Find your way around a poem

0:00- [David] Readers, hello. Welcome to The Poem Zone. I wanna talk about what poems are and how to read them. So what I've got planned for y'all is that I'll talk through some poetry terms, and then I'll read you a very short, original David poem, TMTMTM. And then we'll use my poem as a kind of map.

0:16I'll mark it up like I'm giving you directions, so you can find your way around other poems. But first, a couple of definitions. What's a poem? Good question, big question. I've gotten into fights over this question. But a poem is art made out of words. Poems use rhythm and sometimes rhyme, though not always, to play with the sound and the feel of words to express an idea or a feeling.

0:40So what's a poem made of? Poems are made up of lines and stanzas. A line is what it sounds like. It's a single line of text. When one line ends, that's called a line break. When you group a bunch of lines together, that's called a stanza. It's like a little paragraph.

0:56The stanzas are usually separated by blank lines, so you can easily see where one stanza ends and the next one begins. Some poems rhyme. Rhyme is when the ending sound of words at the ends of different lines match with each other, like in this little poem. "I played baseball in the space mall."

1:16Baseball rhymes with space mall. But okay, now we have our basic poem components. A poem is made of stanzas, which are made of lines. Sometimes, they rhyme. Let's take a look at my poem, which is called "Egg Poem." "Morning is a fried egg for breakfast. 7:10 and the living is easy.

1:35Morning is brushing your teeth, but forgetting the toothpaste, turning the shower on way too hot, almost cooking yourself to a perfect medium. Morning is leaving shampoo in your hair by mistake, catching the bus but forgetting the backpack. Why does everything have to be so hard?"

1:55So part of finding your way around a poem is identifying its parts. Where are the stanzas here? How many are there? There are three. You can tell because there are these three chunks of text with these spaces in between them. That's what stanzas tend to look like.

2:12And you can see what I, the poet, did here. Each new stanza begins the same way, "Morning is... Morning is... Morning is..." The structure repeats, but mourning is a different thing each time. So let's look at how the idea of mourning changes in each stanza. In the first stanza, morning is easy.

2:34And the speaker, that's the voice that narrates the poem, eats a tasty egg. In the second stanza, things start to go wrong. The speaker forgets the toothpaste when brushing their teeth and the water's too hot. And notice the last word, medium. And then in the last stanza, things get even worse.

2:50The speaker has shampoo in their hair and forgets their backpack. And the last word in that stanza is hard. So each stanza describes a slightly worse situation that gets more intense. Each stanza builds on the one before it. And all of them work together to express this growing feeling of frustration.

3:09Until finally, everything's so hard, so difficult, so unpleasant, God, why do we even have mornings? But also, and this is me trying to be cute, remember what the title of the poem is. It's "Egg Poem." So what do easy, medium, and hard have to do with eggs? Well, there are different ways of cooking an egg.

3:29It's diner slang for how well cooked the yolk, the yellow part, of an egg is. So the worst the morning, is the more cooked the speaker feels, until at last they feel like a hard cooked egg yolk. That's how each of these stanzas fits together to build the meaning of this poem, irritation by Irritation.

3:45That's how this poem is structured, you see? When you read your next poem, ask yourself, how does each line and stanza in the poem build meaning? When you can answer this question, you are well on your way to figuring out how that poem works. Happy reading, poets!

4:01You can learn anything. David, out.