How to Prepare & Present an Annotated Poem

ANNOTATION ASSIGNMENTS IN DETAIL

Presentation of an Annotated Poem. Each of you will be called at least once during the semester to lead the discussion of a poem you have chosen for your Annotation Anthology. Ideally, your work on these little discussions will also help develop ideas for your Annotated Anthology.

Please give some thought to both the content of what you want to present and the process by which you want the class to engage with that content. Will you use handouts? overhead? a brief CD, video or internet clip of the poet reading? What are the specific questions you want to ask your peers? Will you need bio information on the poet? Is there historical context necessary for discussion?

Be sure your remarks focus primarily on the aspect of poetic craft under discussion. There are of course many other things to be said about poems, but we won't have time to include them all in every conversation.

Post your annotated material and any other useful links or materials on our Blog before or immediately after class.

After our discussion, turn in your annotation to me.

Annotated Anthology. In this project you will select ten poems from our readings and briefly discuss (500 words) poetic strategies (form, alliteration, imagery, etc) used in each poem. You will turn these on due dates throughout the semester.

Choose possible poems and make notes on them as the weeks go by. You should accumulate more possibilities than you will need, and the sophistication of your notes should rise as you encounter more poems and more ideas about poems. If you lead class discussion on some of your chosen poems, this may also help develop your ideas – your classmates often help you find new understandings of poems that you didn’t catch on your own). As each due date approaches, make your selection based on your preferences, my guidelines for selection (#5 below), and which poems have yielded the most interesting ideas.

This assignment is a lot like writing a poem: the end product is relatively small but to arrive at that product you need to compress a lot of thought into very few words. Keep this in mind as you work and don’t be fooled by the short format of each discussion. You won’t need to turn in a large number of words. However, the grading standard will be high in terms of how much substance you present.

Here’s the anthology format. Please read this carefully.

1) Type the poem. This is required because physically reproducing a poem, letter by letter, teaches you a lot about how it’s made. It makes you a good observer. You are on your honor, here – “cut & paste” is easy, but doesn’t train you as a writer.

2) Write one or two paragraphs explaining some specific strategies used by the poet to create meaning in the poem. "Strategy" in this case can mean a basic formal choice, such as iambic pentameter, sonnet, enjambed free verse, etc. It can also mean alternating slant rhyme, hyphenating words across a line-break to preserve a pattern, metaphor, allusion, a particular conceit, voice, hyperbole, or any other poetic strategy that you feel is important to the poem’s message. In most cases it will be best to focus on one or two aspects of the poem, rather than trying to include everything that might be said about it.

Yup, you can write a good analysis in 500 words if you’ve thought it through clearly before you begin, or if you allow yourself to write first, edit second (the phrase “WRITE CRAP” isn’t derogatory: it simply means, to create a beautiful garden, you have to spread a lot of manure around first – and then weed like crazy).

3) Include (in your presentation and with your 500 word analysis) a copy of the poem with your marginal notes. This is often the most efficient way to point up formal features or thematic motifs (see attached example).

4) However you choose to combine prose with marginalia, your aim should be concision and specificity. For example, using poetic terms, though sometimes tedious to learn, greatly advance the cause of concision and specificity. "McKay makes brilliant use of anaphora," takes up a lot less space than a sentence explaining that the author utilizes the same phrase fourteen times in order to create a sense of chant or ritual, and tells me more about your level of analysis, too.

5) In making your selections, keep in mind that your anthology will be strongest if it addresses a variety of formal problems or ideas. I won’t specify that each poem must address a specific aspect of form off a check list, but I will be looking for a range of forms and for an engagement with several kinds of poems.

6) No unifying theme is required. However, this is a chance to explore poets and poetry, to widen your reading habits, and absorb new and often startling imagery/writing techniques. One way to do that is to construct your anthology around a unifying idea, such as "poems about different kinds of loss" or "poems about childhood," or "how voice is created in coming-of-age poems;" you should be able to follow your interests while still meeting these guidelines. Feel free to talk over your ideas with me as they take shape.

7) I will collect your annotations in three installments (3, 3, and 4 poems for each deadline), as noted on the schedule. For each of the first two I will assign an in-progress grade and provide feedback on how you can develop or improve your work. In some cases I may ask you to revise or expand an annotation and turn it in again.