Berg

My poem from the homework due Monday 16th, workshopped on Monday 23rd. The assignment was "Think of a famous person, event, story or character and write about it in no more than 10 lines. It's up to you what form - and it can be free verse with no real rules or stipulations. You can partially or fully rhyme your offering - or not at all. This is just about having fun and experimenting with poetry and being 'intertextual.'"

Berg

Calved in the far North. My icy frozen
Mother left far behind. I drift southward
With brothers and sisters by the dozen.
Something unnatural, man-made, can be heard
Above the sound of North Atlantic swell.
The mechanical noise gives me unease,
A feeling that not everything is well.
A ship, a giant, Titan of the seas
Sailing careless out of the April night.
I won't miss this steel vessel of light.

So I'm being intertextual with the sinking of the Titanic. Noted were: the isolation of the word "man-made" in the middle of the line; the almost repetition of "a ship, a giant"; all the 's' sounds in the last line. All these were good. It was noted that the title (which I was unsure of) followed by calving made the iceberg seem alive; the last line made it seem malevolent.

All in all, I'm pleased with this. I'm doing a bit of my seeing the world from the villain thing (and to be fair, the Titanic is under power, the 'berg at the mercy of the wind and currents; no one sets out to be a villain in their own eyes.) It doesn't show up with the formatting blogger is giving me, but it was suggested that if you turn it on it's side, it looks almost like the shape of an iceberg, but the space between lines is less on here and if I start fiddling with the look here I'll be up all night.