhythm layout, aesthetic language, evocative language, heightened and expressive language, figurative language, imaginative use of experience, concrete detail, intense and concentrated language and rhyme. So you've got all of the's tools. But I expect that you're saying that there are others others, such as metaphor, simile, imagery, illusion, repetition, punctuation, all of the's tools, which are tools which are used by writers of all types. Yes, I haven't for gotten them. They're also part of the poets toolbox and others, too, that perhaps you think a little more to do with fiction like point of view or showing rather than telling using different tendencies to give a different dynamic to your writing . All of these are part of the Tuck Poets toolbox. They're all things that the poet can use to change the dynamic of what they're writing to affect the reader in one way or another way bumped sadly on this course, we won't have time to look at everything, so I'm not going to not going to look at all of these. I'm going to try and focus on the tools which are more specific for for poets rather than just creative writers in general. And the main divisions off these tools that I want to look at our meter form, layout, rhyme and sound. Now, obviously there there's going to be some overlap. Obviously, rhyme is a type of sound effect, but I I think it's useful here to separate them out and see how they work because how important they are for poetry. So these are the areas that were going to be looking at in the sections ahead. 4. An introduction to metre: the first area that we're going to look at of the poets. Toolbox is the area of meter. Now there are two problems that come up. Very beginning of this one is that people have studied poetry in school on They've heard these complex Greek words like back tail and rocky and so they feel frightened of meter. Well, the other problem is that Theo English are said or English speakers. The English in particular, are said to have no sense of rhythm on, of course, meter and rhythm all about the same thing. Now, this isn't actually true. And what I want to show you is that in fact, English, I had has a natural risen to it. And really, if you speak English, you shouldn't have any problems whatsoever with meter when it comes to poetry. And as for those complex Greek words, well, you you use the meter of natural language all the time, so you don't need the technical terminology in order to be able to speak English. You don't need it to read or write poetry. However, it is sometimes quite useful to be able to put labels on things. So this first part about meter. We're going to be looking at some of those words, but please don't get frightened by them. We're going to start off with the with the I am, which is one of the fundamental metrical units. Metrical beats of the English language, the I am and the adjective I have a big So he taught about on iambic meter and it goes, Did, um what do I mean by that? Let's think about Wordsworth's daffodils. I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high or veils and hills. Well, you can hear that de dum de dum de dum de dum. Obviously you don't actually read the poem quite like that, but you can hear the underlying meter is iambic, and you can imagine Wordsworth out there inlay the lake district, walking away, walking his poems into shape. Now the iambic meter it carries you forward like that de dum de dum de dum de dum the next . The next metrical type is the dactyl, which is a dumb today. The dactyl it meter So Dum Diddy higgledy piggledy poem analysis Dum Diddy dum Diddy dum Diddy dum Diddy. It sounds like I'm going to stop writing a Winnie the Pooh rhyme or something like that. It's got this, this natural music to it. But I think it would be quite difficult to write a poem that was very serious, that was all, or even that the main, the main meter off it was, was back. Tillich, because it's got this, this lightness of music. So we're beginning to see here that each different mitt metrical tight has got a different emotional value to it. What about the Truckee? The trick? AIC meter. That's dumb day. We had the I am, which is the dumb. And now we've got the Truckee, which is Dumb day, obviously, that they're similar, Um, but by reversing that stress pattern, it produces a different effect. I think perhaps the best example we can have here is Longfellow's The Song of Higher Water . Should you ask me whence these stories Wentz these legends and traditions. It is one of the most famous epic poems off the English language. On the whole poem has this dum de dum de dum de dum de rhythm going through it away. Throw. It's almost hypnotic now. Longfellow chose that because he was trying to create an effect that make made his reader imagine the Native American all tradition. It was that the meter that created this effect now the problem is, But if you get any meter going on for a long, long time, it could become very hypnotic. Perhaps with this poem that was, that was a good thing to do. Indeed, it's very, very effective. Power, however, normally will be looking for minor variations in a meter, even if the underlying metrical pattern is whether it's I am big. Whether it's true, archaic, whatever it is will need putting variations to stop our reader going to sleep. So right, let's move on to the Ana Pest, the Ana Pest IQ meter. Did he dumb again? It's like that the back till only reversed. Did he dumb on day one of the poems, which is almost always quoted when we talked about the domestic meter, He's Byron's. The destruction off Cenac, a rib. The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. Yes, I was thinking, There is it silver and gold. Is it purple and gold for the meter? It doesn't actually matter because silver purple. They're both truck AIC words, but in that context of that line, they form an Anna pest. So that's the domestic meter. Finally, we move on to the spawn day. Dumb, dumb to Bates off equal stress. Well, you're never going to write a poem where the whole poem is written in spawned days because English doesn't work like that. When we speak English, we accentuate. We emphasize certain certain syllables or certain words, and so you won't have a poem that is completely stressed. Syllables. Now, this is what I was saying at the beginning that is pulled by natural heritage. That English is a a stress timed language. We put more emphasis on new and additional information. You'll be hearing it there as I'm speaking. So we stressed new information, additional information, important information. It's a rhythmical language, and this is what I meant about being an English speaker. You've got this natural rhythm, and that's what we're going to talk a little bit more about in the next section. 5. Syllables and stress I: Hello. We've just started looking at meter on. We've seen how in English all multi syllabic words have a stress pattern. That's how, with some words, weaken. Tell what they mean because just written down. We've got two words. They look identical, but it's a big difference between content, which is on I am big word content, meaning happy and content, which is a truck AIC word meaning something that's contained content content. You can hear how the emphasis is on the first syllable or the second first syllable content . The second content. English sentences have stress patterns, too, and we tend to put the emphasis when we speak on words that contain new information. Additional information, important information. Listen to what's happening with my voice. As I say that sentence, I say new information. Additional important. We've got the words that I want you to focus on. I want you to focus on are the words that carry the stress and obviously that's very important when we speak. But it's also very important when we write poetry. Now you might think that a word that's longer would take longer to say than a short word. But that's precisely what this this stress emphasis changes in English. That isn't the case. Let's look at some examples. We got the fact Black cat, the horrible cat Now the fat black cat. It's four syllables. The horrible cat that's five bumped under normal circumstances. The first of those sentences is going to take longer from the second when we say it because fat black cat, we've got three pieces of information there. We stress them. Where is the horrible cat? It's the horrible. It takes the main stress on the cat. Another stress. It's only two stressed syllables. So we've gone four syllables, of which three are emphasized and we've got five syllables, which two are emphasized. So the second sentence takes less time to say. Now this interaction off off syllables and stresses is going to have an effect on your reader's mind. Going to see that as we look at some other examples. The plump feline, the added post tabby Well, no, I didn't say that they were gonna be poetry. They're just examples at the moment, but let's look at the plump feline. Hear how the the ayn is. Although it's a not a stressed syllable, it's a long sound plumb feline sort of flows. The added post tabby. We've got that dumb Deedee Dundee, Andi. You'll hear that these stresses on now making you reader feel different effects. It's no, just the stress pattern that's doing that. Feline is a high register word. We don't normally talk about felines unless we're getting quite technical. It's also an elegant word that Ayn sound glides. So we've got a a different kind of effect in the ear of your reader. Where is the Addy post happy? It's all various to cart up now, although Adipose is, it's a high register word. It's not one that we Jews normally, unless we were trying to be calm. A call. Um, if you describe someone is added posts. It's probably not the natural word that comes to mind to describe your greengrocer, for example, or indeed your cat. But yes, it creates this this almost humorous effect because it's slightly out of out of place. So and also, if you if you hear that that last sentence that the added post tabby, it's creating an expectation in the mind of your reader, I'm expecting something humorous. I'm expecting. I'm expecting more those those same sounds. I'm expecting the word happy. Perhaps I'd probably go with the added post Tabby is happy to does on a mat in the sun without pause, toe a nose on a tail cold round neatly. It's tipping hurriyah asleep in the sunshine with nothing to fear. Dum Diddy dum Diddy dum Diddy Don't you can hear the meter carrying that humorous verse. But as we said, syllables are not necessarily the most important thing. It's to do with stresses Onda. Other factors, including sound lexical register and these air, combined to revoke a different emotional and intellectual reaction in your your Reda. So we've got meter, Lexus and sound, all working together to create an effect in the mind of your reader. Andi, if we go to a quote from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he described poetry as the best words in the best