Tuesday: Teacher Poems and Close Reading

Today we focused on some close reading skill development.  Looking at “Head of English” we worked on different analysis skills related to examining a single poem, rather than a few poems on the same topic.  I wish I could recreate the dialogue for you here, but it would take “reams” of description.

In addition, we practiced writing thesis statements based on a single poem and the effect created on the reader (Mood).  I gave you this tool: Thesis Statement Cheat Sheet . I also told you that if I had had this tool when I was in high school, I would have had seemed much smarter and had to do way less work to seem that way. 🙂

HW: Read and annotate for action “Duke of Fire and Duchess of Fire” and “Girl and Tree” for Thursday.

Thursday: DOF&DOI along with poetic vocabulary…

Today I gave you a massive list of vocabulary terms that we can use to talk about the MUSICALITY of poetry.  Here is a recap of those terms that you need to define and start to try and implement with the poetry analysis we are doing.  This list of terms comes form my poetry bible, “Perrine’s Sound and Sense”.

Musical Devices: the choice and arrangement of sounds and accents; also the elements of repetition and variation– the interplay between these things; alliteration; assonance; consonance; rime- internal, end, and approximate.

Rhythm and Meter: rhythm; accented/stressed; rhetorical stress; end-stopped line; run-on line; caesuras; free verse; prose poem; meter- foot– iamb, trochee, anapest, dactyl, spondee; stanza; scansion; grammatical pause; rhetorical pause.

Sound and Meaning: onomatopoeia; phonetic intensives; euphonious; cacophonous; liquid consonants; plosive consonants.

After you got these into your notes, we started working with the sound aspects of “DOF&DOI”.  There are a lot of cool things that happen with the sound imagery in this poem!

Then we looked at the visual imagery related specifically to the use of color.  We dug a bit here, and I modeled a claim for you.   It went something like this: “The use of color imagery develops from overt to indirect over the course of the poem and relates to the objectification of The Duke of Fire and the personal agency of the Duchess of Ice.”

I asked you to give it a try.

One student offered this: “Carol Ann Duffy uses color imagery to engage her reader.”

This statement is a good start, and is what I call a “duh” statement.  It is a factual claim, not an interpretive claim.  While this is a claim, it is not a claim that can be argued with any nuance and I would loose interest in this discussion quickly.  While we need to start with “duh” statements, we cannot stop there– we need to push into the more interesting bits to really get a claim that is interesting to discuss.

I asked you all to dig a bit deeper…

Encore: More CAD

HW: Work with G&T looking at the things we are focused on– sound and meaning and imagery.