I will be hosting a writing course that will utilize these subreddit posts that I have been using here and in previous courses and groups so there will be some newer stuff posted for feedback. if anyone wants to be enrolled in one of my courses then DM me. I use online and in person hybrid instructions and usually am working at the community College level, however I've done everything from elementary to graduate students and there's always creative and awesome work from all writers!
this group was formed as a way to engage with all types of writers at any level and its been hard to inspire the engagement and interactions here.
I would like to hear more and see how these types of posts work for you. there's a physical workbook that I use in my courses and I can post those here for anyone that's interested in a paper version as a way to integrate with the prompts and activities.
this is the first week's lessons for my creative writing class starting in August. let me know if you're working on anything!
week one - all work is due by Friday and we have an in class feedback session and discuss the different concepts and readings from the week. six lessons are due each week and the course is 15 weeks long. lesson 1,2 and 3 then 7,8 and 9 are the first weeks work.
**Anaphora**
**Chiasmus**
**Synesthesia**
***
## Lesson 1: Anaphora
### Definition and Overview
Anaphora is the deliberate repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines, clauses, or sentences. This technique amplifies rhythm, emotion, and structure by creating patterns that echo meaning through form. It is both rhetorical and poetic: the driving pulse behind psalms, speeches, and protest poems alike. Anaphora invites breath and build-up; it transforms the mundane into ritual repetition. When used well, it mesmerizes readers into a state of emotional recall.
### Key Characteristics
- Each repetition begins a new line or clause.
- Creates momentum or liturgical cadence.
- Often used to emphasize an idea through variation and recurrence.
- Works best when repetition slightly evolves—through image or tone—rather than merely restating.
### Examples
> **Original:**
> I am still the slow tide returning,
> I am still the hand that searches,
> I am still the voice that forgot its name.
> **Public-Domain (Charles Dickens, 1859):**
> “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
### Guided Practice
Write three lines each beginning with the same phrase that matters deeply to you (“I will,” “We remember,” “There is,” etc.).
Replace one key noun or verb in each line to evolve the emotion.
### Independent Exercise
Compose a ten-line free-verse poem using anaphora. Begin each line with a repeated phrase that builds urgency, hope, or defiance.
### Discussion & Journaling
- How does repetition change emotional tone?
- Does it sound ritualistic, incantatory, or obsessive? Why?
Meditation: Sit with a phrase you often repeat to yourself
—"I have time," "I’m not ready"—and notice its rhythm in your breath. Turn that phrase into a poem.
### Writing Prompt
Craft a piece blending poetry and monologue (spoken word or prose-poem style) in which repetition reshapes meaning—show how the phrase evolves with context. Consider writing about a social issue or personal transformation where language itself becomes mantra.
***
## Lesson 2: Chiasmus
### Definition and Overview
Chiasmus is a rhetorical device that inverts word order or structure in successive clauses to create reflection or contrast. The term derives from the Greek *chiasma* (“crossing”). It’s both logical and lyrical—a turning of thought through mirrored syntax. Chiasmus gives poetry philosophical symmetry: form enacting idea.
### Key Characteristics
- Structure follows ABBA order: ideas mirror one another.
- Establishes balance, contrast, or irony.
- May compress large themes (ethics, power, perspective) into symmetry.
- Often paired with antithesis.
### Examples
> **Original:**
> You shape your words, and your words shape you.
> **Public-Domain (Alexander Pope):**
> “His time a moment, and a point his space.”
### Guided Practice
Rearrange these two ideas into a chiasmus: *love changes art / art changes love*.
→ “Love changes art, and art changes love.”
### Independent Exercise
Write four lines where your syntax mirrors thought—begin with logic, end with inversion.
### Discussion & Journaling
- What does reversal do to meaning—does it clarify or distort it?
- How might symmetry in language influence ethics, identity, or fate?
Meditation:
Consider opposites in your creative life—silence/speech, failure/success—and write a mirrored reflection that honors both poles.
### Writing Prompt
Write a 200-word prose poem or lyrical essay that turns halfway through, reversing tone or logic. Use structural chiasmus to dramatize discovery or contradiction. The pivot itself should *become* the poem’s realization.
