Creative Assignment

Format: Creative Work: One poem or poetic fragment, minimum ten lines; Defense: minimum 600 words (approx. 2 pp.). 11 pt. Font; Works Cited page; no cover page. Submit according to Instructions for Submitting Essays. Also, see the MLA handout for further details. Save on disk and print out a hard copy as well! Assignment: Write a focused, stylistic imitation (a "pastiche") of a poem in the Barnet textbook; it does not have to be one of the readings listed on the Syllabus. I will not grade the creative work (although it needs to be sincerely attempted); instead, you will write a detailed (minimum two pages) explanation of how you chose to approach the pastiche, and I will grade that “Defense” of your creative work. Use the bullet points below to construct your Defense. Submit your work by posting it to the “Assignments” link on Eagle Online. You will not be able to revise this, but I will review your draft if you like. NO LATE ASSIGNMENTS WILL BE ACCEPTED because this is due at the end of the term. Grade: 15 % of total course grade Evaluative Criteria: I will not grade the creative work, the Pastiche, itself. However, it must seem sincerely attempted to me, or I will refuse to accept it. In grading the Defense, I will look for the following: - A detailed explanation of your choice for the primary text you have imitated - A definition of the particular elements you tried to imitate - A description of the creative process you followed - An account of the challenges you encountered, and how you dealt with them - Your own opinion of the resulting imitation - A summary of the resulting insights regarding the primary work, and creative effort in general Words of Advice: When submitting the file, this is Essay # 3. So, according to the Instructions for Submitting handout, you should title the file something like this: doe_pat_3.rtf (if your name were “Pat Doe”). Possibly, even if you have written creatively before, you have not done so in this manner. Keep in mind that I am not grading the poem exercise itself – and the Defense is merely a report. So, you don't need to worry about the grade on this assignment, unless you're lazy. Essentially, however, it's an exercise in analysis, like the other, more formal essays, but from a different angle. You still need to identify specific formal and thematic characteristics of a primary text (the poem from our Barnet text that you are imitating). But then, you will attempt to transfer a few of them to a text of your own creation. Take a poem like "Those Winter Sundays." Among many other characteristics, it presents a male speaker who tells of a father, somewhat strict and disciplined, with whom the speaker, now probably an adult and the father perhaps dead, had a troubled, uncommunicative relationship. You can create a poem that will also remember back to a recurring, that is, a habitual, experience with your father or mother, or a grandparent, or some other authority figure (you can vary the basic elements); you will perhaps try as well to capture the split consciousness: the earlier lack of appreciation, the present tone of regret; and you might also carry over some of the other, more formal devices: the use of sounds to capture some psychological aspect of the person or situation (notice the “k” sounds in the Hayden poem), or the concluding question (“What did I know, what did I know”) that also includes some key word of double significance (“office,” that is partly religious and partly about the disciplined, dutiful matters the son remembers of his father. Everything else in your poem will be your own, although you might perhaps borrow elements from yet another poem or story. But there is a great deal of flexibility – that is, creativity and responsibility – in the way you choose what elements to imitate. You could imitate, or even copy verbatim, a crucial (or concluding, or initiating) line or two from a text, but change almost everything else. From Hayden's poem, you might borrow only the memory of a recurring domestic experience, and perhaps the regretful (or other emotional) rhetorical question at the end. But your speaker might be the father, or the wife, or an outside observer…that's up to you. We don't even need to see overt connections between your text and the primary, imitated text – although I expect you to let me know in your defense what text you worked from. Many writers start by imitating a beloved (or a challenging, or infuriating) primary text, and end up with something no longer recognizable as a pastiche at all. All writers would most likely trace at least some aspects of their writing, and many of their works, to something they read and were struck by (positively as well as negatively). If you work with a story, most likely your piece will be fragmentary, or at least a short-short story. You might focus on a passage demonstrated dialogue, character description, climactic confliction, interior monologue, setting of scene, or something else specific. But again, the choice is yours. Just to emphasize: you will “copy” certain selected elements from the original text. You need not copy all recognizable elements, nor is that possible, short of copying the text verbatim. Your own text will need to vary, but it should vary in ways you can stylistically and thematically identify. If you work from a poem, it can copy dramatic or thematic details, and none of the metrical details – that is, if the original poem rhymes, and follows a certain meter, you can copy those elements or not – it's up to you. Here is list of poems from the text book “literature for composition by Barnet “ If you need any extra documents please contact me by my email.