order, and I think what he was thinking about wasn't just the words, but it was the effect that they create the effect they create through their metrical values for their sounds and through that lexical register. And one of the ways that one of the things that is very important here is that you hear these things when you read aloud. If you looked at those sentences, I don't think you have got quite the same feeling for what was going on. Okay, so the best words in the best order, that's what poetry is. 6. Syllables and stress II: we've been talking about stressed syllables, and now we really need to look at stressed syllables in context. So let's take 22 sentences to field Nice two old chairs. They look fairly similar, don't they? As phrases, they both start with the number two. We've got an adjective, and we've got a noun, So three syllable phrases. But actually, although they superficially identical, if we put them into a context, we'll see that that changes. Okay, think yourself. No, read them aloud, read them and say how you'd interpret how those sound in that context, the 1st 1 comes from John Bettman's Diary of a Church Mouse, and I think I'd read it as two field mice who have no desire to be baptized. Invade the choir. Two field mice who have no desire to be baptized invade the choir. There's an underlying iambic meter there, whereas the second, the second pair. The second sentence comes from Edward Lears, the younger Bungie bow, and I'd read that as two old chairs on half a candle. One old joke without a handle. Dundee, Dundee, Dundee Dundee. It's an entirely different metrical effect effect, isn't it? The poem is primarily Traa cake. So we've got two old chairs and half a candle, one old junk without a handle, very different from the two field mice who had no desire to be baptized on the page. Those two sentences, those two phrases looked almost identical. But once you put them into context on Dredd, thumb allowed, and that is fundamental. The poet can only do so much. The reader has toe come towards the poet and one of the things that you can do as a Rada to understand what the poet is doing is to read that poem aloud. Andi poetry really needs to be read aloud to understand the meter. It's not enough to see it on the page. You want to read poetry, read it aloud. 7. Stress in the English language: finally in this section on Mater. I want to remind you of what I said at the beginning, which is that the English language is fundamentally rhythmical on. If you can speak English, you've got this innate sense of rhythm. And we're going to do that. We're going to look at the poem, the poetry form, the limerick. Now, I'm sure everybody's during this course knows a limerick. I'm not sure that I want to hear most off, um, because they're frequently not suitable for mixed company. But you know, the kind of thing I mean, for example, there wasan old woman from Kent whose nose was incredibly bent one day. They suppose she followed her nose and nobody knows where she went that have you ever stopped to think about what? How you could define the meter of a of a limerick. There was an old woman from Kent de Dum Diddy Dum Diddy dum. I think it's a headless on a plastic try meter. Well, yes, I think it probably is a headless Anna plastic try meter, but I really don't need to know that to be able to write a limerick, we create limericks naturally and spontaneously think about it. Most limericks start with a phrase along the lines off. There was an old man from Paro. That was an old man with a beard. There was a mine. Okay, that sort of that sort of phrase. And I want a poem. A limerick that's going to start with the there wasa man got a gap there that I'm going to need to fill in with enough syllables with the right stress patterns I'm going to want There was a de dum Diddy, man, did, um, today. Okay. Got four syllables. What adjectives could we put in there? There was a Peruvian man there. Waas. Ah, ridiculous man. There was a reliable man. All of those four syllable adjectives would affect. But for my example, I've actually put two adjectives together that form that same stress pattern. There was a capricious old man who wrote poems that no one could scan when aust white walls , he replied, It's because I always contrive to insert as many multi syllabic words into the last line as I possibly can. You know, that's wrong. And you know it's wrong because you know what you're expecting and you know what? You're expecting because as an English speaker, you've got rhythm. Don't anyone ever tell let you Don't let anyone ever tell you that meters a problem and that the English speakers don't have rhythm. It's a natural part of the language. 8. Traditional poetry forms: We finished the last section on meter looking at the Limerick, and that brings us neatly onto this section, of course, which is about forms now. What do I mean by forms? I mean, some of these traditional structures of poems. Sohn. It's villain Els Festina's Die Zane's. There's a whole lot off them. Many of them are very traditional, but they're still being used now by modern poet. It's and usually forms are defined by patterns, patterns of rhyme, of meter, stanza, length the structure of the stanza by syllable count. Even there's all sorts of things that say, This is a sonic. This is a villain. L you know, by the way, that it's structured. Obviously, if a writer wants to write a solid, they're going to need to know what the rules of a sonnet are. But why would it read? I want to know. Well, strictly speaking, they don't need to know. But I do think it could be interesting. I know I've had readers read my poems and common sight. Why have you used that rhymes game? Why have you broken your lines there? And I knew that it was a traditional sonic rhyme scheme or that I'd counted, um, 10 syllables in a line. I knew that there was an underlying reason for it, which was a reason of form, but the reader wasn't recognizing this. So I do think that for a reader to recognize what the poet is doing can inform the way that they're reading. As I said, although some of these forms are very old, some of them go back many centuries, but they're still being used by poets today on the poets today are adapting them that putting a different spin on them. A sonic was traditionally a love poem, but if you read modern sonnets, they could be about just about anything. If you'd like to find some modern, structured poetry, I suggest you look for some of the books by Wendy Cope Making Making cocoa for Kingsley Amis is one of her books, and she uses Sonics, and she uses Pan Tomb on villain Els, and she puts a very definite modern Spain on them. One thing to realize about forms is that there no restricting, some poets say, Oh, I don't want to bind myself to the rules of a sonnet. I don't want to follow these rules, but in fact you're no restricting yourself. What you're doing is putting a little enclosure around on area off the poem. But this allows you to to experiment within that area. So you've blocked off some of the tools. You can't use some of the poets tools, but this allows you to focus on others. So, yes, once you've actually decided on the form that you want to use, you can still experiment within that you can experiment perhaps with Lexus with grammatical structure, but all within the chosen form. So here we are. We're looking at forms. Just we're not going to look at all off. Um, there are far too many, but we're going to look at some of them just to give you an idea of how these fit into the poets toolbox. 9. The villanelle: in this section. We're talking about forms on, as I said before forms they usually defined by patterns off meter. We've talked about meter earlier on in the course, so we talked about I am big meter drop K yc that Tillich etcetera. Uh, there's also patterns of line length now. That would be how Maney stresses how Maney beats how maney feet there are in each line. So we talk about a sonic normally has. It's written in iambic pentameter. Pent pentameter means that there's five iambic beats, their iambic pentameter. There's five iambic beats in a line. Um, another example. We mentioned higher water for Andi, that that epic poem by the shores of kitschy gumi by the shining big seawater they at the dum de dum de dum de dum day 84 beats on those beats are, um, Outro cake. It's OK. Techtronic Okay, Transmitter. It's easier to read the poem than to pronounce that Try again. Truck cake trick, Tetra meter. So we've got patterns off meter line length patterns of stanza as well. How many lines there are in each verse in the poem? Maybe it's perfects. Maybe it's three lines in each stanza Or maybe it's four lines, in which case it would be quite rains. The length of the stanza is part of the structure of the form, and finally, we have patterns of rhyme. These really are the four main building blocks of how you define a form. Let's have a look as an example at one of the more complex forms. The villain. L. It's a very complicated definition. Um, essentially, it's 19 lines has five ter sets, so that's five stanzas of free lines, and it ends with a quatrain. It ends with a stanza, which has four lines in it only has two limes son line sounds and in the first stanza they that's a ter set, the first line on the third line rhyme. Now those two lines, the first on the third line, are then used their repeated through the poem until they come together as a couple it at the end. It's actually easier if you write one of these yourself and discover how it works, how it fits together. I'm not saying that you have to have written an example of every one of the different forms before you can call yourself a poet um, the villain. L is a very complex form, one of one of the best. Well, for me, one of the best poems in English, but certainly one of the best villain Els in the English language is dull in Thomas's. Do not go gentle into that good night. Um, but I I certainly don't ever expect to write a poem. A villain l that good. But I still found it useful to experiment with writing a villain. L just to work out how this definition actually felt. When I wrote the poem Andi to find out how difficult it walls that actually made me appreciate how other poets are working. Andi, if they have successful forms that I haven't tried, I don't know whether it was difficult or no. But if I've tried, I know how successful they've bean and how hard they've worked. It really helps me appreciate what other poets are doing. So just remember you don't have to have written a good example of every form to call yourself a poet. But experimenting is always fun. So why not try and write a villain? L 10. The sonnet, blank verse and free verse: The next form we're going to look at is the sonnet. Now. In its simplest definition, a sonnet is 14 lines of iambic pentameter. Now we've already looked at what I am. Big means. That's a did, um, line a de dum beat. Andi Pentameter means there are five toe a line, so 14 lines each of thumb with five de