Select one poem from this week’s reading list. Then, read the two required essays in this week’s tab (“How to Read Poetry” and the critical theory essay by Stanley Fish, a very famous essay on poetry, “How to Recognize a Poem.”) After reading these two essays, select a few ideas from the essays, and incorporate two to three ideas from the essays into your response as you apply the ideas to your interpretation of the poem you selected. For example, in the essay, “How to Read Poetry,” one of the ways the author suggests or one of the strategies the author suggests to use when reading a poem, is to consider the “line” (the poetic line in a poem); you could select that as an idea from the essay and then apply what it says about “how to read a line in a poem” to that of a line or two in the poem you select. Of course, feel free to select any of the strategies from “How to Read Poetry” for your response (you don’t have to go with my example about the poetic line); then, same process for the second essay, “How to Recognize a Poem,” by Stanley Fish, as you will take an idea you find interesting in Fish’ essay and then see how that idea could shed some light or provide insight when applied to your interpretation of the poem you selected. It should ideally take you at least a couple of paragraphs to respond in the initial post to adequately cover ideas from the two essays and then to apply those ideas to a poem you selected. Include at least two direct quotations from the reading selections that support your claims (that support your statements).
Mahmoud Darwish, Identity Card, http://www.barghouti.com/poets/darwish/bitaqa.asp
“How to Read a Poem”: https://poets.org/text/how-read-poem-0
“How to Recognize a Poem When You See One”: http://fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/Class%20Readings/Fish/HowToRecognizeAPoem.htm
