Prompts

Week One

1 – Select a (single-spaced) page portion of the MLK speech to read aloud. When you read, you do not need to try to sound exactly like MLK. You should however read with a specific audience and objective in mind. The audience and objective don’t need to be the same as King’s. (If you are comfortable enough, you might enlist friends or roommates to be actual audience. You could even enlist parents or family and deliver the speech over the phone.) The point is that when you read you should do so as if the words must do something. In your journals, reflect on the experience. What did it feel like to speak the words? What if anything did you do in order to reach your audience and/or convey your objective? How did your verbal delivery compare to the written text? If you wanted someone else to read the same passage exactly how you just delivered it, what kinds of edits and/or notes and/or stage directions might you need to add to the transcript? As you reflect on this exercise, take some time to think about what the experience suggests about the relationship between written and spoken word and between recorded script and language enacted in real time?

2 – Listen to an audio recording of King delivering his Mountaintop sermon. In your journal compare and contrast the written text and King’s verbal delivery. Obviously a vast amount of the content (i.e. the words) are the same. What I want you to attend to here are 1) the relationship between the pacing and tone in the written version and the pace and tone in King’s delivery; 2) aspects of King’s delivery that do not show up in the transcript and vice versa. Reflecting on your observations, what do the two versions suggest about the relationship between written and spoken word? About recorded language and language enacted in a specific place and time?

Week Two

1) Choose either Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” or Wolf’s “Say, Yes.” Then complete ONE of the following activities. After completing the exercise, reflect on the experience in your journal by responding to the subsequent reflection prompts.

  • A- draw, sketch, color, or paint a significant scene from this week’s reading.
  • B- using cut out or print outs of celebrities or other public figures, cast all the prominent characters in this week’s reading.

Reflection Prompts:  Describe your visual creation and explain the reasoning behind the choices you made. What passages from the text most influenced the decisions you made in your sketch [A] or collage casting [B]? and Why? What were the challenges of translating this aspect of the text into a visual medium?  In what ways does your visual creation most amplify Stowe’s narrative vision?  In what ways might your visual creation complicate, challenge, or revise vision?

2)  At the turning point of Kate Chopin’s short story “Desiree’s Baby,” Desiree, a new mother of a three month old boy, begins to notice that something is wrong.  Chopin’s narrator describes Desiree’s growing concerns as a “menacing,” “something in the air” that “was at first too subtle to grasp”; “a disquieting suggestion”; “an air of mystery”, that quickly becomes “the threatening mist that she felt closing about her.”  What do you make of the narrator’s appeal to haptic and sonic sensory materials?  In particular what do you make of this appeal to haptic and sonic material to mark the awareness of what turns out to be most overtly a problem of color (the baby’s complexion)?

3) Rewrite EITHER the beginning, the middle, OR the end of Kate Chopin’s short story “Desiree’s Baby” from the perspective of one or more of the enslaved characters (e.g. La Blanche, the quadroon boy, negrillon, etc.) In addition to considering the emotional and ideological perspective from which the character(s) might experience the events, pay particular attention to what material aspects of the setting/environment the character(s) might notice. Follow your rewrite with 1-3 paragraph comparing and contrasting the original scene and your rewrite of it and reflecting on the reasoning behind your writerly choices.

4) – What might the geographic reference to El Camino Real in Tobias Wolf’s story “Say, Yes” indicate (or suggest) about the racial and class frames in which this story takes place?  

BONUS PROMPT only for THOSE WHO HAVE READ AND ARE FAMILIAR WITH CHOPIN’S NOVEL THE AWAKENING. The endings of Kate Chopin’s “Desiree’s Baby” (c.1892) and her novel The Awakening (1899) for which she is most known both involve a relatively young wife and mother walking ominously out into a body of water never to return. Compare and contrast these two endings. Pay especial attention to the details of the setting, especially the physical landscape and the atmosphere. How might rereading Chopin’s canonical novel through the lens of her earlier short story affect how we understand Edna Pontellier’s infamous end? OR vise versa, how might we reread Desiree’s end after the fact of how Chopin replays this idea of the “failed” wife walking away into a body of water in The Awakening?

Week Three

1 – Listen to one of the songs/tunes referenced in Zora Neale Hurston’s play “Color Struck.”  (Note: Some are easier to locate than others.) Write a post in which you describe how the specificity of that particular tune might affect the way we read, stage, and/or understand the signification of that moment in the play.    

