Black Writers' Guild Meeting - "The Poet In You" Presented by Vickie Oliver-Lawson

On Saturday, March 2, 2019, I attended the Black Writers’ Guild meeting at the Enoch Pratt Library (Edmondson Street branch). Vickie Oliver-Lawson presented a workshop titled “The Poet in You! Introduction to Poetry.”

She talked about the different types of poetry:

·       Couplets – two lines that rhyme and have the same meter

·       Haiku – a Japanese form of poetry evoking nature

–       17 syllables (1^st line – 5 syllables; 2^nd line – 7 syllables and 3^rd line – 5 syllables)

·       Quatrains – 4 lines (rhyme pattern or not)

·       Ballads – a bit longer, tell a story

·       Limerick – humorous poem consisting of 5 lines

She talked about the structure of poetry:

·       Prose by paragraph, imagery appeal to the senses

·       By Rhyme or not (pattern of words that contain similar sounds, beat, speak to the mind, any topics, etc.)

·       By stanza (group of lines in a poem)

She then discussed the elements of poetry:

·       Alliteration - tongue twister

·       Rhyme - pattern, AABB, AABBA – limericks

·       Onomatopoeia - sounds like their meaning, e.g. snakes hiss, bang bomb)

·       Imagery - describe a sensory experience

·       Simile - comparison using "as" or "like"

After the presentation, the audience were paired off into small group and given a different type of type of poetry to write. I was teamed up with Pat Fowlkes, Carolyn Davis, and Greg Smith and we were given a Haiku to write. We selected water as the topic to write about and here are the two Haiku poems we came up with:

#1:

Soft, hard, wet, and ice

A water goddess in sight

Flowing – grace and joy

#2:

Bursting from the clouds

Giving life and love to all

Beauty in its source

This was a fantastic workshop and I enjoyed flexing my creative muscles in writing different types of poetry.