dum bates. That's its simplest form. Beyond that, we have, AH, whole number of different types off sonnet. We've got Elizabethan and we've got Petrarca. Andi, Um, the thing that makes them different. They're all 14 lines of I pay, but they have different rhymes. Games the patrol Arkansas on it is the original. It's an Italian form, and it's the original Italians on it and normally a patrol concern. It would be divided into an oak tact. Onda assessed eight eight lines and six lines, and between them, this some kind of little twist. There's a turn. There's a change in direction, a change in perspective. Let's let's take a look at an example that I wrote hero worship. Do you remember how you used to tease kidnap my teddy, look him in a drawer or hang him from the banisters. Ignore my screams, My tears My heart felt pretty, Please. You mocked me when I fell and scraped my knees. Mine was the losing side of every war of cowboys, Indians, cops and robbers board. You'd wonder often. Go and climb the trees beyond my reach, and I'd be left alone for getting physical and mental pain. I'd wait impatiently beside the phone until the next day, when we start again. The years have passed, but I still feel the same, still hoping to be asked to join your games. Now this is a Petrarca and sonnet sonnet. The rhymes aren't perfect. Um, Andi. Instead of having an octet and assess dead, I actually turn after Line nine. So I got nine lines on five, so it's not a perfect Petrakis on it font. It gives you some idea of how the form works. Notice. Sit down at the end, there's a couple it that the years have passed, but I still feel the same, still hoping to be asked to join your games. Well, a couple of at the end of a sonnet, he's actually very, very common in the Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet. It's just one of the options in the patrol can rhymes came But with with a Shakespearean sonnet the couple it is, is a part of the structure Because the the experience on it doesn't rhyme the way this one does. Let's have a quick look it the rhyme scheme that we've got here in the Petrakis on it We've gone two main rhymes going through the octet We've gone teas, please Knees on trees Then we got a draw Ignore war on board and see how those are I baby I a b b a That same pattern We've got teas and please around the rhyming couplets in the middle knees and trees around a rhyming couplets in the middle On then in the cess debt we've got another set of rhymes We call c d C. Day alone pain phone again and then a couple it at the end. Now, if that were on Elizabethan sonnet, the rhymes game would bay a B a B c d c d a f a f g g So you can hear from those that I'm I'm saying that there are a lot mawr rhymes involved in the little is a B. Since on it. That's because English doesn't have the same facility of rhyme that the romance languages like Italian have when they're verbs. All very structured. Andi. The different forms. There's a lot more rhyme in the romance languages. There are other types of Saanich as well. You could have a list sonnet which might be written in couplets, but essentially then the sun. It is 14 lines of iambic pentameter with a different rhyme scheme, depending on what type of sonnet it is. I'm just following on from this On it, we have two more definitions. We've got blank verse and blank. First is defined as unr. I'm ing pentameter. Unr, I'm ing I am big pentameter. Not just any pentameter unwinding. I am big pentameter, so it's like a sonic, but it doesn't rhyme. A lot of Shakespeare's plays were written in blank verse. Sometimes at the end of a scene or at the end of a a speech. He bring in a rhyming couplets. But most of plays don't rhyme there, written in blank verse, but they feel like poetry because of this regular meter and one more the other definition that I wanted to include Waas free verse because a lot of people get confused between blank verse and free verse. But we've just seen that blank. First is unr I'm ing. I am big pentameter, but free verse. It doesn't rhyme Isa, but it has no defined or regular metrical pattern. And so it's got no regular pattern of meter and no regular pattern of rhyme. Probably no rhyme. A tall. So what's to distinguish it from pros? Well, if it's badly done, it can indeed just look like chopped up prose bond. If we if the poet has used the other poets tools, no, just rhyme and no regular meter but looked at other tools that are available. These were hold a free verse poem together, and it will be clear that it's intentional that the line breaks of where they should pay the sounds of being chosen. A free birth poem isn't just chopped up prose 11. The Haiku and the SciFaiku: as we've seen many poetic films come from other language traditions. We've talked about sonnets, and we've talked about villain Els and I mentioned the dye Zane and decimals and cess Tina's. All of these come from European romance, language, traditions, languages such as French and Italian, and they rely very heavily on rhyme. But there's one form that I want to look at that has come from the East that's come from the Japanese, and he's now really a part off the English language poetry tradition. It's been with us long enough, and it's being adapted to our own writing, and that's the haiku. Now some people define the haiku very simply as a syllabic form of three lines, with 17 syllables in total, where the three lines are five syllables, seven syllables and five syllables. Well, it's very simple definition, but there's actually a lot mawr to ah haiku than just counting syllables. In the traditional Japanese form, haiku are very closely associated with nature. There's usually, uh, a season word, a key go that shows what time of year the poem is sent. Now in Japanese poetry, these the's keigo, the season words, many off. Um, you'll find them. Repeat, you'll find that the frog as a symbol of spring time Um, snow is, unsurprisingly, a symbol of winter. I think the chrysanthemum would be autumn Andi Plum blossom or cherry blossom. A spring. Another spring time in age, so different images will tell Lloreda which season the poem is setting. As I say, All of those were natural images in English. There's nothing quite so Ritual Eyes does that, but we still try and link the poem to a season the other. Another thing about the the haiku, which is a very difficult thing to achieve, is that it's a juxtaposition of two images. Wait as they jokes, the pup juxtaposed produce an implicit moment of enlightenment or a new insight into something. So this is essentially what on her haiku is? There are another few things to notice. A swell normally, haiku don't have don't don't rely on rhyme. A tall um they don't have any metrical pattern they don't have titles on. Their punctuation is fairly minimal. Sometimes you'll find a semi colon or colon at that point between the two images, but otherwise the line breaks or what work as punctuation to a great extent in an English hiko, and more recently, the experts have decided. But the original counting syllables doesn't work quite so well in English because it's not the same as Japanese syllables. There's a different amount of information conveyed by syllables in well, they're not really syllables but conveyed by Japanese syllables. So these, uh, these counting syllables are no longer so important, and you'll find even in, um, official haiku poetry magazines, you'll often find a haiku with four lines or maybe two, even a single line poem. So I'm going to share two of my own haiku Now. The 1st 1 doesn't follow the syllable count. The 2nd 1 dulls. I'm not sure I've achieved that. Ah, heart moment, that implicit moment of insight. But, well, I've tried strappy sandals at every step. My toes launch grasshoppers, honeysuckle drapes, overflowing wheelie bins, summer scented air as you can see. No titles. They're firmly grounded in nature of some sort event, possibly a little more human than some of the traditional Japanese haiku. But this is what happens with the forms forms that were we bring into the English language . We adult, um, and we changed. Um, and Now that the haiku has become so firmly accepted in English language poetry, there are other sort of spinoff forms. On the one of thes that I'm going to look at briefly is the SciFi code, the SciFi coup there like haiku, their minimal their short, minimal poems. Instead of being about nature though there about science and science fiction topics, they're presented in direct, tangible images, and they used clear and simple language. So started with a haiku on these. This is an adaptation of the form, and as an example of this, I'm going to use the 1st 2 stanzas of a a series of scifi coup by Sue Burke, who's an American poet writing in Madrid. Actually, when she was writing these, um, Andi so alien sightings and this there's a title for the whole group. We're just looking at the 1st 2 alien sightings a Siri's off science fiction haiku about the alien life forms among us on louts live above exotic fouls, their footprints wire coat hangers in your own closets at home, reproducing. That's just an example off how a traditional form that's been around for centuries has been brought into the English language and now fully acclimatized, fully accepted on adapted to contemporary life, 12. Introduction to rhyme: In this next section, we're going to be looking at rhyme, which is perhaps the most fundamental of the poets tools. If you mentioned poetry, a lot of people will automatically think you mean rhyming, poetry, rhyming verse. Perhaps one of the reasons for this is something that I don, Patterson said. He says rhyme always unifies sense, and that's true rhyme. Pull things together, Andi. It construction the whole experience of reading a poem. If you've set up an expectation for Rhine, the idea that stanza the thought won't feel complete until rhyme Word comes so you can. You can draw your reader through the poem by using rhyme. Well, you can. You can pull the whole poem together. Um, however, there's a big difference between doing that. Andi having absolutely regular rhymes at the end of every line. We said before that, when you have a regular meter, it has eventually has any a hypnotic effect, and you like me to send your readers asleep. Well, rhyme. It's not so much that it's hip, not take, but it can almost trivialize the way you read things. And a lot of earlier poems used very heavy rhyme and sometimes It can be quite difficult to read these poems as serious works now because they're just so full off off regular rhymes. Let's take a look at a poem by By Thomas Thomas Hood Uh, the Bridge of Sighs one more unfortunate, weary of breath rashly importunate gone to her deaths. Take her up tenderly lift her with care fashioned so slender Lee Young and so fair And it goes on. Look at her garments clinging like Cera mons whilst the wave constantly drips from her clothing. Take her up instantly loving, not loathing. And in fact, the poem goes on now for something over 