2 – Imagine you were going to stage a performance of “Color Struck” at the end of the semester. What are some of the details that the play does not mention explicitly that you would have to take into consideration when staging the play? Pick one of these details. Imagine two or three different ways you might choose to address that detail in your production of the play. For each choice, describe the portions of the script that support that choice (even if there’s no explicit direction to make that choice in the script). Discuss the potential effect(s) each choice might have on how the audience experiences the play in terms of plot, central tension, political/ ideological concerns, etc.

3 – When Effie is giving a preview of her dance moves at the beginning of the play aboard the train, the stage directions mention Effie making a noise of ecstatic joy. Take a few minutes to imagine what such a noise might sound like and why Hurston might want to include this detail. Now try to think about your own life. Pick an example of ecstatic joy from your life. Now try to represent the experience and feeling of that ecstatic joy in a medium and form of your choice.  Once you’ve completed this representation as best you can.  Spend time in your journal reflecting on 1) the formal choices you made and why; 2) the challenges of trying to communicate this moment of ecstatic joy via representation; and 3) insights you gained from trying to communicate this moment via representation. (Your insights may be about the experience, the form, the medium, or any topic, at least generally, relevant to the class material.)

Week Four

No journal prompt. Meet with your project groups to prepare for your pre-proposal paragraph due Saturday 2/26

Week Five

This week, I’d like to push you to think about how what we might call our “racial sense” affects the way we read. How does our “racial sense” (the way we perceive and/or know race) affect not only how we read the materiality of white and black peoples lives but also how we read (and don’t read) the materiality of other nonblack and nonwhite groups?

Especially in light of the ongoing racial violence against Asian, Pacific Island, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, and Latinex peoples in this country (violence which though ongoing is not always apparent in the media), I invite you to think more about the presence of Asian Americans, Latino/as, Indigenous and other people of color in some of our previous readings.  The presence will likely be an implied, or let’s say inferable, presence.  As part of my invitation to reflect on this subject, CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING THREE prompts to explore in your journal this week:

1- What might the geographic reference to El Camino Real mark in terms of the racial and class frames in which this story takes place?  

2- In “And Love Them,” does the narrator’s endorsement of Chinese people as agreeably docile and clean (in contrast to the aggressive disagreeability of black people) echo the public sentiment towards Chinese people in NYC in the 1990s and early 2000s?  When we place the narrator’s comment alongside history of popular sentiment, what does the comparison suggest about the way we ought to read the narrator’s comment?  

3- As a third option you can identify a reference to or inclusion of another nonwhite and nonblack racial minority in one of our previous readings to contemplate in your journal. You should identify the reading, the specific part of the text you’re examining, and how that part fits within the text as a whole. Your reflection should contemplate how the narrative renders this minority character and/or group? (i.e. What language? What imagery? What association? How do they compare or not compare with other individual and/or groups in the text?) You should also think about what function this minority person or group (particularly as depicted) plays in the the text as a whole? (What role do they play in the plot? What role do they play in establishing character development? Setting? Theme? Mood? Etc.)

Week Six

1. “Read Your Friends Closely; Read Your Enemies Even Closer”:

Revisit a character from one of the readings that you DID NOT like and/or with whom you struggled to sympathize, and CHOOSE EITHER prompt A or prompt B to complete in your journal:

  • A) Imagine you are this character’s childhood best friend. While your lives may have taken different paths, you will always regard this character as one of those “like family” friends whom you can’t help loving no matter what. Recently the character reached out to you because they are having a particularly rough time. Write your old friend a letter or an email of support and encouragement.
  • B) Imagine that you are this character’s lawyer. The character has been accused by another character (from this text or another text) of a crime that your character swears they did not commit. In your journal write out the opening or closing statement of your defense for this character. Remember that you have a legal and ethical duty to represent their interests as best as possible.

2. “What’s in a Name? . . .

. . . That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Yes, but how would it smell with no name?

Names, naming, and not naming haven been a prevalent aspects of the stories we’ve read this semester. The titles of “Desiree’s Baby” and “White Rat” each foreground the name of a prominent character in the story. At the same time, we never learn the name of Wolf or Glave’s protagonists. In order to think more about the roles names, naming, and not naming play in these texts, PICK ONE of the following options to respond to in your journal:

  • A) How do names and/or the lack of names affect the way we read and understand the dynamics of a parent-child; individual-community; and/or romantic relationship in EITHER “Desiree’s Baby”; Color Struck”; “White Rat;” or “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator.”
  • B) If naming can traditionally function both as a way of enacting power and a way of establishing belonging and connection, what do we make of the decision to withhold the names of the protagonist in EITHER “Say, Yes” or “And Love Them”?

