Unit 8
Lecture
Writing “section” poems.
About the Poem Content
Usually this type of poem will have a strong topic
that is tied together by the poem. The topic is up to you. At this point in the
semester, you have written enough poems to know which topic appeals to you the
most – landscape, political, family, memory, or nature. There may have been a
subject area that seemed like you could write about that forever – this is the
topic to explore for your section poem. Go back to that topic for the free
writing exercise and mine it again. This unit is more about structure than
topic.
The “section” poem can have the following
structural characteristics:
sections are connected by
repetition of words, phrases and that indicate family, place, history, nature,
temporal movement, or landscape
i.e. specific place
names, terms associated with topics – like science, math, nursing terms – any
words that help connect the reader in movement from one section to another,
the
sections can be multi-stanza for movement,
i.e.
time, months, names of places, people,
The above characteristics are suggestions for your
poem’s editing process. After you’ve drafted your poem for this unit you’ll
want to go back through to see if the poem fulfills the expectations of the
assignment. This is part of the editing process.
Let’s look at the following example poem.
Explication will follow in the video.
by Dorothy Barnett
I.
We were travellers those years
riding the winding blacktop,
always reaching westward towards
the next river and back again
Row after row of heavy brown
plants, curled
and straight, clicked-
by, outside the car window
For miles the cotton fields released
white into drifts gathering in eddies
along the railroad tracks
New England snow-white
littered the Panhandle roadside
in dead of summer hell
At the roadside turnaround
we stopped for our lunch
of yellow-orange cheese
and big wheel bologna
sandwiches
In the distance I could see
the u-shaped stooped backs
of the pickers as they worked
their way down the long
rows stretching out
a lifetime
My mother’s hand took me
into the fields to touch the white
bolls of her history, we waded past
knife sharp brown leaves waist
high, we waded deep into the field,
our car a faded blue speck
under the trees in the distance
My mother’s hand took mine ther
in the field, she covered the boll
with our hands, her hand, my hand
the soft white hidden by frown broken
sharp as glass blades
II.
My mother’s people came
from Oklahoma dirt to Texas
during the Depression
Her mother walked barefoot on the reservation,
twisted her long black hair into a braided
crown, dipped brown acrid snuff
and married a Dutchman wandering through
They worked the hard land for
fourteen years and thirteen babies
before the dust nearly buried them
then the let the dry wind blow
them south to Houston
Where tent city slums waited and poverty
wore the color gray, where muddy
water gathered around the base
of communal copper spigots, where
mosquitoes and dusty shell roads
stretched out a lifetime
My mother’s father pulled her out
of school in the third grade, put her
in fields to pick cotton, to help out,
she was eight,
years later he would crawl
into her bed at night, sink into her and
her cotton mattress, touch her while her mother
cried
The fields of cotton-white clouds sweeping
the earth-became her haven,
her quick hands found the sticky
bolls fast and sure, she pulled her weight
fifty pounds, then a hundred, the long
full bag following behind in the narrow row,
stretching out her lifetime
The plants towered above her, hiding her,
her shape hiding, hiding her from his shape,
at thirteen she ran away, married a drunk
wandering through,
he kept her in the fields to help out,
years of abuse left the dry landscape
of her body barren
III.
That day of my childhood field, as our hands curled
around the cotton white, my mother’s voice said,
there’s a softness in life and a hardness
sometimes there’s no difference
in the two
That day in the field-white, my mother’s voice,
my mother’s hand, my hand, the cotton,
sometimes all we have
are the memories.
Links to other note or list poems in the student
literary journal:
A Family Cycle by Jason Mondine
Now, Even, Sometime for the Dying
by Shawn Badgley
Since 1884 by Shawn Badgley
Poem Assignment 8
Reader’s Response 8
Poem Assignment 8
·
Read the student prose poems in the Rio Review for
examples.
·
Using any of the topics from the free writing
exercises write a section poem.
·
Give the poem a title.
· Make
sure the poem is in at least 3 sections and long enough to feel movement - a
beginning, middle and end.
· Make
sure your poem has the elements of a section poem as defined in the section –
Section Poem.