Anthology of student poems – click on this link to open the anthology. Please feel free to add annotations, but please be respectful of your fellow students’ creative efforts, and remember that these poems were written in response to an assignment.
HYPOTHESIS
Using Hypothes.is, an online annotation tool, we will be engaging in digital social reading. We will all asynchronously read the same text and annotate it. Through annotation we will enter into dialogue with our authors and poets, their works, and each other.
You will find the texts for annotation posted here below as we move through the semester.
How to annotate
A. Create a Hypothesis Account
- Register for an account at https://hypothes.is/register. Your username should be your name and surname, in the form ‘NameSurname’ (e.g. ‘NazimHikmet’).
- Install the Chrome browser extension. If you are not already using the Chrome browser on your own computer, I strongly recommend you download it first.
- Click the link I will email you to join the private annotation group, ‘ELIT227’.
B. Annotate your text
- Look below for the ‘Reading List’. Identify the assigned reading for annotation. Click on the relevant reading.
- Select text in the reading, and annotate it, following the instructions in section 3 of the ‘quick start guide for students‘ at hypothes.is. Make sure you are commenting in the group ELIT227, not in the ‘Public’ forum. Check out the ‘Annotation Tips for Students‘ before starting.
(For an example of a publicly annotated document, have a look at the hypothes.is annotations to Sam Anderson’s essay in the New York Times Magazine, ‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text’.)
Reading List
A VERY SMALL ANTHOLOGY – here you can open and annotate the selection of poems that appear at the end of your anthology, or download and print it. Also included is the poem on the anthology cover. (Link not currently live – I’ll be updating this in the next day or two.)
ELIT 227 Miscellaneous Documents – Google Drive. Here you can find the syllabus, class slides and handouts. I will be adding further documents shortly. If you notice that something you want is missing from here, please let me know and I’ll add it if I can.
Week 1
- Parini, Jay. Why Poetry Matters. Yale University Press, 2008.
- Wainwright, Jeffrey. Poetry: the basics. Routledge, 2011.
- Bennett, Andrew and Nicholas Royle, ‘Reading a Poem’, in This Thing Called Literature: Reading Writing, Thinking. Routledge, 2015.
Week 2
Recommended Reading:
Shira Wolosky Weiss, ‘Individual Words’, from The Art of Poetry : How to Read a Poem (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Optional further reading:
An example reading: John Lennard on diction in John Donne’s ‘The Flea’
Week 3
Required Reading:
Shira Wolosky Weiss, ‘Syntax and the Poetic Line’, from The Art of Poetry: How to Read a Poem (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Optional further reading:
An example reading: John Lennard on layout (the mise-en-page) in Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz’
John Lennard, ‘Layout’, in The Poetry Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2006)
John Lennard, ‘Lineation’, in The Poetry Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Week 4
Required Reading:
Martin Montgomery et al., ‘Metaphor and Figurative Language’, from Ways of Reading (London: Routledge, 2000), 117-130
Online class – optional additional reading:
Veronica Forrest-Thomson, ‘Continuity in Language’, from Poetic Artifice: A theory of twentieth-century poetry (Manchester University Press, 2016 [1978]) 18-37 (N.B. If you are in section 1, and have chosen option 2 for Monday’s online class, you may find pp.22-24 especially useful!)
Week 5
Required Reading:
Martin Montgomery et al., ‘Rhyme and Sound Patterning’, from Ways of Reading (London: Routledge, 2000), 195-204
Suggested Reading:
(Very short!) An example reading of rhyme and sound patterning in Emily Dickinson’s ‘I heard a Fly buzz’ and in Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, from John Lennard, The Poetry Hanbdbook (Oxford University Press, 2006). You can also find here a very useful glossary of terms for discussing rhyme and sound patterning.
Week 6
Required Reading:
John Lennard, ‘Metre’, in The Poetry Handbook (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Optional Further Reading:
Robert Hass, ‘A Note on Stress’, in A Little Book of Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (New York, 2017)
Robert Hass, ‘How to Scan a Poem’, in A Little Book of Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (New York, 2017)
(Robert Hass, the author of these two short essays, is a celebrated and widely-read American poet who has also served as American poet laureate. He is also respected as a critic and as a translator of Polish and Japanese poetry. These essays or notes are especially useful for giving us a poet’s approach to poetic metre and stress. If you find John Lennard’s essay difficult, Hass’s might offer an easier way into this topic.)