100 lines. With these very, very strong and very noticeable rhymes, they'll regularly spaced through through the poem on the stanzas on regularly structured. But we could a bit of a problem here because I love this poem. Uh, bar. It's a poem about a suicide and all of this this over use of rhyme. As Faras, a 21st century mind, is concerned. It is overused. Um, it just trivialize exit. It's very, very difficult to read this poem the way it would originally have a sounded 22 people in Let's see Thomas Hood died in 18 45. So yes, it's not a modern poem, and modern poetry doesn't tend to use Rhine quite like this one does. One thing that we can point out from this poem, though, is that we're here. We've got end rhymes. All of the rhymes are coming at the end of the line. Let's move on to another slightly more modern poem, um from a railway carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson. This one also uses end rhyme, but it achieves a very, very different effect faster than fairies, faster than which is bridges and houses, hedges and ditches and charging along like troops in a battle all through the meadows, the horses and cattle, all of the sites of the hell on the plane fly as Vickers, driving rain and ever again in the wink of an eye painted stations whistle By now, that's the first part of this poem, and here you can see two types of end grime we've got If we got We got plain and Rain and we go I and by and those are masculine rhymes, they're strong. They're single syllable rhymes. They carried the final stress of the line then nothing comes after them. And then we go, which is and ditches. We've got battle on cattle. Whether stresses the Penhall commits a syllable, these air feminine rhymes in a feminine rhyme the the word or the combination of words rhymes but the final The stress isn't the very last syllable. Something comes after it. So we've got Masculine and Grimes and we've got feminine End Grimes here. But rhyme doesn't only have to occur at the end. Let's have a look at something by Lewis Carroll. I expect you'll know the Jabberwocky. This is one of the stands is from Jap O Okay. 1212 and throwing Throw. The Vorpal blade went snicker snack. He left it dead. And with its head he went galumphing back. Yes, we've got we've got end rhymes because we got sick snicker, snack and back But we've also got internal rhyme here We've got 1212 throw and throw. So that's rhyming within the first line we've got He left it dead and with its head again on a rhyme within a line. So rhyme isn't just something that happens at the end of the lines of the poem. So when it comes to two full rhyme you can have, you can have single syllable rhymes. You can have multiple syllable rhymes. You could have words like humorous. Numerous thes are much longer words, but the more complex are full rhyme is the more contrived it sounds. And this is one of the reasons going back to what I was saying about the Bridge of Sighs that it's it becomes difficult to take the poem seriously. It sounds contrived. It's too, too focused on the rhyme, but that doesn't mean you should reject rhyme altogether. Some people do. Perhaps for those reasons, perhaps they find it difficult because English isn't like the romance languages where rhyme is very, very simple in English, because all of our words have got different shapes. Tooth, Um, we don't have a regular verb structure verb endings, for example. It is more difficult to find rhymes, and they can come across as more contrived. But I don't think we should throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's more we can do, which isn't just full rhyme. We're going to look a in perfect rhyme in the next section 13. Imperfect rhyme & other sound techniques: we've just been looking at full rhyme. Now we're going to take a look at in perfect rhyme. Let's go back to Stephenson's from a railway carriage and look at the second part. Okay, here is a child who clambers and scrambles all by himself and gathering brambles. Here is a tramp who stands and gazes, and here is a green for stringing the daisies. Here is a card run away with in the road, lumping along with man and load. And here is a mill I'm varies of river, each of glum, each a glimpse and gone forever. Yes, each of glance and Gone forever would have worked for the, um, for the meter, but not so well for the sounds as we'll see in a minute. Okay, before the rhymes that we saw in this poem in the earlier section, they were all full rhymes. But here Stevenson includes two in perfect rhymes. 2/2 rhymes Here is a tramp who stands and gazes, and there is a green for stringing the daisies, gazes and daisies. They're not exactly the same sounds. Gays and days, yes, but gaze is and days ease. There's a slight different quality that to those vowel sounds there and then down at the end. Here is a mill, and there is a river, each of glimpse and gone forever well, river and ever in my accent, they don't rhyme a tall. I suspect that in Stevenson's Scottish accent, there was it was a lot closer, but for me, when I was a child and I first read this poem, I got to the end of it and I was genuinely disappointed. I felt we'd bean rushing along in this train journey and suddenly at the end, it's almost like me come off the track liver, ever. And it was particularly disappointing because up till then everything had been going so, so smoothly so quickly, yes, but smoothly, and I'm suddenly joked it out of my expectations at the end. And that's one of the things that we have to remember. You're setting up expectations in your reader's mind, and if you set up a pattern, whether it's a metrical pattern, whether it's a rhyme pattern, whether whatever kind of a pattern you'll read is going to expect you to follow it. And so if there's a pattern established, anything you do that comes out side of that pattern has got too big for good reason. As I say, this didn't seem to me to be a good reason. A. Perhaps we could say it's very end, but I'm not so sure. I think Stevenson's reason was probably his accent. He didn't notice so much that if that difference but because I say it bothered me as a child, and I'm afraid it still bothers me. So let's go back and have a look at the sonnet that I wrote that we saw earlier. The hero worships on it. Now here I've got my a rhymes, my be Rhines. Remember the A rhymes that that were teas, please knees, trees. Those are perfect rhymes, but on the B rhymes, the drawer ignore war on board. Well, in my accent there pretty similar. But I can imagine that there are accents out there where they be a lot more difference between them now that walls partly intentional, partly because does it say in English? It's more difficult to find rhyming words. But what I did then was set up, uh, an expectation in the reader's mind that I wasn't going to stick exactly to the rhymes game , but I was going to pay a little bit lenient about how I treated rhyme. And so when we come down to the final car, plus where we've got same and gains, I think that the reader isn't going to be so thrown off by that because they've already bean hearing slight irregularities. So I think that this is what we need to bear in mind about those expectations in the reader's mind. You've got to follow through on them or you're going to disappoint the reader. Are you going to come across is just being lazy and that's really not what we want. Now we're going to look at other in perfect rhymes. You'll hear the words slant, rhyme, half rhyme to describe in perfect rhyme. But there's three particular rhymes, or three particular in perfect rhymes that have their own terminology. Let's go back to the Stevenson poem to the to the second half off it and have a look at other lime techniques not full rhyme but sound effects going on in it. So one of the techniques that we're going to look at is ass alliance now essence. It was the Julie Waters character in educating Rita, who described it as getting the rhyme wrong. It's not perfect. In fact, accidents is a repetition off stressed vowel sounds. So what we mean by that upon the in the top two lines with the 1st 2 lines of this section we've got here is a child who clambers and scrambles all by himself and gathering brambles . It got clambers, scrambles, gathering brambles, all of them. That sound is the stressed syllable, and it's holding that part of the poem together, even on to the next line where we have tramp and stand all way through there. That sound. The stressed vowel sound is an excellent sound, and it's held that part of the poem together now. It doesn't have to. It does not have to be the sound because it's accidents. Obviously, you could have words like home and phone or miracle and syllable, and those would also be a solent words because the stressed vowel sound is the same. Those vowel sounds, though now we're going to look at what happens when you repeat constant sounds and we've got two types off in perfect rhyme or sound effect going on here. We have Consul INTs. Andi alliteration. Really? The difference is where that happens, but you can probably get away with thinking off them as just the the constant sound being repeated. So where have we got that happening here? Well, in lots of places, um, we've got what we got. We've got, um, Columbus and scrambles again. Not only are they accident on the A, but we got the, uh, number sound in the middle. Clamber, Scramble that sound and bramble again. Those a continent gathering trample stands aren't because they don't have that same constant cluster in the middle. We've got lots of what we got going on there. We've got a glimpse and gone down at the end. Glimpse and gone. Also constant confident of rhymes. Um, we've got back in Jabberwocky. We had snicker snack, and that would have bean constant as well. In fact, that would be obliteration because the sounds happen at the beginning. Off the, uh, the stressed syllable snicker snack. And that's what alliteration is. It's when this constant effect, the repeated constant sound happens at the beginning, off a stressed syllable. Here we've got lumping along with man and load now lumping and load obviously the Le sent start. Bella happens at the beginning of the word, but along it happens at the beginning of the stressed syllable. So again, there we've got a consulate effect andan illiterate tive effect So we can see here that there's a lot going on with sounds, and I think whether or not you're going to use full rhyme poetry really should pay attention to the sound effects. This brings us back to what what I quoted of Don Paterson at the beginning, where he said, That rhyme unifies sense, and I think you'll find that rhyme does unify it, whether or not it's full rhyme or these in perfect rhyme techniques. 