Assignment Task

Explication:

TO TURN IN YOUR EXPLICATION: 
1. your paper online and
2. in hard copy in class. Staple the documents in this order:
(a)a final draft of explication, with a “Works, Cited,” a “Works Consulted,” and the revised annotated bibliography from October 18 and November 1 (see page 4);
(b)marked-up poem (make a photocopy or PDF from a photo);
(c)the quotations you thought you might use in your explication;
(d)previous drafts in reverse chronological order.


I.PREWRITING: After you have answered these questions, you will have the material for your essay. Be sure to read some models of explications and imitate their rhetorical strategies for your own essay.

A)Choose a Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet. You cannot choose “We Real Cool” (it’s not a sonnet and not even sonnet-like). Here are your choices, unless you’ve cleared it with me: Brooks sonnets to choose from: 
a. From A Street in Bronzeville: “kitchenette building,” p. 1 
b. From Gay Chaps at the Bar: any sonnet, pp. 22-27 
c. From The Womanhood: any sonnet, pp.49-52
B) COPY THE POEM into your notebook, and make notes by hand on the poem. (When you turn in your paper, you will include this note-taking sheet along with your drafts.) Start with observations and discoveries!
C) Find answers to these questions:
i) What is your intuitive response to the poem?
ii) How would you describe how observations about the poem’s formal qualities and how they act on you, the reader; how do these elements account for your intuitive/emotional response to the poem? 
iii) What do you notice about the sounds? How do sounds make meaning in the poem? Write down everything you hear or indicate the sounds you hear with marks.
iv) Is there a central metaphor, paradox, and/or argument in the poem or passage? How do these devices function rhetorically?    
v) What is the sonnet’s tone? 
vi) Related to tone: where are the moments of humor, wittiness, irony? Almost every Brooks poem relies on some form of wit.
vii) Can you apply any poetics, theology, politics, philosophy, black history and other aspects of 20th culture to the poem? Another way to pose the question is to ask, can you contextualize the sonnet? What are the context of the sonnet within Brooks’ career and its specific book or poem sequence?
D) You must quote from Alexander’s introduction or another scholarly source and from Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry. What quotations do you think you might use? Open up a new document and copy them. The reason I ask you to do this is that this is what I and others do to help organize our thoughts

 

2) WRITING, FORMAL CONSIDERATIONS, TURNING IN THE FINAL PAPER: 
B) Begin the essay by typing out the whole poem. 
C) Use the explication we looked at and the explications I’ve posted as models for your essay. 
D) Make sure that you have a thesis.
E) Back up your assertions and observations with textual evidence from the poem. You should discuss every line of the poem or groups of 2-4 lines, as we did several times in class and as I did in my explication from my student days.
F) The secondary sources in your essay are the two sources you already have: the introduction to The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks and The Sounds of Poetry. I want you to quote once from Alexander (or from a scholarly source) and twice from Pinsky. 
G) Use Pinsky to deal with the sounds and their meaning-making. For example, 

In “We Real Cool,” the repetition of the line-ending “we” is unlike the dense alliteration and rhyme in the rest of a poem. The “we” sound is an example of the play between like and unlike sounds that Robert Pinsky describes, and “becomes “important because [it] doesn’t much recur; in a way,” the ‘we’ sound “keeping the richness from being overdone,” is “the most important [one] in the poem” (81). This contrast between like and unlike sounds is especially jolting when the “we” is missing both sonically and visually in the last line of the poem, “die soon.” There is a blank, silent space where the reader expects the “we” to be because the seven pool players will “die soon” and no longer be a group. “The missing ‘we’ that the poem has led us the anticipate,” Elizabeth Alexander writes, “is a yawning chasm, the absence of we, these young black boys, from the poem and from the Earth”(xxi).
H) Briefly contextualize the sonnet within its book, poem sequence or sonnet sequence (A Street in Bronzeville, Gay Chaps at the Bar, the Womanhood) and Gwendolyn Brooks’ career. You can use Alexander to do this or another scholarly source.
I) Don’t avoid paradoxes or words you don’t understand. Delve more deeply into them. 
J) Make sure that your conclusion is more than a summary of your main points.
K) Be sure to quote poetry properly and use MLA formatting and citations. This means:
i) You will have a "Works Cited" section at the end of your paper. You can find instructions on OWL, Purdue University's online writing lab. You will also find punctuation instruction there, and much more.
ii)  You will quote poetry properly and document it properly. If you don't know-how, look it up. See above.
iii)  If you think I'm trying to get you to look up how to quote properly, how to document properly, how to format your papers properly, how punctuation properly, etc., you are correct. I want you to have those skills before you leave my class. Then I will know that I have done right by you and that I have given you the skills you need for the future. These mechanical things are important. They are also mostly self-taught at this stage in your education. Even at my age, as a professor of English, I have to look things up sometimes!
L) In addition to the “Works Cited” page, you will have a “Works Consulted Page.” On this page, you will include every single source you consulted, including those that are not juried/peer-reviewed and scholarly, that is, sources are not acceptable for your “Works Cited” page: Wikipedia, personal blogs, college paper writing “help sites,” and so on.


ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Go to Ellis Library to gather SCHOLARLY secondary sources on the Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet you’ll be writing about. If you can’t find anything about the specific sonnet, then find something relevant.
• Be sure and see if there’s an article about the sonnet you chose in The Explicator.
• Please gather 3 SCHOLARLY sources about Gwendolyn Brooks’ sonnets in general and about the specific sonnet you are writing about.
• Make a list of the 3 sources in MLA style.
• Then annotate each source. That is, write a brief summary of what’s in each the secondary source, evaluate it, and assess why it is applicable to your explication. It must be applicable, even if you don't quote from it in your explication.
    In addition, you will choose one quotation from each source that you think will be useful to summarize, paraphrase or quote in your essay.
Be SELECTIVE about the sources you choose. Don’t give me a Wikipedia entry or a personal blog. You are looking for peer-reviewed articles (the Modern American Poetry website articles are peer-reviewed).

 

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