Poetry

ENGLISH 100-002 Winter 2022. ASSIGNMENT #3: Interpretive Essay: Poetry (1000 words)

DUE DATE: March 7, 2022. (6AM)

Overview: As we have discussed this term, the academy values critical reading and writing skills, the ability to read difficult texts attentively and to express their complexity in clear prose. With this in mind, we spend several classes practicing close reading on the meaning-rich texts that poems provide. University classes, in English and other fields, will typically ask students to write interpretive essays as a way to measure students’ ability to engage in such critical reading and to communicate its results. Here, you are asked to demonstrate this skill in response to poetic texts we have read together.

Purpose: The task of this paper is to demonstrate your abilities as a reader capable of: 1) understanding and responding to a prompt; 2) reading closely and critically a poetic text; 3) fashioning a clear interpretive claim, or thesis, about that text; and 4) defending that claim with logical argument and the use of textual evidence. You are to respond to ONE of the following prompts, each of which directs you to a poem we have taken up in class, and each of which identifies an apparent contradiction in the text that you are asked to resolve. Each poses a question about this contradiction. You are asked to present a clear answer (your thesis) to that question, to organize your paper around explaining the contradiction and your resolution of it, and to do so using the text of the poem itself to corroborate your claims.

In “Dis Poetry,” Zephaniah takes care to replicate the sound and rhythm of the spoken English of his Jamaican community. This suggests his poetry is meant to be performed aloud before an audience, not silently read. But Zephaniah has drafted his poem so that it can be read in this way. Discuss. If the essence of his poetry is its oral character, why does he write it down to appear in books at all?

Marking emphases: a) sentence structure (elimination of fragments and run-ons); b) effective use of quoted evidence; c) proper citation; d) proper coordination/subordination.