30 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem - "The Field" - is by the young Israeli poet Efrat Mishori.



You can find information about her and her poetry here.

Your final paper (and - between us - the one I'm most looking forward to reading)

Your final paper of the semester is a bit of a different beast than what you’ve written for previous assignments. I want you to write a 4 page (or longer!) essay about yourself, about some moment of significance to you.

You have started to work on this with the in-class writing we already did on this topic. You may either expand on this writing or choose some other area of your life about which you’d like to write.

The main thing in this assignment is to tell a story. Think about what details (the way a room looked or smelled, phrases a person might have used a lot, a certain outfit you wore, etc.) will make this story compelling.

THIS PAPER IS DUE ON OR BY MONDAY, MAY 12. You may either give it to Bonny Barsie to put in my mailbox or email it to me. If you email it to me you MUST verify that I have received your email and can access your paper.

Please post any questions you may have as comments here.

close readings: tracking movement in a passage

Much of what we did yesterday in class involved close readings of texts. Close readings can tell you a lot about what the author is communicating and what tools he or she uses to communicate. My hope in modeling this practice for you is two tiered: (1) I hope that you will become better readers of texts and (2) I hope that in doing close readings you will become aware of more tools and methods you can bring to your own writing.

Things to pay attention to when doing a close reading:
• How does the author position her or himself? Does he or she use first person, passive voice, etc.?
• Is the author speaking in universals or particulars?
• What details does the author choose to highlight and what do those details suggest about the point he or she is trying to make?
• How does the author place you - or the audience generally - in his or her text?

28 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is by Meir Wieseltier. Wieseltier is a renowned Israeli poet. The translator of the poem, "On Wonders," is Shirley Kaufman, a well-known Israeli-American poet in her own right.

Questions? Comments? Please post here.

21 April 2008 Poem

The poem for today's class is by Margaret Gibson, who writes absolutely luscious poems (including one about mangoes that, to my tastes, rates among the sexiest poems of all time) and who was my teacher.



One of the reasons I chose "Postcards in March" for class today is that it expresses a sense of a very concrete audience with carefully selected language. This is the degree of attention you should pay to audience in your papers and it's the topic of today's class.

Please feel free to comment here with questions or observations you may have about the poem.

when you try to tell someone something you should consider who they are

We're going to discuss the rhetorical triangle (and audience in general) in class today.

I thought you might want to refer back to this model.

16 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is "Among School Children" by William Butler Yeats.

Here're some useful annotations.

Thesis statements

All right, all.  Here are two thesis statements that your classmates sent in.  I was hoping to have 12 other ones.  Send them on to me, post haste, please.

1.  It is always enjoyable to interpret photographs, whether they are easy to understand or not, but I feel photos that portray the studium point of view are easier to relate to.

2.  Horses have been a fun and useful animal for many generations. Today lots of people look at horses as entertaining, like horse back riding, or horses racing, but we still don't use horses as we used to.  Back in the day, horses were used for transportation, farming, fighting, and many other things.  Machines took the place of horses, like cars and trucks.

Please take some time to read them and consider what might make them stronger theses.  Also, please comment with your thoughts.

14 April 2008 Poem

Today's poem is by M. L. Smoker.

I chose it because I think it's such a great poem for the way it feels when the seasons start to change—that kind of intensified attention we pay to the world around us, the way everything is responding to the change.

I also think it deals, as a poem, with one of the problems of poetry well—how to account for the poet in a poem about the world. I don't know if I'm expressing that well. Basically, I think there's this tension in a lot of poems between the small universe of one person's perceptions and the large universe that she or he perceives.

Any questions, observations, please comment here.

What makes a thesis statement good?

We have talked about thesis statements throughout the semester in different contexts. What I'd like to do with this post is start brainstorming some of the qualities that a good thesis possesses. So, what are some?

I'll get the ball rolling:
A good thesis should be detailed enough to be worth arguing. "Most cats have fur," for instance, is not a detailed enough thesis.

Other qualities? Please reply in the comments section.