ANALYSIS ASSIGNMENTS

(Monday April 18th-)
Read your classmate's analysis of Kenneth Koch's Lunch, then write a full analysis of the poem. . (due Wednesday, April 20th)

(Thursday April 14th)
Analyze and give feedback to your classmate's imitations poems: On Coke and Anne Carson is Righting a Poem!. (due Monday, April 18th)

(Thursday April 7th)
Close read a section of Kenneth Koch's Lunch. (due Monday, April 4th)

(Friday April 1st)
Write revisions using the ammendments to the Life of Towns reports. (due Monday, April 4th)

(Friday March 25th)
Write revisions and ammendments to the Life of Towns reports (see combustion), keeping in mind Carson's use of cultural, literary, philosophical, and religious allusion as it relates to notions of subjectivity and language. If you see an allusion that isn't articulated in the analysis, add it. If you see points that the analysis doesn't bring out or articulate carefully, explain them. You are correcting or adding to your classmate's analyses, post these ammentment CLEARLY in your blog by 8:00 WEDNESDAY. I will be printing them out. (due Wednesday, March 30)

(Friday March 11th)
Analyze poem 230 from the Dickinson handout, with an emphasis on the tension between the the following relationships
death and immortality
female and masculine
self and other
How does the language create tension between these things? Does the tension resolve? Why or why not? (due Monday, March 21)

(Friday March 11th)
Each of you will memorize these poems for class on thursday. Also, you will do short reports on the allusions mentioned in the poems. Write a paragraph about what Carson might be referencing and playing off of. Post this to your blog for Monday (I will be printing out these reports for the class). If you don't know what to do a report on email me. Come with them memorized! This will be another easy quiz grade.

Craig: Apostle town, Thomas Town
courtney: Emily Town, Luck Town
tom: Love Town & Town of the Noon Stack & Thomas Town
krista: Wolf Town, Town of the Sound of a Twig Breaking
mike: Freud Town, A Town I Have Heard Of
tiffany: Lear Town, Memory Town
martin: Town of Bathsheba's Crossing, Holderlin Town
allison: Judas Town, Bride town, Town of the Little Mouthful
tiffany: Town of Spring Once again, Death Town
abby: Town of the Exhumation, Town A-Roving
casey: Desert Town, Town of My Farewell to You
marina: Sylvia Town & One-man Town
matt: Town of the Dragon Vein, Town of Greta Garbo
monte: September Town, Town of Finding Our About the Love of God (due Monday, March 21)

(Monday February 28th)
Compare and contrast the two versions of Safe in their Alabaster Chambers— From a prosodic (meter) and critical (meaning) perspective, why might have Dickinson made these changes? How does it change the reading and meaning of the poem? Be specific. (due Monday, March 7)

(Monday February 28th)
Dickinson’s famous dashes escape almost every scholar’s attempt to pin them down.

Geoffrey Hartman writes of Dickinson's dash that it "can appear at any juncture, to connect or disconnect, generally to do both at once. . . . It introduces from the beginning the sense of an ending and both extends and suspends it" (125-26).
The Dickinson Variorum and the Question of Home, Paul Crumbly

Pick at least two of Dickinson’s poems and describe the different kinds of cesura. Is the pause sharp or sensual? Quiet and loud? Long of short? (Hint: What kinds of punctuation seem to fit in place of each dash? A hyphen, a colon, a comma, a period, an exclamation point?) Write an analysis that deals specifically with pauses within the lines, suggesting how Dickinson uses multiple cesuras to create different kinds of effects. (due Monday, March 7)

Thursday, February 24th
Write and analysis of a poem dealing with it's 1st subject (that which is explictly referenced in the poem) and 2nd subject (the emotional or philosophical resonance gleaned from the poem). Define both subjects, describing ways the author uses language meter, metaphor, ect. in describing the 1st subject to suggest the experiential qualities of the second. For examples: see my analysis of June. (due Monday, February 28th)

Thursday, February 17th
Pick a metrical poem, i.e., a poem that uses a meter to create emotional and/or philosophical resonance. Some metrical poets include Marilyn Hacker, Philip Larkin, Andrew Hudgins, James Wright's early poems, Donald Hall, Theodore Roethke, etc. Scan and analyze the poem based on instances where the regular meter is interrupted and resumed. How is the interruption meaningful? How does the poem change? Other questions: Does the poem evoke the kind of artifice that Fussel describes? Does the poem attempt to hide it's meter through use of colloquial language or line breaks?(due Monday, February 21st)

Thursday, February, 3rd
Analyze a section of Black Dog Songs (My Terrorist Notebook or They is probably the easier sections to piece together). Using specific examples from individual poems, describe how Jarnot constructs and complicates the ideas she's presenting. In other words, map a sequence of poems.