Week Seven

No Journal Prompt. Prepare your midterm journal assessment materials. See Journal Assignment for more details.

Week Eight

No Journal Prompt. Spring Break

Week Nine

  • A. Watch “How Sugar Affects the Brain – Nicole Avena.” Then journal about the following question: Thinking about the neuro-physical effects of sugar (and sweet things), how might we understand the significance of Toni Morrison’s decision to title the story “Sweetness”?

Sweetness and “Sweetness” – Prompt Option 1: Consider the importance of “Sweetness,” the name the narrator asks her daughter to call her. Specifically think about the significance of the name through the lens of Toni Morrison’s choice to title the story “Sweetness.” Thinking about the name through the lens of the title requires you to think rigorously about the possible significance of Morrison’s decision to title the story “Sweetness” (as opposed to another feasible title like “A Good Mother” or “Blue Black” or “Lulu Ann”). As a way to further examine the title’s potential significance , PICK ONE of the following three prompts for this week’s journal entry:

  • B. Watch “A Brief History of Sugar from Slavery to Sweetners.” Then journal about the following question: Thinking about the timeline of sugar production and artificial sweeteners, how might we understand the significance of Toni Morrison’s decision to title the story “Sweetness”?
  • C. Watch “The Journey of Sugar: Neither Short Nor Sweet.” Then journal about the following question: Thinking about how the historically persistent demands for sugar and its sweetness have contributed to imperialism, slavery, and global capitalism’s ongoing exploitation of the poor, how might we understand the significance of Toni Morrison’s decision to title the story “Sweetness”?

Who You Talking to? – Prompt Option 2: Throughout the first half of the semester, voice and perspective have been recurring points of interest in our class discussions. This week we have more texts than usual to discuss, and while there are similarities between them, each of the four texts employ tone and perspective differently. In your journal compare and contrast the tone and perspective in AT LEAST THREE of the four texts for this week. Make sure your observations about each text are specific and rooted in particular textual evidence. After you’ve completed your observations and descriptions, review what you’ve wrote and any thoughts that come to mind as you’re reviewing your observations. Then reflecting on what you’ve observed and described about how these texts’ various use of tone and perspective, try to infer who the author, the text, and the narrator are addressing in each story. (Keep in mind: 1-Just because the author, the text, and/or the narrator are addressing a particular individual and/or group does not mean that only that individual or group can read, understand, appreciate, and/or find meaning in the text. 2 -While there might be some overlaps the author, the text, and the narrator aren’t the same.) As you think through who the narrator, text, and author might be addressing make sure you’re articulating how you’re deducing your claims from what you’ve observed about these texts. (e.g. How do you know who the narrator’s addressing?) Finally, take time to consider the importance of the audience for at AT LEAST ONE text. Ask yourself how the text might work differently if in fact the author’s intended audience or the text’s primary readership, or the narrator’s imagined audience were some how different than who you identified these respective audiences to be.

Week Ten

OPTION 1) Fleshing Out the Material Context

A) Carefully go through Ntozake Shange’s short piece “oh she gotta head fulla hair,” and in your journal make a list of all the cultural and historical references you find. There are a lot.

B) Next look up each reference and make a note in your journal about the person, place, event, or thing to which the narrative alludes. Make sure you identify any relevant dates, place, ideas, or socio-political effects associated with the person, place, event, or thing to which the narrative alludes.

C) Reflecting on your list, answer the following questions in your journal:

  • In what ways might the various references connect to each other?
  • What are 2-4 2-4 overarching categories you might use to quickly classify the relationship(s) between the different references? (ex. Maybe 6 of the references relate to midcentury car culture; 4 references relate to 1970s sports media; and the rest have something to do with the Caribbean.)
  • In what ways to do the various references relate to other details in the narrative (ie. the details about person, place, thing, event, etc. that you did not need to look up)?

