Your goal in this essay is to create a rich experience of a poem (of your choice). What does this mean? Think of your project as creating a guide to the poem that will make the poem more fruitful and more interesting for a reader. Nota Bene: don’t think of your rich text as offering a final interpretation of the poem; you don’t have to tell me what the poem “means.” Instead, your goal is to guide a reader through the poem, and especially the moments, questions, issues in the poem that you find particularly important.
Here’s how to do it:
- Pick a poem and create a page for it on your WordPress site.
- Print the the poem out and read it several times, annotating and marking with a pen or pencil.
- Think about moments in the poem that are confusing or really stimulating. Why are these moments confusing? How are they stimulating?
- Start working on digital annotations for the poem. As you work on these annotations, think about how they fit into our four categories of annotation: patterns, form, confusion, context.
- Use as much multimodal material as you can to make your annotations richer, more beguiling, and more suggestive. Remember our discussion about attaching images to the poem: it’s not enough to show me what a “hummingbird” looks like (a la “When I Was an Aztec”); instead, use images (and links) to show and explain something important about the poem and the line you’re annotating. If you’re not using the image etc. this way, it probably won’t add to my experience of the poem.
- In the end, you should have at least 6 or 7 good, robust, effective, “multimodal” annotations.
- Draft Due: Monday, March 4. (Email me the link to your annotation essay.)
Admittedly, this is kind of a weird assignment because I’m not asking you to offer a final interpretation of the poem. Instead, I’m asking you to create an experience for the reader of your poem, one that will make the poem richer, more interesting, and more engaging for them. We’ll work together on this in class on Monday and Wed.