14. Layout: the poet's special tool: Hello. We're moving on now to look a layout. One of the big differences between poetry and prose is the way it's laid out on the page. When you think of prose, we have words and from words. We build sentences or fragments of sentences, and we build paragraphs. So essentially we've got the units of pros are the word the sentence in the paragraph, and paragraphs normally run from one side of the page to the other. Their size is adjusted according to the size of the page size of the fund Onda. Every paragraph ends with a full stop, and then we move on to the next paragraph, which is built up in the same way. Poetry isn't like that. Poetry has a lot more flexibility. I know one definition of poetry, which describes it as the the genre of writing, where the writer has mawr control over the layout, the typesetter or the printer. And obviously it doesn't look at any of the other tools, but it does look at this tool of layout. So we said in prose, we have words, sentences and paragraphs. Well, in poetry. We have words and sentences, but we have standards is stanza is more or less the equivalent of a paragraph, but it doesn't have to end with a full stop. It can do often it dolls, but it doesn't have to, and we also have the really, really powerful tool of the line break. So we have words and sentences stanzas, but within those stanzas we have the line on the line break. The poet could do a lot more with with the layout than a prose writer can a poet consent of the text? I knew an American poet who right justified all his lines instead of being pushed up to the left like normal lines. Are they all pushed up to the right? That was his choice. And it had a certain effect, because thes thes tools that the poet uses of how to lay the poem out on the page affect the way the reader reads things on. The the tool of layout is one of the most powerful because it's specific to poetry. Something's all common between poetry and prose, things like punctuation on grammar. Usually we use standard punctuation and grammar in poetry. Not always, but personally, I think that it's a good thing to do here. I'm going to quote from Alison Chisholm, Allison says. Unless the subject matter of your poem demands that you're mimicked punctuation, put it in. Most poems are stronger for it, and a mission looks like laziness. So yes, um, punctuation. There were times when you can change it because it's a poem, but it isn't necessary. It's actually in the same way as it helps the pros reader to follow what you're doing. Then it will help your poetry reader to follow what's going on in the poem. Situations important. Andi standard punctuation by D Fold is probably the best you can change it afterwards, when you when you practice using standard punctuation, maybe you want to experiment. But if you don't know what else to do, I'd recommend standard punctuation. One thing that that leads us onto is capitalization. In old poems. Traditional poems were very often find the first word off. Every line is capitalized. Well, that's no longer the no longer standard. It's no longer what's expected. A lot of modern poets still do that, but I think that there were two reasons they do that one is that they've seen it in poetry books that they read when they were Children that they read in school, and they think that it makes it look like poetry and the other rays that they using software that does that capitalization. Fourth, Um, but just think about it. Do you really want a computer programmer to decide how you're you're writing your poetry? I don't. So I think those capital letters at the beginning of a line are something that you may choose to put in, but you shouldn't put them in by default. For a reader, it's much easier to read a poem with standard punctuation and standard capitalization so that the capital letters only begin the beginnings of sentences. And then that's when the power off stanza break lines line breaks. The tools which are the domain off the poet really come into their own. And we're gonna look now at some off the effects that these these tools can have 15. The stanza: in this section, we're going to take a look at the stanza. We've said that the stands rim poetry is to some extent equivalent to the paragraph in prose writing. Not exactly the same, but it's more or less an equivalent. Now. Where does the word stands? Air come from, comes from the Italian and in the Italian stanza means a room. Now There's a great quote here from James Fenton, who says A room, generally speaking, is sufficient for its own purposes. But it does not constitute a house. Yeah, you don't normally get a house, which is just one room. Let's hang on to that soul. Well, we, I think a bit more about the word stanza in Spanish. The word for a room is very similar to stanza. It's Estancia on. That word is connected to the verb a star, which is the verb to bay to be a temporary state of being. So I like to think off the the stanza as a room where you are for a limited period of time . It's a space that you can walk around. You can explore a topic. It's a space dedicated to one thing, and when you've explored that topic, you move onto the next stanza, going back to what James Fenton said. A single stanza doesn't usually constitute a stink. Single room doesn't usually constitute a house. A stanza doesn't normally constitute a poem. We normally have more than one room more than one stanza, which allows us to explore different topics. And between them we build this complete house of the poem. So let's take a look at an example in particular that does this very well. This poem that we're going to look at is called July, and it's written by Chris North, who's a poet who is based in Spain. And I do like what he's done with the stanzas here. This is just the 1st 2 stances, so the ceiling gecko cannot charge. He needs three feet at hearing at all times. His strength nonchalance his motionless for hours. Water could be kindly. Swimming is like flying wasps crave water in the hate. They will drown for it. They suck the moisture from our wet footprints. Look at these two two stances. They're each dedicated to individual topics. In the 1st 1 we have a description of the gecko. We we learn more about the gecko on. We focus on him. It's noticed compact as a Hiko, but it's a stand alone, a little concept. The gecko. Then we move on to the next stanza, and here we're talking about water I wasps and these two. There's an interplay between the two ideas, and they're bound up in one stanza. Let's move on to the next two stanzas of this poem. There are six in all. Photographs fade to lighter, lighter blow blue is their color of dissimulation. The clouds have packed their bags and gone for weeks. Swifts cannot communicate calmly. It's always shrink. No swallow is depressed, downcast or repressed, they seem in permanent ecstasy. So there we've got. We got the photographs and the color of photographs, the blue that brings us into the sky and then up in the sky. We've got the swifts. We've got swallows. Each stanza is working alone, pushing us towards the next one. Let's look at the last two stanzas. Then the newspaper left on the table top breakfast was read gently by the mid a breeze, and now at dusk is mildly. Sometime, the gecko creeps to within within an inch of the mouth waits. Half an hour starts to turn away, but then and after thought unzips his lightning tongue. And that's the end of the poem and we've returned to the gecko. If you remember that first verse, we talked about the gecko. Andi, How stationary. How emotionless Iwas. We talked about water on the wasps who sucked the moisture from our wet footprints. I think this was the the early morning swim. We had the newspaper left on the table at breakfast that was read during the day by the breeze by us, slightly suntanned. So through the poem, we've had a progression through the day on back at the very end, we're back with the gecko who is still where he waas at the beginning. Each of these stanzas has pushed us forward a little, the gecko still lair and then suddenly, in the last line, something happens with the gecko. But they said these stands that's are not quite as compact as Hiko, but there's something very, very similar in the way that they they explore each of these little areas and particularly in this poem, their little areas of nature. And I think this seized one of the way. One of the reasons that this poem is so effective, the stanzas a pared down They're very, very well focused and they work individually. But together each of these rooms is joined on to the other rooms in the poem and at the end we have this complete building, this complete house, which is the poem made up off thes different stanza rooms. 16. Linebreaks: here, we're going to take a look. A line breaks, which is one of the most powerful tools in the poets toolbox. We've already seen that the stanza is more or less equivalent to a paragraph, but what happens with a line break is something that a prose writer doesn't need to consider. The poet has this tool, Andi. There's all sorts of things going on with line breaks and with lines, because it's not just the break. It's what happens between the brakes. So there isn't just a single reason for choosing where to break your line. There are many. First of all, it may be done for visual effect. Um, perhaps you you've read. We had Jabberwocky from Alice earlier. Own. There's the mouse's tail by Lewis Carroll, and the line breaks there are chosen to draw the shape of a mouse's tail down the page. Now those line breaks on the size of the text. They're they're chosen deliberately, but it's not something that you can hear. If you read the mouse's tail, you don't hear the shape. So this this idea of poetry that draws a picture on the page, it has a limitation. These I e poetry. Um, the limitation that it doesn't it doesn't work. It doesn't add information when you read it. And I think the poetry needs toe work both on the page. Onda off the page. It's very clever to draw pictures with words, but I actually think weaken doom or than that So fancy layout is no in and off itself enough to make a poem. Another reason for choosing line breaks where they are, Maybe because you're writing a certain form. We looked at the sonnet earlier on and remember that we said that it was 14 lines off iambic pentameter, and I am big pentameter being 10 syllables did, um, or 11. If you've got a feminine ending so it would pay you go do dum de dum de dum de dum de dum and then on to the next line. If it's a sonic, you're going to have a rhyme at the end. There on your line breaks are pretty much dictated by the form your writing. Well, there's more to it than that as well. Think how poetry normally when when you open a book of poetry, you see the poem they're normally sort of regular blocks on the page days, some poets will say, Look, my first line was this long. My next line a better break it there. So that is about the same length. Yes, that's another reason for breaking a line, but it's not always the best reason. However, it's true that if you've got a regular block of poetry and you got one line that's very long or one line that's very short. Your readers going to notice that. Remember