D) Experiment with how thinking about and thinking through the historical and socio-cultural context such allusions offer can affect the quality (or “depth”) of your close reading, by doing the following:

  • i. Select 2-3 references from the list of references you recorded in your journal.
  • ii. Select 1-3 lines (not necessarily sentences) in Shange’s story that you would like to examine further. (Note: You the lines you select do not have to be the same lines in which the references you selected appear.)
  • iii. Spend at least five minutes close reading the line(s) of the story that you’ve selected (your response to i) through the lens of the historical and socio-historical context alluded to by the 2-3 references you’ve selected (you response to ii).

Option 2) Mapping the Movement of Mother Daughter Relations

  • 1 ) Print out a detailed street map of Manhattan, and a detailed street map of Brooklyn. If your street maps do not also include transit information (re: subway and bus lines), you should also print out a MTA transit map for Manhattan and Brooklyn.
  • 2) Go through Edwidge Danticat’s story “New York Day Women,” and using the explicit and implied details of the narrative, identify AT LEAST FOUR proposed coordinates along each character’s respective route across the city. (Note: You’re looking for A TOTAL OF AT LEAST EIGHT different coordinates: 4 coordinates on the narrator’s route, and 4 coordinates on her mother’s route).
  • 3) For each of your (at least eight) proposed plot point, make sure you note the specific textual detail that supports your decision to indicate a point at this location. You can do so by first labeling the plot points on your map. (For example: Point A, Point, etc. or with more topical labels like Work Site; Social Point; etc.) And then, elsewhere in your journal, create a key in which you list each plot point by the label you’ve assigned it followed by a brief note about the specific textual details that support your decision to place a plot point at this location. You may use quotes, paraphrase, explication, or any mix of the three.
  • 4) Once you have plotted the various coordinates, you should draw both characters’ respective routes by drawing separate route lines for each character. Each line should connect the coordinates on the respective character’s movement route. Make sure the mother’s line of movement is visually distinct from the narrator’s line of movement (e.g. make the lines different colors or make one line solid and one line perforated).
  • 5) On your map you should also note places, sites, and/or geographic features that are relevant to either characters’ movement and/or the context, references, or themes integral to the story.
  • 6) Paste, tape, stitch, or otherwise securely incorporated your map(s) and any relevant keys into your journal.
  • 7) Reflecting on the map and the details you noticed in plotting out the movements, spend IDEALLY 10-15 minutes (but AT LEAST 5 minutes in your journal) reflecting on ONE of the following questions:
    • A) In what ways might thinking about the time, direction, and manner of their movement (implied by your routes) as well as the physical, financial, and socio-political implications of their particular mobility in the city affect the way we understand the significance of the story’s title “New York Day Women”?
    • B) Considering the time, direction, and manner of the two women’s movements (implied by your routes) as well as the physical, financial, and socio-political implications, in what ways are the women’s respective mobility across the city conversive with their mobility as black Haitian immigrants across water, land, cultures, and nation-states?

Week Eleven

No Journal Prompts – Happy Birthday to Professor Curseen (and Connor J)

Week Twelve

OPTION 1) Considering Literature as Cultural Conversation and Critical Reimagination

Nalo Hopkinson’s “Shift” is part of a long cultural tradition of responding to by re-presenting and re-imagining the story, character, and character dynamics of Shakespeare’s c.1610 play The Tempest. Read the Wikipedia entry on The Tempest, paying particular attention to section 6 (“Themes and Motifs”); section 7 (“Criticism and Interpretations”); and, especially, section 8 (“Performance History”). Then choose one of the following prompts to reflect on in your journal:

A) In what ways does Hopkinson’s reimagining of Caliban and Ariel in “Shift” continue (or build upon) existing interpretations of the The Tempest as articulated either by scholarly critics or other writers, artists, and performers adaptation and/or reimagining of the play? And in what ways does Hopkinson’s reimagining of Caliban and Ariel differ (depart, challenge, reject, etc.) from the long interpretive tradition around The Tempest, particularly regarding the characters Caliban and Ariel?

