Week 92: College Reading and Writing: Richard Blanco and Ladd Everitt

Week 92: College Reading and Writing: Richard Blanco and Ladd Everitt

Richard Blanco and Ladd Everitt: Annotating, Summarizing, Analyzing, Imitating

to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better

to summarize: to put something in your own words

to analyze: to consider a question on the text, providing supporting examples from the text

to imitate: to create an original piece of writing based on something you have read

We are doing the fifth poem and response in our book today, starting on page 17.

Exercise: Read and Annotate

1.     Read the poem and response out loud and underline any words you need to look up.

2.     Write any questions you have in the margins or in your notebook.

3.     Put tricky parts into your own words in notes in the margins or in your notebook.

Exercise: Respond to Poem

Write a response to this poem. What are your first impressions? How do you connect or disconnect to the subject and speaker? Does the poem remind you of anything from your own life and experience?

Exercise: Questions for Comprehension of the Poem

1.     Who is Blanco talking to?

2.     What’s meant by the line “…keep writing until / we never need to write a poem like this again” (Blanco 18)?

3.     What shift happens in the last stanza of the poem?

Exercise: Questions for Comprehension of the Response

1.     Why is it hard to “acknowledge how precious all these people’s lives are while continuing to move forward” (Everitt 19)?

                                                                                                             

Homework Assignment: Summarize the Poem

Write a 7-9 sentence paragraph summarizing the poem with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work Cited Page.

Example Summary: Too short, but incorporates quotation and in-text citation:

Richard Blanco’s poem “One Pulse—One Poem” starts with Blanco invoking the reader, asking for help finding “our courage to face this page” (Blanco 17). He describes the sound of the nightclub, “the rhythms pulsing through Pulse…mixed with gunshots” and imagines the dead as a “choir of their invisible spirits rising” (Blanco 17-18). Blanco expresses “[a]nger for the voice of politics armed with lies” but ends with images of the dead when they were alive and happy, from when they were children to “their very last selfies” (Blanco 18).

Work Cited Page (for today’s poem)

Blanco, Richard. “One Pulse—One Poem” Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Ed. Brian Clements et al. Beacon Press, 2017.

Homework Assignment: Summarize the Response

Write a 7-9 sentence paragraph summarizing the response with quotations, in-text citations, and a Work Cited Page.

Homework Assignment: Analysis

Question for analysis: What are some of the strategies in the poem and the response for writing about something difficult? Which do you think are the most effective as a reader or as a writer? Use quotation and summary to support your answer, which should be 7-9 sentences.

Homework Assignment: Imitation

Write your own poem asking the reader to help you write about something difficult, anything you want. Use Blanco’s technique of naming things as he does them, like “write one more stanza…” (Blanco 18).

Homework:

1. Summary of Poem
2. Summary of Response
3. Analysis of Poem/Response
4. Imitation of Poem

About this class:

In this class, you are welcome to submit homework for a grade.  If it’s not strong enough to earn an A, I’ll give you some comments to help you revise it, and let you do it over again. You have as many chances as you want to complete and perfect the work in this class, and you are welcome to do more than one week’s worksheet for homework at a time; ask me for sheets you’ve missed.  Students who complete 15 weeks of graded assignments and a longer paper can qualify for college credit.  When you get close to completing 15 weeks, I’ll help you get started on your longer paper.