Sound Poems & Revision Exercise

Sound Poem Assignment: See previous post for directions. Write a poem using sound imagery. Due at end of class. This is your primary assignment today. Do not waste time. Compose a draft. Call it "sound" poem or "sound imagery" poem.

When you are done, please continue with the assignments on this blog.

Li-Young Lee reading "This Room and Everything in It"
Optional poem draft: Observe a specific room. This one. The unused room in your house. The kitchen. The garage. The lobby of a bank. Then describe the room and "everything in it." Use Li-Young Lee as a model.

LAB ASSIGNMENT: 
Sound: (please listen/read) these poems and then comment about the collection on the forum.

Gerald Manly Hopkins: "Pied Beauty"
"The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo"
"The Windover"
"Spring and Fall to a Young Child"

Emily Dickenson:
Hope is a Thing with Feathers
I Heard a Fly Buzz
I'm Nobody (silent, no sound, but please read the poem)

Wallace Stevens
The Idea of Order at Key West
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
The Snow Man

Taylor Mali: Like, You Know 
The The Impotence of Proofreading

Amiri Baraka: Why is We Americans

LAB WRITING: Revision exercise. Choose one of your previous poems. Deliberately change the SPEAKER or VOICE. Add a specific TONE, and clarify your DICTION. Rewrite the poem with this new diction, voice, and tone.

Some examples/suggestions:

• age your speaker about 30 or 50 years.
• change the gender or cultural heritage of your speaker
• increase or decrease your speaker's IQ by several points
• make your speaker in love with the subject of the poem
• make your speaker fear or dislike the subject of the poem
• Use one of the tones mentioned above
• Use understatement, euphemism, or any other rhetorical strategy dealing with diction
• Change the career or occupation of the speaker. If your speaker, for example, was a student--make them a doctor or a lawyer or a disc jockey or a horse jockey.

THEN: write it a third time with yet another voice, tone, and diction. Call these drafts "voice/diction/tone" exercises. If you rewrite a poem, change its draft # to the next #. Thus, rewriting draft #1 will now be labeled draft #2. Keep track of your draft #'s.

This assignment will be due next class.

HOMEWORK: Post a forum response to the poems above by next class. Complete your Sound Imagery poem draft.