what we said about patterns of meter and patterns of rhyme, building up expectations in the mind of the reader? Well, when they look at the page, if you do something with a long line or short line that's going to draw your readers, I they're gonna think something's happening here. I should be paying attention. So just remember that any patterns that you build up, they build expectations in your reader's mind. And if you do something different, it should be for a reason. And what you're doing with your line breaks is your telling the reader how to read your poem. You're guiding them through the poem. So let's have a look at some of that notice that on line break doesn't mean a stone. If you've got a full stop the end of the line, then yes, you should pause. But sometimes the sentence and the sense just runs on from one line straight on to the next . And if we haven't put a capital letter there, as we said earlier that we didn't need to, you read it just keeps reading. This technique is called engendered mint on. That's when a sentence runs straight for one line of a poem to the next, without any punctuation mark or without any pause in the sense. Now. In that case, how does that Reda? So how does the poet choose where to break it? Well, we've seen that it may be forced by the form Andi, the next poem we're going to look at. There is a structure on the in judgment overwrites that structure structure. I will see how reading it those those in jammed lines draw attention to certain words, so we're going to look a take a look at a poem here by D. H. Lawrence Poem Piano. It's just three stanzas frequent trains, and you'll see how the rhyme happens softly in the dusk. A woman is singing to May, taking me back down the vista of years till I see a child sitting under the piano in the boom of the tingling strings and pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings So that you see, we've got rhyming couplets. Andi me see String sings quite trains, and this is how the whole poem just 33 quite trains. In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song betrays me back. Still, Heart of Me weeps to belong to the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside and hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano, Our guide. So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor with a great black piano, a passion auto. The glamour of childish days is upon me. My manhood is cast down in the flood of remembrance. I weep like a child for the paths. Now, obviously, here we call, we've got couplets, and I said earlier on that rhyming couplets on a lot of rhyme and simple full line contribute allies a subject. But here you'll see. The what D. H. Lawrence has done is produced a poem but those rhymes are almost embedded. We see them on the page, but when you look at what the grandma's doing, it's an older poem. Of course, that's why we've got the capitalization. I think in a modern poet might well not capitalize these lines and you'll see that the grammar carries you forward as you raid. It carries you on. Now let's have a look at this quote by Phil Roberts. We've mentioned him before. This is another quote from Phil Roberts says the conflict off print Andi sound may be seen as one of the main factors contributing to the particular richness of poetry. So what he's saying is that with poems like uh, like, D. H. Lawrence is the piano when we got there is a conflict from what we see on the page on what we read. And this is one of the things that makes poetry particularly rich, will look a bit more how those line breaks are working in a later section. Next, though, I just want to mention free verse, which we defined way back. Ah, when we were talking about sonnet blank verse, which was unr, Imed, iambic pentameter and free verse which has no regular pattern off rhyme, no regular pattern off Mita or line length. So a lot of modern poetry is free verse, and it's when we write free verse that the poet has the opportunity to show their skill with, uh, with the line break tool. It's the poets special skill. If you just take a piece of prose and you cut it chopped up. Prose isn't poetry. There's gotta B'more going on Andi. People who think of modern poetry as chopped up pose a chopped up prose. It's usually because the poet hasn't paid attention to other tools and particularly hasn't paid attention to the line break. We saw how waste with a D. H. Lawrence Lawrence's poem The Piano, the lines carried us forward. Despite the rhyme going on at the end, the grammar and the sense pushed us forward. And what will find is that sense meter line breaks, punctuation, grammar content. They're all working together on. The poet uses the mall in combination to guide the way that the reader reads the poem 17. Line length: We've been talking about line breaks, but the idea of the line break obviously goes hand in hand with the idea of the line Andi got out there of the line with. It's a long line, a short line line lengths. Andi, the length of the line can have a big effect on how a poem is red. Let's have a look at the poem inside Outside by Martin Bates. He uses very short lines. I look at the effect that that has inside, outside, outside the dark, north of the hill knuckles, the white cloud outside the sea is dreamed by the sway of leaves outside the flame of berry and winds, releasing scream of goal inside the skitter of paper tricks. The foot inside the dust unsettles Inside, the paper clips springs cold and twisted like a smile. Inside, the words lie low, sighing with the wind outside. Inside the date stone clenches along the line of breakage. It's memories off outside inside. Now all of those short lines that we don't have to stop on a line because the sense continues, it encourages us to Paul's. It encourages the reader to take each line. This is slightly staccato effect. Certainly it slows us down as we shown images in isolation. It's a very pools effect, a very intentional effect. Notice, too, that Martin here has centered the poem on the page. Andi, often centering a poem, has no particular reason. Poets do it because it looks good. As I said, what you do on the page isn't necessarily going to be heard when it's red eye poetry. The layout isn't enough to make poem. But hear this deliberate centering helps to reinforce this idea of balance, the inside outside balance that it is the concept that is, is being don't within this poem. So it got short lines. We've got deliberate, intentional images in isolation. Now, what about long lines? We're going to look now at another poem by Sue Burke. Andi. Let's see the effect. The the longer lines have in every ill wind. Whispers of another faced reigns scribbles warnings on windows like flyers dropped before bombings. And in Louisiana, they know to gather spices and hide from the hurricane toe. Follow tradition to cook street hearty while they wait and hope on this storm's menu. Fancy for most U chunky with butterfly shrimp smoked sausages and new potatoes with corn bread to sop up the pot liquor and run rice pudding for dessert. Savored by flashlight, Tabasco sauce sparks with lightning. Water trickles across the floor and somewhere above winds rip offs shingles. Later, people sort through the wreckage and greet their neighbors. What did your eight? The combination here of thes longer lines and the n jammed mint, the lists, the continuation. It becomes as unstoppable as the hurricane that so is describing. It just pushes the reader, throw pulls and throat. There's not this paused effect that those short lines that Martin Bates used. No, this is This is tremendously powerful. It just rolls on like the hurricane now, interestingly, when I asked, So if I could use this poem in the course, she said it was particularly sensible part, of course, Pick particularly apt place for it to be used, because originally she she'd written this with much shorter lines, and then she took it to a workshop, and someone said what would happen if I having made the lines longer, she discovered that the poem was flowing the way that it needed toe. It was working the way that it needed to to reflect the hurricane. So this the difference between long and short line lengths? There's no one answer to what, whether what effect it will have, because it's going to depend on the other tools that you're using as well. But I do think that if you're having a problem with a poem, or if you're not quite sure if it's working that changing the line length can give you an interesting insight into something that might work better. 18. Ambiguity: we're staying with line breaks for a little bit longer. As I said, it's one of the most powerful tools that a poet has, so we could look at one of the effects of line breaks, which is ambiguity. Uh, you can set up a line break, too. Create an expectation in your reader's mind to fool them into thinking you're going one way with what you're saying. And then when they turn the corner of the line, you take them somewhere else. Um, obviously, that really only works the first time. The poet, the reader reads the poem, but it's still an interesting effect to play with. So let's go back to the inside outside Poem by Martin Bates. Let's look at the first how it began outside the Dark north of the hill. I'm pretty sure the first time I read this poem, which was a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure that what I expected to come next Waas something else that was outside that this was going to be a list of images of what was outside. I know that I wasn't expecting. Outside the dark north of the hill knuckles, the white cloud that took me by surprise, and it became more effective because I wasn't expecting it later on in the poem inside we had inside the paper clips. Springs Springs is a tremendously interesting word. Springs could bay spring as a verb. What could be a plural noun? So there we've got a very ambiguous word at the end of the line. There you're setting up your readers to Well, we don't think about paperclips springing. I suppose we think of them as shaped like a spring. But even so, even if you expect it to go one way, there's still that idea that something else might happen. So we have inside the paper clips, springs cold and twisted like a smile, okay, still slightly ambiguous. But you can see that the kind of word we put on the end of the line is going to very much have an effect on how the reader reads what's coming next. Now I'm gonna take an example next from a poem that I was writing and I had the phrase I hear Bird song echo Children's laughter. Now where do I break that phrase there? So many possibilities I hear. But so I hear birds on echo, maybe the whole line. Together I hear Bird Song echo Children's laughter I wouldn't want to break after Children's That, I think, would be a very awkward line break. But the other options all quite it couldn't be. I hear birdsong. Yes, there are lots of possibilities, and I debated for a long time. Yes, I think it was probably months that I took over this particular poem. Onda. I debated where that line week break would go. In the end, this is the, um, the first stanza off the poem Spring Paul sunshine through the woods to Dapple on my polished shoes. I hear Bird song echo Children's laughter. Green is a cent, a taste fresh on my tongue, and I chose very short lines there, and I think when I read it there, there's quite a lot of pausing going on. It wasn't that force that we had in the poem about the Hurrican. It was a much more paused, deliberate effect, and that was very intentional. This poem is about a funeral. They doesn't actually mention the word funeral anywhere in the poem, but I think that from the rest of the references, the polished shoes, all sorts of things going on later in the poem, I think it's clear that it's a funeral, and what I wanted was this paused, slightly staccato effect. This no, quite how I don't want to sort beat too much because it's a funeral because it's a lump in the throat. I'm That was the effect that I was trying to achieve with these short lines. Um, we've got the ambiguity going on there. I hear Bird song Echo. What's it echoing? Is it just the birdsong that's echoing? And then we get the Children's laughter and we we hear that they are. The laughter and the birdsong are echoing each other. But we've also got this Stig arto effect off the short lines. So that's another way that we're using line breaks. 