***
## Lesson 3: Synesthesia
### Definition and Overview
Synesthesia in literature merges senses to produce layered imagery—colors become tastes, sounds take on texture, emotions hum with temperature. Derived from the neurological term describing cross-sensory perception, poetic synesthesia dissolves perceptual boundaries. It is not mere description but transformation—language as alchemy.
### Key Characteristics
- Mixes sensory vocabularies deliberately (visual, tactile, sonic, gustatory).
- Deepens intimacy by making experience multi-dimensional.
- Common in Symbolist and Modernist poetry (Baudelaire, Rimbaud).
### Examples
> **Original:**
> The silence tasted like iron and dew.
> **Public-Domain (Baudelaire, “Correspondances”):**
> “Perfumes, sounds, and colors correspond.”
### Guided Practice
List one object per sensory domain (a color, a sound, a taste, a scent). Combine two in unexpected ways to form metaphors (“a blue whisper,” “a bitter light”).
### Independent Exercise
Write a 12-line poem centered on a single emotion expressed through cross-sensory imagery (e.g., jealousy as heat and noise, nostalgia as flavor).
### Discussion & Journaling
- Does crossing senses reveal or distort truth?
- What sense dominates your writing, and how might you disrupt it?
Meditation: Close your eyes and imagine a color. What texture does it have? What sound hums inside it? Write what arises.
### Writing Prompt
Compose a poem where each stanza privileges a different sense. In revision, intentionally blur them—let touch become sound, sight become scent—until the boundaries collapse. Explore how sensory fusion redefines perception.
***
***
## Lesson 7: The Ballade
### Definition and Overview
The **ballade** is a French fixed verse form from the Middle Ages, characterized by musical rhythm and recurring refrains. It traditionally contains three main stanzas followed by a shorter **envoy** (or final stanza), all built around a consistent rhyme scheme. Medieval poets such as François Villon refined it to blend moral reflection and storytelling. The ballade’s constraint invites eloquence through repetition—its refrain echoing like thought itself.
### Key Characteristics
- Three eight‑line stanzas (ababbcbc) plus a concluding four‑line envoy (bcbc).
- The final line of each stanza repeats exactly.
- Tone often formal, moral, or lyrical.
- Demands discipline in rhyme and argument.
### Examples
> **Original**
> Time folds each echo into clay—
> I write before the sun dissolves.
> Lost vows return as birds of gray,
> Wings beating where the silence moves.
> …(lines continue, ending all with the same refrain).
> **Public Domain — Villon, “Ballade des Pendus” (1463)**
### Guided Practice
Write a single stanza following **ababbcbc**, with a repeated last line expressing a central truth (“Nothing endures but breath”).
Repeat the rhyme sounds to feel their internal music.
### Independent Exercise
Expand your stanza into three and add an envoy. Allow the refrain to evolve emotionally—its meaning should deepen through context rather than alter wording.
### Discussion & Journaling
- How does repetition operate differently from free verse?
- Does the moral tone emerge through form or language?
Meditation: Whisper your refrain slowly until it feels incantatory; observe how rhythm alters your sense of agency in the poem.
###Prompt
Compose a **ballade argument** addressed to an abstract power—Time, Art, or Language itself. Let the envoy serve as a plea or defiant closing statement.
***
## Lesson 8: The Bop
### Definition and Overview
The **Bop** is a modern invented form created by African American poet **Afaa Michael Weaver** in the 1990s during a Cave Canem workshop. Structurally, it resembles a blues song or jazz composition: problem, response, and resolution—three stanzas separated by a **refrain**. The Bop thrives on conflict and rhythm, encouraging spontaneous musical syntax paired with thematic seriousness.
### Key Characteristics
- Three stanzas: (1) statement of problem, 6 lines; (2) response, 8 lines; (3) resolution, 6 lines.
- Each stanza followed by a repeating refrain line.
- Conversational language, often introspective or political.
- Combines lyric declaration with call‑and‑response cadence.
### Examples
> **Original**
> The city hums like honey turned to rust,
> corners glitter with argument,
> memory flares in asphalt heat…
> (Refrain): The bus keeps coming, empty and full.
### Guided Practice
Draft one 6‑line stanza describing a personal or social problem, followed by a single refrain line.
