Exercise 1 (Week 2)
Take four lines of a tetrameter poem from this week’s assignment, and turn them into four lines of pentameter. You should conserve as much vocabulary as you can, but you can adjust word order and introduce synonyms and paraphrase as needed (i.e., do not simply add a new, two-syllable word to each line).
Conversely, take four lines of a pentameter poem from this week’s assignment, and turn them into four lines of tetrameter, following the same guidelines (i.e., you do not need simply to subtract two syllables from each line, but can move things around more freely).
In both cases, preserving the rhyme, if any, is optional.
Finally, write a two-hundred-word explanation of what you did, and any difficulties you encountered, drawing on terms and concepts from our reading for the week.
Exercise 2 (Week 3)
Choose one word from this week’s poetry readings—any word—and spend the next week listening and looking out for interesting instances of its use. After a few days, write up a one-page report on your findings, based on at least four instances. Any encounter, visual or acoustic, deliberate or accidental, counts, but you should try to mix these kinds.
Begin with a phonetic description of the word, based on what you learn from McGregor’s chapter on phonetics. After that, draw on whatever resources serve your curiosities: these might include, but are not limited to, the OED (including its account of the word’s etymology), Google n-grams (which will give you a sense of its recent frequency), an analysis with Praat (a good opportunity to explore that software). If your examples are from recordings or videos, provide a link so that I can find it easily. You are not required to make your own sound recordings, but feel free to do so (e.g. of different people saying the word, of the word as digitally processed in revealing ways, etc.). You can submit those via email with your text. The exercise is intended to open up the word’s poetry and its affordances for poetry, that is, what it offers to the art, always coming back to its sound.
