Poet Verse Quiz

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by that interesting and curious quiz guy, John Chaneski from New York. Hi, John.

Hi, Grant. Hello, Martha. I hope you guys are doing well in this challenging time, as we call it.

And in this challenging time, I think we need some poetry.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure.

One thing that’s great about poetry is that everyone can do it. You just need confidence and some kind of vocabulary.

Now, this quiz is half trivia, half creative. I’ll read you a selection from a famous poem, and I’ll leave one word or two off the end or off the section I’m giving you.

And if you think you know what’s missing, say, I know this, and then you can give me the answer. Or if you don’t know what’s missing, you can say, I wrote this, and then I’ll let you come up with a word that ends the selection, even if you don’t know it.

What do you think of that?

Okay, so I know this or I wrote this. I know this means I’m filling in the right words. I wrote this means I’m filling in some nonsense that I just want to have a laugh with.

It could be good nonsense. You never know, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, I have a feeling, based on what I know about you guys, you guys will do pretty well in this quiz anyway.

Here’s an example. This is from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first four blank.

I wrote this.

What did you write, Martha? What do you want to put in there?

I kept the first four. I gave the other three back. I gave the other three back.

That’s very nice. That’s not actually what Robert Frost said, though. What he said was another day.

Another day.

Right.

Oh, I thought he was rhyming with black.

Oh, no, no. He was rhyming with lay.

But nice try, though. I liked yours.

Again, there’s actually no wrong answers in this quiz. Whatever you think is poetry is poetry.

Here we go. Here’s another one. This is from Gwendolyn Brooks. It’s called We Real Cool.

We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We blank.

I wrote this.

You wrote that, Grant. Tell me, what does it say?

We stayed in.

We stayed in.

Well, that’s very current affairs of you. I like it. It’s really good.

It goes like this. We sing sin, we thin gin.

Oh. I’ll take both staying in and a little thin gin right about now.

This one’s The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams. This is basically the whole poem.

So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white blank.

I know this.

You do know that, Martha. What is it?

Chickens.

Chickens, right, beside the white chickens.

This is from One Art by Elizabeth Bishop. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is…

Faster? I wrote this.

Their loss is no…

Disaster.

Yeah, their loss is no disaster. That’s a beautiful poem.

Anyway, that’s our poetry quiz for today. I thought I’d just put a little poetry in your day.

So I hope you liked it. I’ve got some collections here on the shelf that need to make their way to my desk, I think.

Excellent. Let’s do it. Let’s all do it during this time.

Thank you, guys. Take care, and I’ll talk to you next time.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We know you want to talk with us about language, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and comments about language to words@waywordradio.org.