Jerz: EL150 (Intro to Literary Study)


30 Apr 2007

Sonnet Slam

Be prepared to deliver a version of your sonnet for the class.

You don't need to memorize your sonnet, but you should have practiced your delivery so that your oral presentation contributes to our understanding of your work.

Remember not to pause automatically at the end of every line, but remember also not to ignore the stressed and unstressed patterns that are part of the form of a sonnet.

Bring a double-spaced printout that we can put on the overhead projector.

Evaluation criteria for the sonnet exercise:

Meter: do the lines have the right number of syllables and the right pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables?
Diction: are your individual word choices effective? Does each word matter, or are your lines stuffed with filler ("I think that maybe I just might do that")? Does your poem include a list of emotions, or do your words SHOW emotion, using specific images that GENERATE unnamed emotions in the reader?
Form/Thought: do your quatrains and your sestet contain complete thoughts? Is there a twist in line 9? If you end with a rhymed couplet, does the couplet drive the point of the poem home? Does your poem look like more than 14 random lines stuck together? Is your poem chiefly focused on expressing the feelings that you have, rather than using specific, vivid imagery to generate new feelings in your reader? (Note: If you choose wonderful words that don't fit the meter, or your meter is perfect but your diction is simplistic, overall the fit between form and thought will suffer.)
Presentation: did your oral presentation add to our understanding of the poem? When speaking, did you remember not to pause mechanically at the end of every line? Did you remember to speak naturally, without artificially stressing the syllables that you need to stress in order to get the right meter? A singer can make "Happy birthday, dear Tim" and "Happy birthday, dear Veronica" fit the same music, but poets have to pay attention to each syllable.

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Comments

Are we supposed to revise our sonnet before the sonnet slam, or wait until the revision is due?

Posted by: HallieGeary at April 29, 2007 2:18 PM

When you have a chance to present your work, it makes good sense to present the best possible version of your work, or else the feedback you get on Monday will be about errors that you already knew about.

Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz at April 29, 2007 2:41 PM
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