Short Paper Assignment
Write a three­page paper, due in class on the date listed, which examines one of the poems scheduled to be discussed in class that day. (On days when we read long poems or sections of very long poems, you can discuss a 10­30 line passage). The guidelines for this paper are relatively loose, but you should plan on making some kind of interpretive claim about (and supported by specific evidence drawn from) the poem you discuss. You do not necessarily need an elaborate argument or specific claim, but you need to be saying something along the lines of "by looking at the way the form (or some aspect thereof) of this poem/passage interacts with its content, we can better understand what the poem is saying.” In other words you are offering a close reading: an interpretation that accounts not just for what the text says out loud, but also how that explicit content is emphasized, narrowed, broadened, or complicated by formal qualities like the sounds of the words or their arrangement on the page. These are not the only formal features you may consider, nor do you necessarily have to talk about these ones specifically. If you’re not sure where to start, though, the relationship between sound and sense is almost always a good place. Please be sure to write about a text we are discussing on the same day the paper is due, not one that we’ve already discussed or one we are to discuss later on. You will have far more freedom of choice in your