I work with disturbed adolescents and am constantly in need of poetry writing exercizes. This is fairly easy, since almost anything can be used to encourage "response" writing. My difficulty is coming up with enough poems to use as examples. Does anyone (or everyone for that matter!) have poems that can be used as examples for poetry writing exercizes such as: list poems, identity poems, use of metaphor/simile, "Once I was...but now I am...", "I came from...", etc.? It would be helpful to include the names of some poems, or even the text, plus an idea of how it can be used as an exercize. I work with so many kids of different ages, cultures, experiences, as well as both genders that I'm always looking for new ideas. Anyone? PS. Does anyone have the text of the poem "Remorse" by Jorge Lums B

-- Catherine O'Neill Thorn (oneillpub@earthlink.net), September 06, 1999

Answers

Hello my daughter is 15 and she was given a book titled "chicken soup for the teenage soul". This book has many poems in it and short stories as well. I hope this might help you :-))

-- Rene (rkilpatrick@sprint.ca), January 08, 2000.

Two remorses . Remorse for any Death by Jorge Luis Borges - 1923

Free of memory and hope, unlimited, abstract, almost future, the dead person in not a dead person: it is death. Like the god of the mystics, whom they insist has no attributes, the dead person, everywhere no one, in nothing but the loss and absence of the world. We rob it of everything, we do not leave it one color, one syllable: here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up, there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope. Even what we are thinking it might be thinking too; we have shared out like thieves the amazing treasure of nights and days .........................

REMORSE JORGE LUIS BORGES I have committed the worst sin of all That a man can commit. I have not been Happy. Let the glaciers of oblivion Drag me and mercilessly let me fall. My parents bred and bore me for a higher Faith in the human game of nights and days; For earth, for air, for water, and for fire. I let them down. I wasn't happy. My ways Have not fulfilled their youthful hope. I gave My mind to the symmetric stubbornness Of art, and all its webs of pettiness. They willed me bravery. I wasn't brave. It never leaves my side, since I began: This shadow of having been a brooding man.

-- ilza (ilza@pobox.com), September 08, 1999.