Welcome to SET POETRY FREE

We are the ifsopoets, a team of poetry subversives dedicated to the liberation of poetry and we need YOUR IDEAS AND CREATIVITY to set poetry free.

This E-COMMUNIQUE contains your instructions for liberating the poems you study. We call on you to:

G Refresh, re-mix, respond and release them back into the WILD to create your own poetry happenings.

G Take a stand! Undertake a direct action NOW. Help us to Set Poetry Free!

Choose one of the poems here and undertake the DIRECT ACTION suggested. Look out for our next COMMUNIQUE with info on more DIRECT ACTIONS we want you to undertake to SET POETRY FREE

from The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again

The isle is now full of torrents of terra-bytes, streams and twangling podcasts.

As the poet Benjamin Zephaniah said: “There are lots of new ways to publish your work on line. The important thing is to publish in people’s hearts”.

Words can be set free from the page to live on line and out loud too.

What will a poem look like in the future?

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ACTION A

1. 1  You are the future! Imagine it’s 2114 and you have becomePoet Laureate…
2. 2  Write a poem from the future.
3. 3  Include future terminology or jargon that does not exist today.
4. 4  Think how it could be published online – with as much or as little sound, video, animation.
5. 5  Think how your future poem could involve reader interaction and response.
6. 6  Work in groups on a collaborative poem about the future.

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The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim Because it was grassy and wanted wear, Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I marked the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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ACTION B
Poets of the World Re-Write! You have nothing to use but

your brains!

Redrafting and editing your work makes for great writing, and making poems can help you think more clearly and help you to make up your mind.

1. 1  Think of a real tricky decision you have to make.
2. 2  Start writing about this dilemma in rough.
3. 3  Now shake up your poem – shape it in the form of a flowchart or a map showing the different directions you could take.
4. 4  Put the poem under your pillow tonight – see if it slips into your dreams and helps you decide what to do.
5. 5  What was the outcome, did the poem help you decide?

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