answered: Essay 2: Poetry (due Thursday, October 6th, by 5:00 pm) Your

  

Essay 2: Poetry
(due Thursday, October 6th, by 5:00 pm)
Your second essay (2-3 pages in length—no shorter than two full pages) will be about ONE of
the following poems:
? Adrienne Rich, “Planetarium”
? Solmaz Sharif, “Planetarium”
? César Vallejo, “A man walks by with a baguette on his shoulder”
? Paul Celan, “Deathfugue”
Your essay should include 3-4 paragraphs:
1) In the first paragraph, describe the poem.
This should not be merely a summary. It should begin to shape your reader’s understanding
of the poem and its significance, focusing our attention on those elements of the poem that
are most important to your reading of it. Think carefully about how you will structure this
description and what features of the poem are significant enough to include. You may want
to consider some of the following questions: What is this poem about? How is this subject
matter presented? In what ways is the speaker of the poem identified or characterized? Has
the poet selected a specific poetic form? As the goal of this essay is ultimately to present
your own readerly analysis and interpretation of the poem through your observations about
its details, you should not look outside of the text to offer historical information about the
author, the poem’s composition, the time period in which it was written, etc. Your
description should remain focused on the poem as a poem. As with the beginning of any
essay, this first paragraph is the place to name the text and the author you are writing about.
2) The second (and perhaps third) paragraph(s) should further develop the ideas in
your description by answering the following question: how is meaning produced in
this text?
This is your opportunity to make close observations about the choices that have gone into
crafting this poem. It may help to start with those moments when, upon a first reading, you
were confused or surprised. What makes this poem difficult or ambiguous? Look for
patterns or moments of tension. It may help to consider some of the following questions
(though you don’t necessarily need to address all of them): What kinds of language, tone,
images, rhymes, etc., has the poet chosen to use, and what effect do they create? What is the
form of the poem? What is unexpected about how the poet handles the subject matter
and/or the form of the poem? How do different parts of the poem talk to one another?
You will probably have many observations to make, but try to focus on those that seem
most significant to how the poem creates meaning. A short essay is an exercise in making
choices: you will not be able to address everything. Include and discuss textual evidence:
you shouldn’t simply make generalized assertions about lines in the poem, nor should you
quote from the text and move on without commenting in some detail on why you think the
quoted passage is interesting or important. It’s up to you whether you want to use one or
two paragraphs for this portion of the essay, but be sure that the sequence of your
discussion is logical and that your paragraph(s) function(s) as a coherent unit. It should be
clear to your reader how the various observations you present in the middle paragraph(s) are
related to one another. You don’t yet have to make any big claim as to what it all adds up
to—you just need to investigate how meaning begins to emerge from relevant textual details.
3) In the final (third or fourth) paragraph, begin to make an interpretive argument
about the poem that grows out of your observations. Of the many possibilities for
understanding this poem, what seems the most important and defensible to you?
You are welcome to discuss any interpretive idea that seems most compelling. You might
want to think about some of the ideas we’ve discussed in class, but it should be clear how
the ideas in this paragraph grow out of the evidence and analysis you’ve presented above.
Whatever argument you make here should follow from the prior paragraphs, and you may
need to spend time backing it up with further evidence from the text. Remember that an
interpretive claim needs to be grounded in analysis: it should not rest on personal or
subjective opinion or on moral or aesthetic judgment of the poem or writer, nor should it
simply restate what you think the general “message” of the poem is. Note that once you
articulate your interpretive claim about the poem in this final paragraph, you may need to
return to your earlier paragraphs to revise them: your essay should read as a logically-
developing and coherent whole. It should be clear to your reader how your interpretive claim
in the last paragraph emerges logically from the two paragraphs that precede it.
As in your last essay, your central goal in this essay is to craft a nuanced analytical reading of
your chosen poem presented in excellent paragraphs.
Important Dates:
? Monday, October 3rd: Essay Workshop
Upload a complete publish of your essay to the workshop forum on Canvas and bring a
printed copy to class. To receive credit for this workshop, your essay should satisfy all of the
expectations listed above—that is, it should be a more or less complete version of the essay,
even if you still need to revise it. Failure to submit your publish/bring a copy to class will result
in the deduction of 5 points from your final grade on this essay.
? Thursday, October 6th: Essay 2 due 5:00 pm
Your essay is due by 5:00 pm on Thursday, October 6th. Please upload your completed essay
to Canvas by this time. If you submit an essay that falls below the length requirement for
this assignment (2-3 pages, which means at least 2 full pages), you should not expect to
receive a passing grade, unless your essay is truly exceptional. You do not need to include a
Works Cited page with this essay, but please follow proper MLA formatting throughout. For
guidance, see the “How to format your essay” document on Canvas.
Other Notes:
Remember that your essay should be your own original work. This means both the ideas and the
writing should be yours. “Borrowing” ideas about these poems that you find on the internet
constitutes plagiarism. You should not consult such sites at all—I’m interested in what you have to
say about this poem.
English 101
Grading Rubric: Essay 2
This essay assignment places a greater emphasis on the observations you make about how the text
works, and eventually on the interpretation you derive from these observations, than on an
overarching thesis about the whole text that shapes your paper from the beginning. The following
rubric is meant to give you an idea of the criteria I will use in assessing this essay, describing my
grade scale and the characteristics of papers within each grade range. Large-scale problems involving
your observations and interpretation of the text or the coherence of your discussion are inherently
more severe than minor mechanical errors, but such errors will affect your grade insofar as they
show a lack of effort or revision, fall below college-level writing standards, and/or prevent
comprehension of your ideas. Note that a passing grade on this paper presupposes that your
writing is clear and accessible to an outside reader and is free of severe recurring
grammatical errors. (It also presupposes that the essay meets all length and other requirements
outlined in the prompt.) While this rubric is not a checklist, you may find it a helpful tool in
evaluating your own papers-in-progress.
A: The essay’s observations are striking and original and point to details about the poem’s
underlying structures. Its description of the poem is concise and directed, shaping and focusing the
reader’s understanding of the text. The essay ultimately transforms its observations into an
interpretation of the text that provides a convincing explanation of the meaning created by the
textual details it has explored, offering a thorough and persuasive analysis of quoted evidence. The
essay’s paragraphs are coherent, carefully develop from beginning to end, and show an attention to
reader engagement and comprehension in their style. The essay transitions easily from one
paragraph to the next to build a unified and logically connected discussion of the text. An “A-” essay
may be an “A” essay with a few minor flaws or may present a slightly less ambitious and nuanced
discussion and interpretation of textual details than an “A” essay.