Today’s Prompt:

1. Today’s Prompt: • Inch by Inch Choose an inch of space anywhere around you: the sole of your shoe, the rusted headlight of an abandoned car, that weathered and broken thumb your grandfather used to pry open the back fence. Write about that inch. As poets we often become overwhelmed by the big picture. We seek to conquer love, injustice, and the meaning of meaning. Take a step back. Focus the scope of your poetry. Writing about a single drop of rain can tell us the most about the sky above.

2. “Making the Ordinary Extraordinary” with Philip Levine Phillip Levine often uses ordinary, every day objects and images to create poems with deeper meanings. In the two poems we are going to look at, he uses these items for symbols. In Milkweed, Levine uses this ordinary plant as a symbol to make a deeper point about life and letting go. In The Poem of Chalk, Levine uses chalk as a symbol to make a deeper point about aging and death. Now it’s your turn, pick an ordinary, every day item and use it as a symbol for something deeper or as an extended metaphor.

3. Literary Terms Review: • symbol (sim-bol): a symbol is a word or object that stands for another word or object. The object or word can be seen with the eye or not visible. For example a dove stands for Peace. The dove can be seen and peace cannot. • metaphor (met-AH-for) [from the Gk. carrying one place to another]: a type of figurative language in which a statement is made that says that one thing is something else but, literally, it is not. In connecting one object, event, or place, to another, a metaphor can uncover new and intriguing qualities of the original thing that we may not normally notice or even consider important. Metaphoric language is used in order to realize a new and different meaning. As an effect, a metaphor functions primarily to increase stylistic colorfulness and variety. Metaphor is a great contributor to poetry when the reader understands a likeness between two essentially different things.

4. Milkweed Remember how unimportant they seemed, growing loosely in the open fields we crossed on the way to school. We would carve wooden swords and slash at the luscious trunks until the white milk started and then flowed. Then we'd go on to the long day after day of the History of History or the tables of numbers and order as the clock slowly paid out the moments. The windows went dark first with rain and then snow, and then the days, then the years ran together and not one mattered more than another, and not one mattered. Two days ago I walked the empty woods, bent over, crunching through oak leaves, asking myself questions without answers. From somewhere a froth of seeds drifted by touched with gold in the last light of a lost day, going with the wind as they always did.

5. The Poem of Chalk • Text is on your handout. Follow along with the audio of Philip Levine reading.