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Basic Terminology

Structure - how words are arranged on the page
Line - words in a row
Sentence - a grammatical unit with a subject and a verb that makes sense
Stanza - several lines, separated by a blank space from other stanzas
Enjambment - a sentence that extends past a line break
Caesura - an interruption or break or pause
Negative Space - white space where there aren’t words
Syntax - sentence structure, grammar, word order

Polysyndeton - lots of conjunctions
Asyndeton - absence of conjunctions

Repetition - elements used more than once

Anaphora - beginning elements used more than once
Refrain - a key phrase or line used more than once

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Here is the endless wet thick cosmos, the center of everything -- the nugget of dense sap, branching vines, the dark burred faintly belching bogs. Here is swamp, here is struggle, closure -- pathless, seamless, peerless mud.

I’m Mary Oliver, and I want to visually arrange my swamp to be this metaphorical place of struggle, complicated, difficult, hard to navigate, universal, everywhere and everything… how do I arrange it?

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Negative spaces mimick the holes in the swamp, sucking you down

This enjambment makes it The Endless, like a concept

The wandering structure of the lines, made by negative spaces, also reflect the wandering speaker.

She says it’s closure and gives us a caesura to break it… but it’s not a full stop period. So what I thought was closure isn’t ever closure.

Almost like reverse anaphora… repeated endings, not beginnings, reflecting endless.

the center IS a nugget, that’s what centers are

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What do I want you to do?

Here’s “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks with all the structure taken away.

The pool players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon.

How should it be structured on a page? Why?

Go into a Breakout Room.

Read the poem. Do basic speaker / situation / paraphrase.

Then structure this thing. Make intentional choices.

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After you have analyzed and structured the poem…

Here’s “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks with all the structure taken away.

The pool players. Seven at the Golden Shovel. We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon.

Go to the Flipgrid link posted in Schoology.

If you need a join code it’s mancoffaplit2020.

Make a video.

-Explain your structural choices and what you did.

-You might share the screen of your structured poem.

-Then read it, using that structure to inform your reading.

-I provided an example.

-View others’ videos. Comment positively. Like. React.

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For Cheaters

Here are some readings of the poem.

Video #1 has the poet herself and then also Morgan Freeman.