Blog Prompt #2

Now that everyone has gotten their feet wet with the blogging thing, I'm going to get more strict about by expectations for your posts. While many of your first blog posts were great, many others engaged far too much in summary, and many also did not meet the length requirement outlined in the original blog assignment. For your second blog post, I will expect you to fulfill the demands of the following prompt, and your posts will be graded based on how well you meet the expectations outlined here.

For your second post, I want you to concentrate on the ways in which poets use the formal features of a poem (its rhythm, structure, grammar, etc.; i.e., all of the things we've talked about in class and studied in the Vendler book) to reinforce, question, or even contradict what the poem's words mean on a literal level. Choose one of the poems we will read for class that day, and begin your post with a paragraph briefly summarizing what the poem is, literally, saying. If the poem makes an argument, summarize that argument; if the poem tells a story, summarize that story; if a poem merely presents a series of images or sounds, summarize the sequence.

Now that you have established your interpretation of the poem's literal meaning, I want you to write 3-4 substantial paragraphs examining how specific formal features within the poem either support or contradict your literal interpretation from the first paragraph. Within these paragraphs you might approach a single formal feature in 3 or 4 separate ways or you might analyze separate formal features in each paragraph. For instance, if a poem's rhythm shifts abruptly (as Shakespeare's does in Sonnet 129), you might write one paragraph analyzing or explaining the rhythm in the first part, then another paragraph on the rhythm in the second half. Alternately, you might devote one paragraph to a poem's structure (Where do the line and stanza breaks appear? How does the poem move from one theme or topic to another? How does the rhyme scheme link certain words or concepts?), another to its rhythm, another to its diction, etc. Each paragraph should identify a specific formal feature and make some type of argument about how you interpret that formal feature. This can be something as simple as "the rhythm is choppy" or something much more complex. If you get stuck, re-examine the questions Vendler has proposed at each chapter, many of which have been summarized on the course blog.

As I said, your post should be 4-5 substantial paragraphs in length, or about 2 pages in a normal 12-point font in Microsoft Word. As always, your post is due by 8AM the morning of class.