Astro Poetry: Students Working as Poets.

An approach to teaching the writing of poetry is presented in this brief article. AUTHOR'S COMMENT (excerpt): A poet's purpose is to amuse, to instruct, to embellish truth, or to vitalize dull reality. Poets compress, using the minimum number of words to gain the maximum effect, yoking seemingly disparate ideas into metaphors, creating poetic shock, leading the reader to expect one idea and then offering another. THE APPROACH (excerpt): One approach I have employed successfully in making students aware of these qualities of the poet is called "Astro Poetry." Students clip the "Astrological Forecast" from the newspaper and bring it to class. We discuss the four types of meaning in a poem: Sense, Feeling, Tone, and Intention. Students read their forecast to get the literal "sense" of the message. They then translate the "sense" into poetic form. To do this, they must capture the "intention" of the original message and transform it into the aim of their poem. They must establish the "feeling" of their poem--serious, humorous, ironic, satiric, didactic. The strings of consecutive words must be coherent, precise and unified, and must be so shaped that they look like a poem--a special arrangement of words on paper. (KC)