In Edward Hirsch’s “How to Read a Poem,” the acts of reading and writing are considered dialogic (relating to or in the form of dialogue; conversation).

As a reader, according to Hirsch, you enter into a conversation with a poem by coming to it with questions and understanding there isn’t necessarily one right answer.

For your first essay, then, you will demonstrate the “conversation” you have entered into with a poem. You may write about any one or two of the assigned poems from this unit:

“The Red Wheelbarrow,” Williams
“Diving Into the Wreck,” Rich
“Introduction to Poetry,” Collins
“This Is Just To Say,” Williams
“O Me! O Life!,” Whitman
“If You Are Over Staying Woke,” Parker
Excerpt from Citizen: An American Lyric: “You are in the dark, you are in the car…,” Rankine
“My California,” Herrick
“ode to coffee / oda al café,” Noel
If you’d like, you may build upon any of the discussion posts you have already submitted. Your posts can provide the foundation or a starting point for your essay. Your thesis will be a claim you want to make about the poem. You might, for example, want to discuss the speakers of one or two of the poems (see the poetry lexicon discussion post for an example of what this might look like).

Your essay should contain quoted lines from the poem you are writing about. You are also permitted to quote from any of the articles we’ve read to support your claims (in fact, I would highly recommend this; it’s not required, but it is encouraged. However, you must rely on the sources that have been provided to you; these include the assigned articles, as well as the sites you can access from the course homepage. You do not need to do your own research for this assignment. Use the sources that have been provided). Please review the powerpoint from Week 1 for how to quote poetry. Remember that quotations must be introduced; they cannot stand alone as complete sentences. For additional tips on quoting, see: Avoid Dropped Quotations (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. For those of you with copies of They Say/ I Say, review “The Art of Quoting.”

You can bring any of the assigned texts into conversation with each other; don’t think that you can’t quote the Chiasson article if you’re writing about Parker, for example. You might find yourself wanting to comment on the potential “meme-ability” of Whitman’s poem, perhaps, and therefore it would be appropriate to quote from the Sussman article even though he is discussing Williams.