poem should be 15-30 lines (approximate); essay should be b/t 3-5 pages + works cited
It is vital that both poems and essay are in ONE document (again, use my template to copy and paste your word into and save as one file if you cannot format it correctly yourself). Make sure to save your document as either .doc (or .docx) or .pdf
Write a paper Imitation poem & essay Draft.Choose a poem to imitate from one of our authors we studied this term—Danez Smith,
Li-Young Lee, Julie Marie Wade, or Nguyen Phan Que Mai. For the purpose of this
assignment, choose a poem somewhere between 15-30 lines long. (if the poem is
outside of that range, ask me for approval)
2. Imitate that poem. How does one go about imitating? Things to consider:
form (i.e. the poem patterned, rhyming, written in numbered stanzas, is free verse,
etc.). I have books that I can photocopy as source(s) for you!
rhyme scheme or rhyme patterns
topic / content (what’s this poem talking about?)
tone /mood (dark and dreary Edgar Allen Poe-esq or sensual and intimate?)
point of view (first/second/third person; male/female; persona)
style (long/short sentences, use of punctuation or none, etc.)
diction (high/medium/low diction; connotation vs. denotation; irony/sarcasm)
figurative language (metaphor, simile, allusion, apostrophe, metonymy,
synecdoche; hyperbole/understatement)
sound devices (alliteration, consonance, assonance, euphony, cacophony)
3. Your imitation poem cannot simply replace a few words here and there from the
original. You need to make a NEW poem that is both similar AND different from the
original. This is your chance to be creative and do something original (despite
imitating someone else). As the dramatist Oscar Wilde says, “Imitation is the sincerest
form of flattery!”
4. After writing your poem, begin work on the ESSAY: explain how you have
imitated the chosen poem. This may be done in a number of ways, but by the end of
the first paragraph, there should be a thesis of what exactly you did and how you will
justify your imitation in comparison with the original poem. Consider having a
paragraph on summarizing the original poem if one of the aspects you imitated was
“content;” for example, that since the original poem is about living on a farm, you have
then written a modernized version of living in a city.
while outside sources are NOT required, ANY information used for ANY reason MUST be cited IN-TEXT (i.e. with a signal phrase and parenthetical citation) AND a works
cited page entry
