First Day's Homework

http://en.wikipedia.org

1. Find your way to this blog.

2. Read "We Real Cool," p. in your Norton Anthology, and write about it.

a. Make 3-5 observations about the poem. (An observation is something that no sane person would disagree with.)

Each observation should seem intuitively to have some potential importance. For example, the fact that the letter e occurs x amount of times probably isn't too important. The fact that the poem contains no articles seems more important.

Other possibilities (feel free to use these): "The verbs in this poem are . . ." or "The rhymes in this poem work this way: . . ." or "The metaphors in this poem are . . ." (if you think there are any metaphors). The list of literary terms and definitions in the Humanities Department Handbook will provide you with lots of ideas for observations.

b. Write down 3-5 words that occur in the poem that seem to you the most most important or interesting.

c. Look over what you've done in (a) and (b). Now write for 1/2 a page to one page, typed, double-spaced, about the poem, in a relaxed way. Try to keep going until you think you've gotten somewhere, until you think you've made a discovery about the poem.

d. Save what you've written [in (a), (b), and (c)] in a folder dedicated to writing about poems. Send an email to me and attach what you've written to the email. (If you don't know how to send an attachment, copy what you've written into the body of your email.) My address is sdurning@walnuthillarts.org.

2. Read or re-read "Rare Bird" from Ship Fever.

3. Optional: make some more progress on your chart about the passage from "Rare Bird" we looked at in class (if we got as far as starting a chart.)

Thank you!