ABSTRACT
Poetry is often seen as a mysterious genre: intimidating, difficult, pretentious. Learning the basics about how some poems work, then putting our knowledge into practice, will help us gain a fuller understanding of poetry. Poems can be serious or entertaining, light-hearted or dramatic, slow or fast-paced. One of the key elements of poetry is imagery. In terms of the poem’s story, the narrator or speaker of the poem is caring for an unnamed woman who has become too weak to climb the stairs to her bathroom. Making sense of a poem often requires reading it more than once. Some writers like to freewrite or make notes in prose, then shape their material into lines of poetry afterwards. Figurative language is a blanket term for various kinds of writing that are non-literal. The writing and revision process is much the same whether we are writing fiction or poetry.
