I Wish I Had Written That

Papers Due Thursday, March 19th

“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” – T. S. Eliot

Select a poem that you especially admire. It may be written in any style. It also may be your “favorite poem,” but its personal meaning to you is not the topic of this assignment. You may think of it as a poem you wish you had written, or a poem that suggests ways that you would like to write your own poems.

Some, I think most, of you have done this before.  I’d like to see folks get out of their comfort zones a bit.  Also, I’m putting the caveat down of avoiding Frost (with possible exceptions), Silverstein, Poe.  Also the further away in time (say the last hundred years) we go with this, the harder this paper gets.  Explaining under what conditions you expect to make poems that contain elements of say, the Elizabethan tradition, requires one to clarify exactly what elements of poetics you would hope to extract from it into an object composed in the language we presently speak. In other words, that’s likely a 25-50 page paper.

Type the poem, as it appears published. Write 3-4 pages describing how you think the poem works, or some aspect of how it might inspire you to write a poem like it. The focus of the paper should be on how the poem works as a poem, and on what relation those functions you see working in it impact your own work.  As such, you should see this assignment as a type of “dry run” for discussing your own work.

The purpose of this assignment is as much creative as academic and should be approached by you as a writer seeking to broaden your own horizons.

The poem should have been published.  Poems by friends, family members and from personal websites could possibly be included, but you should see me first.  It is likely that they will be harder to discuss from this viewpoint. If you have a question about that, check with me.

The poem may address a subject that you wish you could address and are unsure how to.  How does it do this? It may apply diction or method (perspective, some quality of the speaker) that you would like to see in your own work.  What formic qualities does the poem possess that you have either tried or would like to try or have been afraid to try?

This is a poem explication, something that most of you have probably done before, a consideration of the relationship between form, content and effect of a language object.  It is also a consideration of your own work and will be most successful if you can address the poem you choose to that framework.