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- [Instructor] Hello readers, let's talk about poems.
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Poetry is a special kind of writing.
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If ordinary writing is like talking,
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then poetry is like singing.
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Poetry is a way of making art with language.
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Poems can express huge ideas or feelings
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that can be about the sound or rhythm of language.
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Or they can be goofy little jokes.
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It's like any other kind of writing.
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Poems can be about everything
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or they can be about nothing at all.
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They can be funny or sad, or sweet.
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They can rhyme.
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They can very much not rhyme.
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And all of that is, in my opinion, absolutely wonderful.
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I think of some poems as condensed ideas
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that contain a lot of ideas in small amounts of text.
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So every word matters a lot.
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Those are little light bulbs representing ideas.
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So I'm gonna look at a couple of poems today
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in order to describe some parts of a poem.
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Let's begin with the poem, Cat by Marilyn Singer.
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Goes like this.
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Cat, I prefer warm fur,
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a perfect fire to lie beside,
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a cozy lap where I can nap,
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an empty chair when she's not there.
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I want heat on my feet,
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on my nose, on my hide.
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No cat I remember dislikes December inside.
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So, the person who wrote this poem, Marilyn Singer
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is the poet.
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For stories, the person who writes the poem
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is an author, but for poems, the writer is a poet.
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But who is telling the poem, who's speaking?
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The person whose voice we hear in a poem
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is called the speaker.
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Which is another thing I like about poetry.
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When you're having trouble understanding a poem,
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read it aloud.
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Part of the pleasure of poetry, for me,
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is hearing the words bounce around as you say them.
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And in this poem, I'm pretty sure the speaker is a cat.
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Now you'll notice there are only three sentences
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in this poem, but they're separated in to 15 lines.
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You can see these lines have anywhere
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from one to four words in them.
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Lines can be as long or as short as a poet likes.
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But here the poet is creating these line breaks
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to indicate pauses and rhythms.
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Right, like, normally we wouldn't start
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a new line here if this were prose,
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which is what we call all other forms of writing.
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Prose uses normal sentences and paragraphs.
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Right, the poet is choosing to create line breaks
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in order to change the way the sentence
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or the line looks on the page.
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Poetry's not just about how it sounds.
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Sometimes it's about how it looks as it's written.
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Now, in addition, the poet is also using spaces
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to scoot these three phrases over,
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as well as this word, inside.
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The words themselves are scooted in.
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They're curled up and feeling cozy.
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Like a cat by a fire in the middle of December.
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You'll also notice that some, but not all
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of the lines rhyme with each other.
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And let's take a moment to think for a second,
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what is rhyming, really?
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One way to think about it is when the ending sound
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of a word matches the other ending sound of a word,
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like lap and nap.
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Or when a bunch of sounds match each other
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throughout a pair of words like remember and December.
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I wanna be super clear about this part,
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because I was already out of high school
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before I learned this thing.
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But, poems don't have to rhyme.
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They can, but they definitely don't have to.
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I have one more poem part to describe to you.
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And to do it, I wanna use Billy Collins poem, Litany.
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Which sounds like a fancy poem at first,
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but then becomes much more conversational.
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I'll end by reading the first three stanzas,
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which are these paragraph-looking things.
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Not all poems are broken in to stanzas,
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but this one is.
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So, those are some parts of the poem.
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To review, a poet writes lines.
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The place where each line ends is called a line break.
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And a group of lines together in a paragraph
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is called a stanza.
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The voice that tells us the poem, the poem's narrator,
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is called the speaker.
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Some poems rhyme, others don't; cool.
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Here's a snippet of Litany by Billy Collins.
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Litany; you are the bread and the knife,
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the crystal goblet and the wine.
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You are the dew on the morning grass
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and the burning wheel of the sun.
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You are the white apron of the baker,
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and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.
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However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
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the plums on the counter,
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or the house of cards.
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And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
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There was just no way that you are the pine-scented air.
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It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
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maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
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but you are not even close
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to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.
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There's more, but I'd love it if you looked it up
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and read it aloud yourself.
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You can learn anything; David, out.