Poetry Overview, assignment help
Please see the below instructions, and respond in APA format.
Complete 1 Summarizing Poetry
Step 1:
Read the following poems (you’ll find these in the
textbook and/or online)
° Nikki Giovanni “Poetry”
° Rita Dove “Sonnet in Primary Colors”
° Emily Dickinson “I’m Nobody! Who are
You?”
° Robert Frost “Fire and Ice”
Step 2:
Read each of your four poems silently to yourself at
least a couple of times. Breathe deeply, and take your time. Sink into the poem
and try to understand its soul.
Next, summarize each poem in 2-4 sentences. In your
summary, try to respond to at least a couple of the following questions:
● How is sound working in the poem?
● What happens in the poem?
● Who is speaking?
● What is the poem’s message?
● What do you notice about the way that the poem sounds?
● Does this poem make use of any poetic sound
devices that you learned about i.e.,assonance, consonance, repetition?
Complete 2 Reading Poetry Aloud
Read each of the above poems, but this time focus on
reading each poem using several different voices. This is really fun. See if
you can make a small child laugh. Read it with different emotions, like anger
or grief. Or pretend you’re a favorite cartoon character. As you do this, get used
to the rhythms of each poem and the play of words. Understand the persona.
Listen to yourself speaking the poem out loud. Who are you? And who are you
talking to? In 2-4 sentences (per poem) describe your experience of reading the
poem aloud and how changing voices/tones impacts your understanding of and
response to each poem.
Complete 3 Imagery and Metaphor Exercise
Choose one of the poems from the above set and write
a 3-4 paragraph response in which you describe the pictures these poems create
in your mind. Make specific reference to the poem’s use of metaphor and
metonymy, as well as its imagery. Before getting started, review these terms in
the textbook and online.
Here is an example to get you started using a famous
Ezra Pound poem:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Sample student response:
I see a crowded subway platform and out of the
moving crowd of people, various beautiful faces take shape, one upon another. I
get this particular picture for several reasons. I see the subway platform
because of the title, and I see the crowd because the poem says there’s a
crowd. The reason the crowd appears to be moving lies in the main feature of
the poem, which is its metaphor. Essentially, the poem is nothing but a
metaphor, where the second line is a metaphor for the first line. In other
words, “petals on a wet, black bough” is a metaphor for “the
apparition of these faces in the crowd.” To me, this means the crowd
(bough) is moving and undifferentiated (wet, black) and the faces are
incredibly beautiful (petals on a bough). In my picture, singularly beautiful
faces take shape in succession because they are “apparitions.” They appear
to me from the moving, undifferentiated mass of bodies (the crowd).
Note: while metaphor and imagery are technical terms
and therefore objective, interpretation is subjective. The point is, don’t get
hung up on finding the correct meaning of a poem while learning the techniques
of poetry just dive in and share what you ‘see’!
