Poetry and Beverage Analysis
PURPOSE:
This is your final essay for this course, so it should be intensive in research and design, but also fun and appealing to view. The purpose is for you to explore a poet’ life and accomplishments, analyze three of his or her poems, and design a creative presentation of your findings in a multimodal or mediated form. Your final project will show your effective synthesis of literary knowledge, your interpretations about this literary genre, and your creative organization in presenting text visually.
INSTRUCTIONS:
You will create a multimodal composition, which means that your final product will NOT be a white background with text in paragraphs. Instead, you will insert photographs, images, designs, links to You Tube videos, and/or any other kinds of imagery and sounds that you want to include in a presentation mode. The Internet offers us mountains of information, so this is your chance to gather some of it up and pour it into an academic composition/project.
The most popular version of this assignment is using power point or Prezi slides. With either mode, you can choose background designs and easily insert photographs and links to create an exciting presentation. If you are uncomfortable with power point, or just don’t have time to learn how to use it, you can also insert much of the same content right into a word document. It’s incredibly easy: I learned how to make power point slides from my daughter when she was in second grade. She taught me how to copy and paste my word document information into power point slides and add designs and even animation. Prezi is even more challenging, but the results are stunning. If you do resort to a word document, at least change the color of the background (like this page!).[unique_solution]
The most exciting part of your project is that you will compare your poet to a beverage! See the requirement details below:
REQUIREMENTS:
Choose a poet from our textbook (POET MUST BE FROM OUR TEXTBOOK!! Literature: Craft & Voice 2 ed By Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse McGraw Hill ISBN: 978-0-07-338492-4) and find interesting biographical facts, along with the standard info (birth, death, personal details, and literary accomplishments). If you choose a poet outside of our textbook, prepare to receive a zero for the assignment. Also, feel free to include any interesting information about this author—popular quotes, videos, audio clips, commentary about the author’s works, and any other extraneous information that would be interesting for your viewers.
- Copy and paste in your slides at least three other full poems for which your poet is noted. TWO of these poems must be explicated for your audience; in other words, provide a non-Spark Notes or e-Notes-type analysis. Start at Blooms Literary Database! Go to Ebsco or Literature Resource Center! You can copy and paste from Poetry Foundation—they have lots of poems and poets.
- Finally, imagine if your author were a beverage (alcoholic or non-), what would he/she be? Defend your choice using literary elements and author information! Consider any elements of the poetry or the author’s life and compare to the drink’s ingredients, tastes, reactions, and reputation. This should be at least a paragraph of analysis, not just a sentence or two. Try to avoid the easy choice of water or black coffee. Find a drink that has multiple ingredients, and connect those criteria to the author’s life and works.
- INCLUDE A WORKS CITED PAGE ON THE FINAL SCREEN; you may use Wikipedia for biographical information and images. You do not have to include citations for every image.
- The assignment focus is on well-developed analysis and creativity. Don’t insult your readers with obvious or simplistic information like definitions of poetic devices or generally known biographic information (i.e. Poe died a strange death which reflects in his writing).
- Your text should be approximately a minimum of 1,000 words, and there is a way to check word count: File-Info-Properties-Words. Most of the successful power points are a minimum of 10-12 slides and easily 1,300-2,000 words. However, please do NOT load paragraphs of text onto your power point! A good guideline is about a half a paragraph per screen. Better yet, use bullets for your information—you don’t need to include complete sentences.
- Download your final project into the Blackboard assignment portal in Discussion Board by the due date. Your final DB will include a review of another student’s poetry presentation along with this project.
Partial student example on poet E.E. Cummings:
“If E. E. Cummings were a beverage, he would probably be a club soda, also known as soda water, which is fizzy and bubbly. Many of Cummings’ poems possess this same whimsical, bubbly ambiance. For example, both poems, “anyone who lived in a pretty how town,” and the “the sky was can dy,” have fun, bubbly tones just like club soda. In ‘the sky was can dy” the words are fragmented and pop into random positions on the page, just as the bubbles in carbonated drinks randomly fizz throughout them. Another unmistakable characteristic of club soda is its poignant, yet sobering taste—only a select group of drinkers choose to tolerate or enjoy its distinctive flavor. The poems “l(a” and “next to of course god America I” both exhibit these characteristics as well; one must get past their “unique taste” or unconventional arrangement in order to realize the strong points the poems make.”
I have some more good student models that I will show in the Videos and Files links.