Wednesday, April 25, 2012

W is for WOKEN?

W is for WOKEN
Photo by Amy LV

Seal Dreams
by Amy LV


Students - Do you notice anything strange today?  Well, I made an embarrassing little error.  Opening my dictionary to a letter for today's poem...I opened to the wrong letter.  I forgot V, the letter of my OWN LAST NAME.  So, today's poem is a W poem, and tomorrow will be a V poem.  Then things will all be right again.  (I do know the alphabet. I do!)

Even with this silly mistake, I'm quite happy with today's word.  It's a funny and old-fashioned sounding word, a word we don't use often.  I had to look it up in a few different places to hear some varied sentence examples.

This short little verse has a wee bit of special sound work inside of two lines.  In line 5, QUILTS and SILVER have the IL sound, and in line 7, CRIED and FIND both have the long I sound.  Sometimes writers repeat vowel sounds, and this is called assonance.  Sometimes I revisit a poem after I have written it to work more purposefully on my vowel sounds.

Try it.  Look at a sentence or poem line that you recently wrote, maybe something in your notebook.  Now just study the vowel sounds.  Do any repeat? Can you find a way to include a bit of assonance in one of your lines or sentences?  It's a good brain exercise, one that becomes more natural with dedicated practice.

Do not miss this week's funny and informative post at Sharing Our Notebooks. Author and poet Suz Blackaby is sharing her notebooks as well as a neat writing exercise. Stop by to read her words and to enter the giveaway for her book, NEST, NOOK, & CRANNY.

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7 comments:

  1. "W" is for Woken

    I would have woken,
    But your soft voice held me in.
    In dreams we are still.


    According to Merriam's Online, the next word in the dictionary is "Wokowi" what would have written if you had landed on THAT!

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  2. Forgot the v??? Vvvvvery interesting! Vhere is your head? Seriously....there's nothing serious about that. I am cracking up!
    Woken is beautifully written! Thanks for your poetry :-)

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  3. So, following Penny, Vell, vhat vould you say if others had made that mistake? I suspect losing the internet made the day rather interesting yesterday. Thank you for the beautiful 'woken' poem, & love the Christophe haiku above.

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  4. The Weight of Day

    Dawn lifts its weight
    off the night, nothing is broken.
    Then, I'm light. Woken.

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  5. Love the imaginative leaps in this one, Amy! Tomorrow will be a good day for V. You wouldn't be a poet if you didn't get out of order from time to time. :)

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  6. Even though v was vacant today, woken was a very clever poem.

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  7. Hee hee...you are good people not to totally make fun of me! Thank you again to Lisa and Christophe - these are beautiful. All of us with our sleepy eyes, savoring those moments of morning... a.

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