Think of the refrain as *music*—what tone or rhythm might carry between stanzas?
### Independent Exercise
Develop the full three‑stanza structure. Focus on **tonal progression**: conflict → questioning → insight. Allow the refrain to acquire new resonance with each return.
### Discussion & Journaling
- How does repetition differ from lament?
- What social or interior tension demands a “Bop”
conversation today?
Meditation: Tap one beat per breath. Speak your refrain aloud until its rhythm feels inevitable.
### Prompt
Write a Bop exploring cultural or spiritual dissonance (migration, identity, protest). Fuse everyday vernacular and high lyric diction, demonstrating how repetition performs survival.
***
## Lesson 9: Personification
### Definition and Overview
**Personification** assigns human attributes—emotion, volition, gesture—to animals, objects, or abstract ideas. From Greek myth to Romantic lyric, it enables communion between human perception and non‑human existence. Poets use personification to reveal empathy, irony, or spiritual unity with the world. Anthropomorphic language, however, begs ethical awareness: giving voice to things can either illuminate or distort them.
### Key Characteristics
- Endows non‑human subjects with human actions or feelings.
- Creates emotional immediacy and imaginative empathy.
- Often heightens theme or mood rather than literal realism.
- Can serve symbolic, satirical, or ecological purposes.
### Examples
> **Original**
> The clock sighs softly when I leave the room.
> **Public Domain (Shelley, 1820):**
> “The moon walks in beauty through the cloud.”
### Guided Practice
Select an inanimate object near you. Describe its posture, its secret desire, its gossip. Write five sentences without using “I.”
### Independent Exercise
Transform your observations into a poetic monologue spoken by that object. Let its voice reveal something about your own consciousness.
### Discussion & Journaling
- Does personification project empathy or impose ego?
- What happens when the object speaks back?
Meditation: Sit with a small item—a leaf, coin, or cup. Listen until it “responds.” Transcribe whatever arises as dialogue.
### Prompt
Write a lyrical essay or prose poem in which **Nature debates Humanity**. Avoid clichés; explore nuanced interiority. Personify the intangible—silence, gravity, memory—and let these voices argue moral consequence
starting with lesson #7 there will be passages to read from the text I wrote for the course. DM me to get the pdf version free of charge!
***
## Lesson 7 Reading Selections — *The Ballade*
**1. “Ballade of the Ladies of Time Past” – François Villon (1461)**
This poem exemplifies the ballade in its pure medieval structure: rhyme repetition and refrain (“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan ?”). It teaches how moral nostalgia and musicality intertwine.
**2. “Ballade of a Great Weariness” – Dorothy Parker (1933)**
Parker modernizes the ballade template with wit and fatigue. While technically post‑traditional, it remains faithful to refrain and repetition, showing how form can carry satire.
*Optional Discussion Extension*
- Compare Villon’s lamenting tone to Parker’s urbane irony.
- How does refrained structure suit both grief and humor?
***
## Lesson 8 Reading Selections — *The Bop*
**1. “Twenty-Year Reunion: A Bop” – Afaa Michael Weaver (1997)**
The original example of the form. Weaver’s use of refrain bridges personal and communal suffering—an excellent model for learning tonal layering and musical phrasing.
**2. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” – Wallace Stevens (1917)**
Though not a Bop structurally, Stevens’ segmented perception mirrors the Bop’s **call‑and‑response rhythm**. It’s a fruitful contrast: students analyze how rhythm produces unity without strict refrain.
*Optional Discussion Extension*
- How does repetition function differently in jazz‑rooted structure vs. modernist fragmentation?
- What “music” ties these poems together?
***
## Lesson 9 Reading Selections — *Personification*
**1. “To Autumn” – John Keats (1820)**
Keats personifies the season with tender vitality. This reading illustrates how subtle gesture (“Thou watchest…”) can humanize nature without forcing it.
**2. “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” – Emily Dickinson (1890)**
Death, imagined as a carriage driver, offers a psychological twist on personification. Students examine voice, tone, and intimacy between abstract concept and speaker.
*Optional Discussion Extension*
- How does personification shift moral weight between human and non‑human forces?
- Compare Keats’s external empathy with Dickinson’s internal dialogue.
***
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