This Seat's Taken: AP Lit, October 29, 2012

Focus: Structure and meaning in traditional vs. modern poetry

1. Announcements

Traditional Poetry
2. Warm-up: With your small group, review the salient points in Chapter 4 of How To Read Literature like a Professor: "If It's Square, It's a Sonnet."  

• How is structure specifically important to the sonnet?  
• How does structure relate to and reveal meaning? 

3. As a class, develop a list of about 5 "rules" of sonnets. In other words, what patterns or rules do all sonnets tend to follow in terms of structure?  Please pick one student to post these on the class blog underneath the comment section of today's agenda.  You may use the class computer or your smartphone.
4. Read aloud "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun," and as a group, mark up and discuss this poem by applying your 5 rules of traditional structure to this poem.  Decipher how the poem's structure reveals its meaning.

Modern Poetry
5. If time allows, read aloud the modern e.e. cummings' poem, "since feeling is first."
6.  Annotate the poem by unearthing its structure and its attitude toward structure:

• How does the structure deviate from that of the sonnet?
• More importantly, why does its structure deviate from that of the sonnet?  What are the poem's larger meanings, and how does form specifically contribute to them?

HW: Finalize your choice of poem by tomorrow.  Copy and paste it into a Google doc and be ready to perform a metacognitive writing on it tomorrow (remember to meet in the library computer lab tomorrow).  Also, by Thursday please read Act 5, write down 10 one-liners in your composition notebook, and type a close reading of a single speech from Act 5 (read it as you read a poem).