Some questions to ask yourself:

What kind of engine is driving the sequence? For instance, They uses repetition and listing patterns. How does one poem differ from the next? Look specifically at the language here, the techniques she's using to list different things. How does Jarnot's use of repetition and rhyme differ within the section and to what end? How does Jarnot situate the speaker of the poem? In which poems is the speaker present and where does the speaker disappear from the poem? My Terrorist Notebook presents a political case. How do the different forms speak to the complexity of the ideas presented? How does the allegorical function in these poems? (due Monday February 14)

Thursday, January 20
Using the methods we went over in class, analysize one poem from Tender Buttons. (due Monday January 31)

Thursday, January 13
Write an analysis of a poem or prose using a term from the list in the syllabus. (due Monday January 24)

 

CREATIVE ASSIGNMENTS

(Thursday April 7th)
Writing an imitation poem of Anne Carson titled "On Coke" (specifically using the techniques in Short Talks) that discusses Kenneth Koch's poetic strategies. (due Monday, April 4th)

(Thursday April 7th)
Writing an imitation poem of Kenneth Koch titled "Anne Carson is Righting a Poem!" (specifically using Koch's techniques) that discusses Anee Carson's poetic strategies. (due Monday, April 4th)

(Friday April 1st)
Write two more poems with a partner.. (due Monday, April 4th)

(Friday March 25th)
revisions of Carson imitations (due 2 days before you meeting, email them to me!)

Monday February 28th This is an excerpt taken from Shemtov, Vered’s article: Metrical Hybridization: Prosodic Ambiguities As a Form of Social Dialogue (see the whole article here):

Dickinson’s poetry is widely understood as “a poetry of voices”… In many cases, the speaker is involved in a hidden dialogue:15 “Imagine a dialogue of two persons in which the statements of the second speaker are omitted, but in such a way that the general sense is not at all violated. The second speaker is present invisibly, his words are not there, but deep traces left by these words have determining influence on all the present and visible words of the first speaker. We sense that this is a conversation, although only one person is speaking, and it is a conversation of the most intense kind” (James 1994: 171).

Write a poem that imitates this effect in Dickinson’s poems. Assume a voice that speaks in the presence of another unnamed unaddressed silent voice. Don’t be Dr. Obvious. Think about the subtle changes in speaking that coincide with different groups of people. (due Monday, March 7)

Monday February 28th
Dickinson uses quotation marks in several innovative ways to direct attention to utterance and to undermine it’s significance. In the first line of poem 480, “Why do I love” You, Sir? quotation marks suggest the speaker is repeating this phrase (ironically, critically, angrily, or exhaustedly) back to an addressee. However, the You is excluded from the quotation marks, thusrearranging the common utterance "I love you" into something radically different. The use of Sir, heightens the tension between the words’ intimate significance and the actual feelings of the speaker towards the addressee. In contrast, first line of poem 199, I'm "wife"—I've finished that— Dickinson uses quotation marks to critically point out a process of naming, creating tension between what the speaker is “called” and who she really is. In both cases, quotation makes point to an exteriority, an outside force (which can be someone’s actual words or theidea that language exerts a pressure on something by naming it). Quotation marks imitate this exterior voice, thus implicating the him/her (usually it's a "him" in Dickinson) doing the naming. A mother and a child, a poem by Alice Notley, points profoundly to this effect. Rearranging the quotation marks changes the poem entirely. For this assignment, write a poem that uses quotation marks in different ways to achieve different ends. (due Monday, March 7)

Thursday, February 24th
Write a poem in the voice of an animal. (due Monday, February 28th)

Thursday, February 17th
Write an accentual poem (14-24 lines, each line with an equal number of stressed syllables) using nonsense words, i.e. words that don't make grammatical or associational sense. This should not be a stream of consciousness. Pick words based only on their musical qualities. Fussel describes four musical qualities: pitch (highness/lowness), loudness, length (legth of time consumed by the utterance of a syllable), and timbre/quality (fuziness, hoarseness, sharpness). This meter should work to pull the poem together and break the poem apart in specific places. (due Monday, February 21st)

Thursday, February 3rd
Write a transcription poem. Listen in on a conversation between two people you don't know. Copy everything that you hear word for word (even if you hear incorrectly or can't write as fast as they're talking). Copy this draft word for word onto your blog, then construct a poem from this draft. The rules: you can't add any additional words or change the order. (due Monday February14th)

Thursday, January 20th
Fill in the diagram of a complex sentence, then write that sentence in 4 different ways. Comment on the different kinds of sentences, how the order changes the tone or even the meaning of the utterance. (due Monday February 7th)