2nd for today: The Art of Bluffing in a poetry class
You have all experienced it. You read a poem in silence. If you are lucky and your teacher so inclined, your teacher reads you the poem. Then she puts the book/text/paper down to say, "So what do you think of it?"
What follows can either be stunned silence, uncomfortable silence or thoughtful silence but you get the picture, everyone tries to look like they are thinking intelligently about the poem.
How do you rise above all that silence to indicate your superiority over the others mutely, silently reflecting away?
Some tips - I feel generous today about trade secrets -
1) Hunt down a reference to an image and focus on why it was used. Then make a comment about it along the lines of "The image makes me think of ....", "the image of ..... in Line 4 (score 10 pts with this!) seems to suggests..."
2 Amass the images. Do what you did in 1) many times and ask yourself if the images are similar, hark form the same theme or decidedly contradictory? If you want to go for the kill, but softly, just say "all the images like ..., and .... seem to point to ...."
3 Look for themes across genres - is there a character from a fairytale in your poem? Or does the poet refer to an actor from the movies? Make sure you are the first one to take note of these references and go in for the spike.
Try it, and when you are done, you might realise you actually understand the poem.
What follows can either be stunned silence, uncomfortable silence or thoughtful silence but you get the picture, everyone tries to look like they are thinking intelligently about the poem.
How do you rise above all that silence to indicate your superiority over the others mutely, silently reflecting away?
Some tips - I feel generous today about trade secrets -
1) Hunt down a reference to an image and focus on why it was used. Then make a comment about it along the lines of "The image makes me think of ....", "the image of ..... in Line 4 (score 10 pts with this!) seems to suggests..."
2 Amass the images. Do what you did in 1) many times and ask yourself if the images are similar, hark form the same theme or decidedly contradictory? If you want to go for the kill, but softly, just say "all the images like ..., and .... seem to point to ...."
3 Look for themes across genres - is there a character from a fairytale in your poem? Or does the poet refer to an actor from the movies? Make sure you are the first one to take note of these references and go in for the spike.
Try it, and when you are done, you might realise you actually understand the poem.
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