The Everything Writing Poetry Book (37 page)

Another exercise for older children is to use enjambment for all but the final line of the poem. Enjambment, remember, means that the end of a line in your poem is not the end of a sentence or a phrase (ending each line where a sentence or phrase ends is called
end-stopping
). For example, if you started with the previous example list and created end-stopped lines, you could write something like this:

The two of us sat at a table.
You turned and smiled at a blackbird.
I finished eating my sundae.
The bottom of my bowl filled with ice cream grease.
The skin on my knuckles turned green
.

Such an effort will feel like you're deliberately writing toward your list of words (and it probably won't produce good poetry either). Enjambment will give the poem more flow and hide your word list better. Here's the same list used in a poem with enjambment:

As we sat at the table
I noticed through the window a blackbird
perched quietly I ate my sundae
slowly but it felt like grease
on my tongue. The bird turned green
.

You should see by comparing the two that the second has a better flow to it and a sharper energy that moves you from line to line. The content of the poem doesn't make very much sense because the words were chosen at random. Choosing words randomly can provide you with more of a challenge, but you can also select words that you know will go together well. Practicing the enjambment exercise will help children not only with bouts-rimés but with other forms as well—even those that have rhymes. After a while, the children will get a better sense of when to use enjambment and when to use end-stops.

Chapter 18
Vision and Revision

Y
ou may feel that revision will spoil the page. Or you may feel that poems, being so short, don't need a lot of revision. However, neither of these worries is valid. Even professional poets use a drafting process to improve their work. They may make it look easy, but you can be sure that most of the published poems you read are the result of hours of thought. This chapter will give you the tools you need to create your own revision process.

Clause Patterns I: Nontransitive

In Chapter 3, you read about different phrase patterns—participles, absolutes, and prepositional phrases—that you can use to liven up your details. For your revisions to be successful, you should have a working knowledge of the basic clause patterns used to create sentences. First, you must understand the distinction between a phrase and a clause.

Definitions

A
phrase
is a group of words that form a unit. This unit, however, cannot stand on its own as a sentence. For instance, the word groups
in the driveway, spinning its wheels
, and
windshield covered with ice
cannot be set off as sentences—that is, beginning with a capital letter and ending with a period.

A
clause
is also a group of words that form a unit. But the clause differs from the phrase in two important ways. First, the clause always has a subject/verb pair at its heart. Second, many clauses can stand on their own as sentences. “She is the smartest girl in the class” and “We ate the whole pizza in ten minutes,” are clauses that can be punctuated as sentences.

The Intransitive Pattern

In Chapter 5, you read briefly about the noun/verb/noun pattern that creates clauses. Sometimes this noun/verb/noun pattern creates a
nontransitive clause
pattern. This means either that the subject is the only one affected by the action of the verb or that the verb names a state of being rather than an action.

When the subject is the only one affected by the action of the verb, the subject/verb pattern is
intransitive
. Sentences like “She is walking very quickly” or “He went upstairs” are built upon this pattern. The subjects of the two sentences,
she
and
he
, are performing the actions named by the verbs
walking
and
went
, and no one else is involved. You might have noticed that the second noun in the noun/verb/noun pattern has disappeared. The disappearance of the second noun is common in the intransitive pattern.

The Linking Verb Pattern

When the verb names a state of being instead of an action, then the subject/verb pair forms a
linking verb
pattern. This usually means that whatever follows the verb renames or describes the subject. Sentences like “She is a police officer” or “He became a nurse,” follow the noun/verb/noun pattern (she/is/police officer; he/became/nurse), and the second noun renames the first. In other words, both nouns refer to the same person.

This pattern can be altered by replacing the second noun with an adjective. In the sentences “She is brave” and “He became dizzy,”
brave
and
dizzy
are both adjectives that describe the state of being of the subject. Traditionally, the main elements in both forms of the linking verb pattern are labeled subject/linking verb/complement.

Clause Patterns II: Transitive

Sometimes the noun/verb/noun pattern creates a transitive clause pattern. This means two—sometimes three—entities can be affected by the action that the verb names. The subject is the starting point of that action, and the direct object is usually the end point of that action.

The Basic Pattern

In the sentence “She is walking her dog,” the subject
she
performs the action named by the verb
walking
. The word
dog
rounds out the action named by the verb, making it the direct object. Notice that this noun/verb/noun pattern is different from the one in the linking verb pattern. In the linking verb pattern, the two nouns (she/police officer; he/nurse) refer to the same person. In the transitive pattern, however, the two nouns (she/dog) refer to different entities.

Variations to the Pattern

The transitive pattern can also be altered. One way to do so is by adding an
indirect object
. For example, in the sentence “She gave the teacher an apple,” you have a subject (
she
) which starts the action, and a direct object (
apple
) that the indirect object (
teacher
) receives. In this sentence, there are three nouns (she/teacher/apple) that refer to different things.

You can also alter the pattern by adding an
object complement
, a noun that renames the direct object. For example, in the sentence “We elected him president,”
we
is the subject and
him
is the direct object, but the word
president
tells us what the direct object became.
Him
and
president
refer to the same person.

We can alter the pattern yet again by making the object complement an adjective. For example, in the sentence “The fumes made her dizzy,”
fumes
is the subject,
her
is the direct object, and
dizzy
is an adjective that tells us what the direct object became. However, no matter what variation you make in the transitive clause pattern, you must always have a direct object present.

Clause Patterns III: Independent and Dependent

Clauses can be distinguished further by their ability to stand on their own as sentences. Clauses that can stand alone are called independent. Those that can't stand alone are called dependent. Both types have the subject/verb pairs required of all clauses. Dependent clauses, however, are independent clauses that have been changed so that they can be embedded within yet another clause.

The Adverbial Clause

Consider the clause “She is a police officer.” You can punctuate it as a sentence because it can stand on its own. However, by putting a subordinating conjunction before it (
because she is a police officer
), you turn it into an
adverbial clause
. It still has a subject/verb pair in it, but it can no longer stand on its own as a sentence. It must now be joined to an independent clause (
Because she is a police officer, she has had training with firearms
) and in this case describes the verb of that clause.