B) In the second paragraph of section 7 (“Criticism and Interpretation”), the Wikipedia article on The Tempest, reads:

  • “Arguably Caliban is sometimes considered a character who is not a part of New Comedy since he is regarded as a Convent Vehicle. Lester E Barber suggests a Convent Vehicle is a slave who does vile and unintelligent things that cause them to fail miserably and be humiliate and punished. Caliban fits this through his hatred and disobedience to Prospero. Ariel as a slave carries a different approach to himself since he is a Typical Paradigm. A Typical Paradigm is a more brilliant slave that is more intelligent than other slaves, supportive of their masters, and will fix their master’s problems. Ariel is very obedient to Prospero and follows his wishes to use magic against the shipwrecked victims as part of Prospero’s revenge.”
  • 1 – Go back to the Wikipedia article and read the entire subsection in which the above quote appears in order to have as much context for the ideas it communicates as possible.
  • 2 – In your journal, do your best to parse through the ideas put forth in the passage quoted above. in your journal you should paraphrase the quoted passage in your own words, adding any additional questions or comments it might spur for you. Note: You re not required to do any additional research or consult any outside source other than the Wikipedia article on the play. However, if you’re curious and/or feeling like you want to go down a rabbit hole, you can try looking up more information by Googling “Shakespeare’s The Tempest” AND any of the following relevant search terms “Lester E Barber”; “New Comedy”; “Typical Paradigm”; and/or “Convent Vehicle.”
  • 3 – In your journal, reflect (in prose or outline form) about the details of how Hopkinson reimagines The Tempest in the story “Shift.” In particular makes some notes about what you observe in terms of the narrative’s attention to binary opposition; rivalry; names and naming; gender conflict/gendered violence; and the tense and complicated dynamics around power, resistance, and belonging.
  • 4 – (Re)Read Hopkinson’s prefatory reflection on writing “Shift” (in the framed text opposite the first page of the story). In your journal, spend some time reflecting on Hopkinson’s reflection, in particular, on her concluding comment about “perform[ing] a paradigm shift.”
  • 5 – Drawing upon your observations and thoughts in response to steps 2 and 3, spend time in your journal reflecting on how you understand Hopkinson’s short story responding to (e.g. building on, echoing, diverging, inversing, critiquing, challenging, etc.) the ideas about the characters Caliban and Ariel articulated in the Wikipedia passage quoted above.

Option 2) Responding to the Call forClose Reading and Reparative Reporting

So much of Nafissa Thompson’s short story “Heads of the Colored People” calls our attention to the violent tension between the structures by which American society read the racialized black body and the complex and dynamic cultural positioning by which individual black bodies perform and understand their own identities and relation to blackness. The story suggests that the this violence manifests at all levels of society: at the local level of everyday public interactions people have with each other as well as the macro level of media representation and state policing. And the story suggests that this violence is so pervasive that even black peoples whose bodies are at risk to the violently limited structures of reading raced bodies at times also reify as they get tripped up in the ironic blindness of these of these overwhelmingly visual structures of reading the black other impose. From the narrator’s “aggressively” “meta” interjections to her distinct perspectival shifts across the numbered sections to her explicit contemplation of Riley and Brother Man’s respective family and friends’ disapproval of how the media portrayed their decease loved one, Thompson’s narrator tells this story, structures it, reflects on it, peoples it, contextualizes it in ways that strive to critique if not offer a sort of redress to the violent vision-dominated structures of reading (seeing, knowing, classifying, judging, and profiling) racially black bodies in the US. In an effort to more closely consider the details of this critique and the ways in which the text goes about communicating (and responding t it), follow the below steps to create in your journal a form of reparative reporting for the events around Riley an Brother Man’s encounter that would both accurately and ethically report the event and its relevant import while also doing justice to how Riley and Brother Man respectively understood their own blackness and endeavored to live out their respective black lives. To be clear honoring how these two characters understood their own blackness and how they sought to live their lives is not necessarily the same thing as creating a news report that their families would agree with or like. Families too impose external structures of knowing onto each other that do not always align with how a person sees their self. However to the degree that that the people closest to Rilely and Brother Man have a greater awareness and appreciation of how the two men understood their blackness and who they were in the world, we can imagine that your reparative reporting should resonate more favorably with these loved ones than the mainstream news and social media coverage.

1 – Going through the explicit and implicit details communicated in the story, outline or make a list of the key components of the incident. Do your best to record descriptions of the incident rather than your interpretations, presumptions, or assumptions about the incident.

2 – Going through the explicit and implicit details of the story, make another list or outline of the aspects of how the news, the police, social media, onlookers, and (us as) readers may have been inclined to view, present, and/or frame the event and the involved parties in ways that either Riley, Brother Man, their loved ones, and/or our aggressively meta narrator might find inaccurate, misleading, or otherwise problematic.

