Poetry Wiki

Each Friday, we will focus our discussion on a single poem. In order to facilitate discussion, each one of you will begin annotating that poem on our course wiki. We will discuss the details of this assignment in class together. I will provide a handout describing how to edit the wiki and what I mean by “annotate.”

Each student should contribute 1 annotation by 5 pm Thursday evening before the assigned Friday’s class. Your annotation should be a short paragraph. To be more specific, it should be approximately five sentences. I expect you to make a concrete addition to our understanding of the poem. Be creative in your choice of words/lines/phrases to annotate. You may also use the comments feature if you want to ‘piggy-back’ off of someone else’s annotation. Both of the sections of poetry that I'm teaching this semester will be annotating the same copy of the poem.

You will repeat the exercise in preparation for your MARBL presentation.

Here are the poems that you will be annotating throughout the semester:

• 23 January, Tennyson, "Ulysses"
• 30 January, Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• 6 February, Wordsworth, "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"
• 13 February, Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
• 6 March, Ashbery, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons"
• 20 March, Shelley, "Ode to the West Wind"
• 27 March, Trethewey, "Elegy for the Native Guards"
• 3 April, Carol Ann Duffy, "The Devil's Wife" (12:50 pm class) and "Mrs. Tiresias" (2:00 pm class)
• 10 April, Seamus Heaney, "Digging" (12:50 pm class) and "Strange Fruit" (2:00 pm class)
• 17 April, Langston Hughes, "Kids Who Die" (12:50 pm class) and "I, Too" (2:00 pm class)
• 24 April, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, "Tulips" (12:50 pm class) and "Crow Tyrannosaurus" (2:00 pm class)