19. Front and end stress: we still have just a little bit more to say about line breaks. What happens when you break a line is that it draws attention, toe the word that you break on on either side of the break. So at the end of the line on the beginning of the next line, and what that does is draw attention to your readers attention to those two words, and it gives them a little bit more emphasis in some way. We saw back when we were talking about meter how content words in in English have have stress on them. When we said about newer information, additional information, important information, we stress those words, their content. They're giving information. Now what you've got here with a line break, is that it? It has that effect off, making the reader stress the words before and after the break. So if their content words, this becomes even more noticeable. Let's go back to that little fragment of a poem about a funeral that we were looking at just before the break. So we've got spring poor sunshine through the woods to Dapple on my polished shoes. Notice how with that pole, that's a content word, and I hang on to it just a little bit longer to Dapple. There's a rising tone there to Dapple on my polished shoes There. We've got a full stop at the end and we have a falling tone. And then we come onto that problematic bit that I had before. I hear Bird song echo Children's laughter. Green is a cent, a taste fresh on my tone. So with that brake on echo, we've got that ambiguity going on. And then on the next line, we've got green. We've dropped off fair on the semi colon, our voice, Children's laughter. That's a pause. Then green is this big, strong word at the end of the line with a rising tone. Green is a cent, a taste. Again, we go up on a comma because it's going to continue afterwards and then a taste. It's another content word stressed at the end of the line, and when we come down to the next line, we got another content word. We've got fresh. We got a taste fresh on my tongue, falling away at the end because it see end of the stanza on because we've got a full stop. So here we've got We've got guidelines for your reader, about which words you want to have emphasized. And what we've got going on here, then is in stress and front stress. So let's move on and have a look At a poem called Fishing by Alison Chisholm, I cast the line, let my hook dip to settle above stirred sand until mud flurries still sharpened green deaths. It waits, watches, ripples break on. Stone reaches when a hint of fish gleams. Here, have a punctuation on the line breaks I'll cool. Zing rises on fools in the way I'm reading it. The second stanza, The bait is snatched, float Bob's and I really in a glittering wedge that spins and dances rise and flaps. I catch it cold and slithering. He's the hook. Feel it thrashing. So those front and end stresses, which have caused by the line breaks where we've got a content word. It's where it's most important whether the content word is at the end of the line or at the beginning of the line. And they're helping me to read that the way that the poet intended notice in this poem. Most of the lines are in. Stressed in stressed. We've gone What we go. We've gone dick sand deaths. They're all competent words there. But we do have a couple of fronts stresses as well. We've got, um that second line in the second stanza Really? In that riel is emphasized. And on that first line, you wouldn't normally in a verb, you say I really in? No, I really in. But here, the way we've got the line broken. Thank you. It's forced that I on to our attention and we do stress it. And then on the next line, we got the verb. So you end up with that double stress going on there on either side of the break. So let's have a look at the last stanza. Then off fishing, a small fish flickers. I throw it back, watch its movements synchronized with waters rhythm. I cast another line troll for another flash of silver gather fresh harvest from memories drenched store notice again, what those lines are doing with the pausing on what they're doing with the stress again. In that last two lines we've got gather that strong content word Fresh harvest again fresh is a content word. So, in fact, we got a lot there because harvest is also a content words and fresh harvest. This thing is how, uh the line breaks are used to help us to do the pausing, to do the right, stressing the way the poet intended and what I said before, they're working with the other tools. So quick recap, then on line breaks. We said that they're very, very powerful, and we can use them to signal front stress and end stress in jam. Remember when the line just ran straight on? The sense ran straight on, But that pause, that's what Really this this contrast this conflict of what's going on in sense? Andi, what's on the page? So I got in German. We've got ambiguity. It's an indication for pausing. The thing to remember, though, is they're working as well with the standard tools off off Grandma Andi Punctuation. Remember that anything that other writers condo's, that prose writers, condo's all of their tools, the poets got those to use as well. But that layout and particularly line breaks are the poet special tools and that there is a great deal off power in a line break so it's something that it's really worth trying to master. One of the things you could do there is that if you find poem that you think is working well for you, it's interesting to stop and look at those line breaks. See what it is that the poet has achieved. And don't forget that in order to really appreciate them, you're going to need to read those poems out loud to taste what's going on so that you really understand what the poets trying to dio. 20. Sound as a connector: in this section, we're going to talk about sound. We've already talked about rhyme, which is a very specific kind of sound, but now we're going to talk about it more generally. So one thing that we we mentioned, I think, was that modern poetry doesn't tend to use that same heavy rhyming that you'd find in Robert Louis Stevenson. It doesn't use quite so often the sort of light verse effect of Of really regular heavy end rhymes we had in Jabberwocky. Modern poetry relies a lot mawr on half rhyme on those sound devices that we mentioned off of alliteration and Assen. Intense off, um, slant, rhyme and half rhyme and sound is very, very important. So let's take two sentences yet they're just sentences. They're not particularly poetical sentences. We've got the cat finds a shady spot on the cat, finds a patch of shade metric cle de dum dum de dum de dum. The cat finds the patch of shade yes, symmetrically there, just about equivalent. What about what's going on with the sounds in the two of them? The 1st 1 the cat finds a shady spot, but we hear there we hear finds a shady spot. We've got these sibilant it's in there. Have got a lawful lot going on, though. Halfway. What about the next one? O those those symbols, by the way, those of the international phonetic alphabet. So that's That's what the symbols are because we know that in English, every letter doesn't correspond to just one sound. So we have to show that finds. Is that sound, um, and spot? It's a unveil voiced s sound. So although those three are all semblance, they aren't identical sounds They still similar enough toe work together Now, the second, the second sentence, the cat finds a patch of shade. I think one of the things that leaps out from that is the cat patch that short our sound that goes with that letter A So I got the cat finds a patch of shade. The letter a in shade, is an entirely different sound. We're listening to things now. We're not looking at letters on the page, so we've got can't patch and we've also got some sibilant Say again, we've got finds Patch shade, three simple and sounds. They're all different, and we've also got a lot of unstrap est or number of unstrung est syllables there of the, uh, uh of yeah, that, uh, off all of those are shown. That's the Schwab sound, which is the unstrapped syllable in in English, which is what allows us to be so metrical. But here you can see that the second sentence seems tohave a bit more going on in it than the 1st 1 But of course, poetry isn't about single lines in isolation. We need to put it into a context and we're going to stick with the 1st 1 and give it a second line. The cat finds a shady spot just long enough to stretch. Here we go. So let her owes in there. We've got spot on long and those of both see or sound the O in enough. That's a different sound, isn't it? So we've got the all that's working between two lines. This is what begins Teoh hint of poetry when you've got sounds working across lines not just within them. We've gone semblance again. We've got fines, shady spot. Just stretch a lot more now that are just that sound that unveil voiced s so they're more similar and again working between the two lines We go. Oh, we've got just enough. Uh, and enough, enough. So strange word because the ou makes a sound on the GH makes a which links back to the F in fines. So again, with binding the lines closer and closer together and we've got some more, some more Schwab sounds more unstrung est fouls going on there. Now remember what Don Paterson said about rhyme, unifying sense? What I think that it isn't just rhyme that unifies its half rhyme song rhyme, effects of accidents, civilians, constants These sound effects are what thai words tie lines together to make them poetry. Obviously, this cohesion is not enough to make something poetry. Those