3 – Now your job is to report on the event in a way that effectively communicates the substance of what you observe in you first list/outline without replicating the same problems you note in your second list/outline.

4 – As you craft your (mock or draft) reparative reporting piece, keep in mind the following:

  • Your piece should should be attentive to both the content and the form. (If you are imagining a social media or digital form, you should either do a mock up on the computer that you can print out and paste into your journal; OR draw an illustration of how your piece would look if published on its intended platform (including notes about layout, hashtags, links, handles, and formal aspects relevant to the medium and platform and audience you’re imagining).
  • Your piece should include a mix of visual and textual content.
  • Your piece should reference at least three different types of (hypothetical) source materials (e.g. eye witness accounts, anonymous tips, expert testimony, relevant scholarly opinions, and relevant and reputable institutional data reports like Pew Polls or CDC reports).

Week Thirteen

OPTION 1) Go Back & Try a Different Path

Pick a prompt from a previous week that you did not do but would like to do this week. While you should try to adhere to the prompt, you may tweak the prompt in a way that allows you to think more about a text on the syllabus that you’d like to think more about.

OPTION 2) Chart Your Own Way Forward

Write two original prompts. The prompts should differ in the texts and topics they encourage you to examine as well as in the way they invite you to engage the respective topics and texts.

For this option you should:

  • Record both prompts in your journal.
  • Then EITHER
    • A) Pick one of your prompts to respond to in your journal 30-45 minutes. OR . . .
    • B) Spend 15-20 minutes outlining your potential response to the first prompt and another 15-20 minutes outlining your potential response to the second prompt.

Week Fourteen

OPTION ONE: Upon Learning about the Basquiat in “upon viewing basquiat’s death”

Read Stacey Keith’s article December 12, 2021 article on Medium.com titled “Jean-Michel Basquiat Died for Our Sins.” Spend some time journaling about how Mahogany L Browne’s poem, “upon viewing the death of basquiat,*” invokes, engages with, and /or makes use of the title’s reference to Basquiat. As you journal, make sure to consider:

  • The title. Thinking about Basquiat’s life and art as described by Keith, what do you make of the phrasing of Browne’s title, particularly the phrase “upon viewing”? (What’s the effect of titling the poem “upon viewing the death of basquiat*” as opposed to say, “viewing the death of basquiat”? or even just “the death of basquiat*”? )
  • The body of the poem: In what ways does the form and/or content of the body of the poem resonate with aspects of Basquiat’s life and art (as presented in the Keith article)?
  • The asterisk footnote. What effect does Browne’s relatively-lengthy, poetic footnote have on how we read the title and/or the body of the poem? How does the asterisked note affect the tone, pace, and/or order in which you read the poem?
  • The relationship between the title, the body, and the footnotes. How do your observations about title; your observations about the form and/or content of the body of the poem; and your observations about the footnote work together? One way to think through this question is to ask yourself how the poem might change if we removed or radically altered one of these three components but not the other two.

OPTION TWO: Listen & Reread

Morgan Parker’s poem “Let Me Handle My Business, Damn” is part of her collection of poems titled There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce. Listen to Parker read other poems from this collection during Morgan Parker’s 2017 poetry reading at the Portland Museum of Art on YouTube [Start at 13:00]. After listening, spend some time journaling about

  • How “Let Me Handle My Business, Damn” fits and/or doesn’t fit with the poems from the same collection that Parker reads?
  • What hearing Parker read affects the way you hear “Let Me Handle My Business, Damn” in your mind and/or the way you might read it out loud?
  • How Parker engages and/or invokes pop culture, particularly black celebrity icons, in her work?

OPTION THREE – Imitate Write

Write a poem after Parker’s. Your poem must follow the below requirements, which have been drawn from the formal elements of Parker’s poem:

  • A title plucked from the lyrics of a popular song.
  • Composed of one single stanza that is 18 lines long
  • 6 lines must be 8 syllables long.
  • 6 lines must be 9 syllables long.
  • 6 lines must be 10 syllables long.
  • No capitalized words except the word “I”; the first word of the first line; and the words in the title.
  • At least three near rhymes
  • At least three references to pop-culture (movies, music, fashion, etc.)
  • No punctuation except the colon in the last line (see below).
  • The last line must end with a colon (:) followed by a three word declarative sentence.

Week Fifteen

No Prompts. Prepare your Final Journal Assessment Materials.