two lines are not very poetic, but you could Botham and Coke summon worry them and tweaks um, and find that perhaps they could become a poem. A little poem party. Oh, Archie finds a cat length patch of shade whisker wide and hidden from curious non feline eyes. He did apples into tabby gray. Now what we've got going on, there isn't just sound, but in the next section we're going to have a look at the sounds on the other things that are going on this on within this little poem 21. Beyond sound: Okay, We're back with Archie here again on We're going to start by looking at the sounds that are going on in this short poem, Archie finds a cat length patch of shade whisker wide and hidden from curious non feline eyes. He apples into tabby gray There. We've got a number of sounds going on here. We've got the long I sound the long I sound off fines wide, non feline eyes. Number of those repeated. We've got the the sound off can't patch And then in the last line, apples and tabby. Obviously, this is a short poem, a four line poem, something that happens in the first line and something that happens in the last line. They're sufficiently close together to be connected. If you've got a 20 line poem, you can't expect your reader to remember the sound from the first line and connected in any in any way with what's happening at the end of your poem. Unless you've woven it down through the poem. And you continued it in there and carried it with your reader as they read. Okay. What else have we got going on here? We've got gray and shade. They're not rhymes, but that a sound is the same. So there's an accidents there unnoticed that they're out on the ends off the lines. But the rest of the sound that's we're talking about is happening all over the place. We're not talking about n drying here. We're talking about rhymes anywhere in the poem. Andi, we've also got plenty of civil INTs again, A variation we got from Patch. We've got shade, we go Archie over in the title. He's another church isn't, uh we got whisker fines, curious lots of lots of civil INTs. Um, and I think that if this poem was a lot longer, I need to be very, very careful not to put in too many civil INTs. I don't want people thinking of snakes. Archie's a cat. So you do need to be very careful of just how dense you make these sounds. How how many you crushing together into a line or into a short poem. But essentially, then we've got a lot going on with sound here. But moving beyond sound. We've got other things going on. Look at we've got the beginning of wordplay. Haven't way. Remember that. We said that poetry was a game. We've invented a few words here. We've got a cat length patch of shade length. We won't find it in the dictionary, but I think you know what it means. And if I didn't say cat length, what could I say? 50 centimeters? 18 inches? Well, it isn't going to work, is it? Cat Link says exactly what it needs to. And then we got whisker wide, and I know I was told When I was a girl, I was told that cat, its whiskers were very important. And anywhere where his whiskers could go through, the cat could go throat. So when I hear whisker wide, I'm thinking it's just just wide enough for him to sneak in there. So we've got more going on than just the words. We've got illusions to draw other information there. Andi, We've also got that with curious non feline eyes because, of course, curiosity killed the cat. And here we're linking, curious to the non movie lines. So again, where we're playing with that, we're playing with these words. Andi. One other thing that I want to notice here is that verb Dapple apple is a verb, but It's not something that a capped normally does. And yet here he apples into tabby gray. If you know what a tabby cat looks like and you know what shade and sun and you know the effect. I think that verb Dapple makes sense, even if it isn't used in its strict fiction remaining. So this, then this playing with meaning, playing with illusion with sound. All of this is what helps to make this into a poem. Next, we're going to look at another short piece and see how that's using the same kind of innovative language, the same kind of creative language as, well, a sound. So Daldry under long leaves slick with sunlight, pink nose novels, wild strawberries, cream petals drift and see goals Mu overhead. First of all, what about the sounds? Well, again, we've got quite a lot of civilians. We've got slick sunlight, snuffle strawberries. You've got lots of civilians going on there on again. We need to be careful what they want to many, but they make this this text very dense. We've also got a lot of l's. We've got those lower leaves, sunlight wild. We've got that el sound happening in all way through the poem through to see goals we call Oh, under snuff ALS sunlight We've got We've got the short I pink drifts Oh, and slick In the first line, Andi and I got sunlight Wild. So lots of different connections going on within the poem. What are the distribution of sounds? Look first, just those 1st 3 lines under lower leaves slick with sunlight, pink nose sniffles, wild strawberries. It's very dense, very intense. There's an awful lot going on with those connected and repeated, Uh, sounds that dense and dark and like the undergrowth. And then on the fourth line, cream petals drift that hard. See it breaks. It breaks in with a sound that we haven't heard in the first part of the poem. Cream petals drift again. We're lightening this now, and these last two lines are look less dense. There are a lot clearer and lighter. Well, we're up in the sky where where the petals air drifting where the seagulls are flying So you start off very intense And then the effect of the sounds lightens Onda. What about the meaning? Well, the meanings of the different words. We've got some interesting meanings going on here. Slick slick is normally something that's wet, but we've got slick with sunlight. That's one of those line breaks where you're asking the reader you're putting the reader in one direction, and then you take the carpet away from them when they turn the corner. So under lower leaves, slick with sunlight. Okay, what else have we got going on? We've got pick in the line before strawberries. And then we got cream. We got something playing in the background there. Something sort of aging is forward. Strawberries and cream. Nothing here actually says what algae is now. We just met Archie and Archer was a cat. And a lot of my examples were have bean about cats. But here we've also got We've got things in the poem that hint at the fact the Altes a can't We got cream, We've got mu, We've got birds and cats chase birds. We got see goals. So these things happening in there, which are helping the reader guiding, took the reader. It doesn't tell the reader things, but it gives prompts to the reader so that they can infer. But algae is a cat, and all of these things they the sounds, the unusual meanings, the illusions outside of a poem on the implications the in there for the reader to find all of this. It is what helps to make a poem and make a poem work. 22. Conclusion: Well, we've come to the end of the poets Toolbox. Congratulations on route. We've visited five main areas of the toolbox. We've looked that meter form layout with a rhyme and sound in Mita. Remember how we started off talking about how English is a metrical language? How they There are complex words to talk about. The different metrical feet, the different metrical units of poetry. The I am the Truckee, the back till. But you don't actually need those words. You could still use the effects without knowing the technical jargon. They can be useful. You can always look them up if you need to. So remember that English is a rhythmical language. Andi, you can use rhythm just because you're an English speaker. You've got naturally a for it. We looked at form. We looked at the sonnet. We looked at blank verse, which, like the sonnet is, is iambic pentameter. But unlike this on it, it doesn't rhyme went Then we looked at free verse. A lot of modern poets were writing free verse, which has no regular pattern of, um of rhyme, no regular pattern of meter. But if you're writing free verse and you thrown out form completely. Be very careful. You need to concentrate on the other tools for tools like like Rheiman, Like sound a crime. Um, but sound effects on line breaks. You need to be very careful about those. Concentrate on those so that you don't end up with just chopped up Pope pros chopped up prose. Yes. Um, we also looked at the villain. L and I recommended that Dylan Thomas villain l do not go gentle. We looked at the Haikou on SciFi coup and saw that poetry forms are evolving. Modern poets are are pushing the limits with with old forms and adapting them to to where we are now. And in the modern lifestyle, poetry isn't a thing of the past. It's it's evolving. And then we looked out at layout within layout. We talked about punctuation. We talked about, uh, grandma we talked about in John Berman. We talked about, um, lying breaks. And we had that quotation from Phil Roberts about what's on the page. On what you hear that the conflict off print and sound may be seen as one of the main factors contributing to the particular richness of poetry. We're talking there of course, about things like in Germany, where you've got a line break. But the sense continues over that line break. So we've got this this conflict going on, and that's what rarely makes layout one of the most powerful tools in the poets toolbox. And after that we talked. We also talked about rhyme both masculine and feminine, the end rhymes and the full rhymes. We talked also about the different sound effects, such as alliteration. Where they are, the stressed vowel sound is repeated. We talked about constants, Andi alliteration, where we're talking about the constant sound, which is important. And we had that quote from Don Paterson about rhyme, unifying sense. And I think it isn't just full rhyme, but it's also half rhyme these other sound effects that pull a poem together. So those were the five main areas that we looked at. There's still more that we could have looked at, and we did venture in a little bit to start looking at how we were playing with language. We were making illusions. Outside of poll, we were implying things within the poem, choosing our words very carefully, playful use of words. Let's go back to that. That quotation, What we had very early on about poetry being the most complex and adult word game of all. Yes. Don't forget, then it's a game. Poetry should be fun. I hope that what you've seen on the Essential Poets toolbox helps you to understand this game, to understand its rules, understand the equipment and how it's being used within the game of poetry. And that you I hope you've enjoyed the course. And I hope that you enjoy poetry, Mawr, as you go on to read and write more off it. Thank you for staying with me through the course. Andi. Well, good luck. Thank you.