Notes on the Poetry Essays

There are a few mainly technical issues regarding the poetry essays. One regards the integration of evidence in the body paragraphs, the other involves verb usage.

Using Evidence / Integrating Quotes

First, everyone at this point should be avoiding the “dropped” quote that floats in the paragraph by itself without being integrated into your prose. For example, from “Barter”:

Teasdale repeats two lines in the poem. “Life has loveliness to sell” (lines 1 & 7). This repetition highlights their significance.

Instead, integrate the evidence smoothly into the sentence structure, looking something more like this.

Teasdale repeats only two lines, “Life has loveliness to sell,” highlighting their significance in the poem (lines 1 & 7).

This improved example provides “handles” on either side of the evidence, making the quote flow naturally into the sentence. There need not be handles on either side of the quote. A phrase before or after or both all work equally, depending on how you want to use the quote. Everyone should be at the point where they are making decisions about how to do this best, but they should be doing it.

Second, poems provide some small adjustments in terms of how they are presented as quotations. If you are going to use four or more lines, you need to block quote the lines, making them look exactly as they do in the published poem. For example:

The final image is the most revealing of Dickinson’s tone toward the natural world, focusing on her attentiveness to detail and rich use of metaphoric imagery.

I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home—

Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam— (lines 14-18)

Here the speaker interrupts the scene and causes the bird to take flight. Yet, Dickinson employs a nautical image for the bird’s ascent. The bird’s wings cut through the vast blueness of sky, ultimately disappearing from view, as the sun’s reflection off the bird’s velvety feathers help camouflage its flight from the speaker.

The alternative to the block quote, when using three lines or less is to integrate it normally but use a slash to demarcate the individual lines. So trimming the same example could look something like this.

The final image is the most revealing of Dickinson’s tone toward the natural world, focusing on her rich use of metaphoric imagery. The speaker interrupts the scene and causing the bird to take flight. Yet, Dickinson employs a nautical image for the bird’s ascent, “Than Oars divide the Ocean, / Too silver for a seam—” (lines 17-18). Continuing the rowing metaphor, the bird’s wings cut through the vast blueness of sky, ultimately disappearing from view, as the sun’s reflection off the bird’s velvety feathers help camouflage its flight from the speaker.

Also notice the citation and punctuation changes. In the block quote, the punctuation is precisely as it appears in the poem and the citation appears after any punctuation in the quote. When integrated in line within the paragraph, a slash designates the line break in the quote and the final punctuation mark for the sentence appears outside or to the right of the citation, not inside the quotation marks of the quoted material, ensuring that the citation belongs tot he correct sentence.

Additionally, related to the integration of quotes, everyone also should be beyond the point that “This quote…” needs to be employed after introducing evidence. Simply begin stating your analysis. Using that construction is simplistic and unnecessary at this point. Everyone is capable of better.

Also, simplistic is the phrasing construction, “This…because…” when constructing your commentary and analysis. That phrasing might be effective but it too is simplistic, as well as being terribly formulaic. Challenge yourself to explain your analysis with more elegance. Again, everyone is capable of better.

Verb Choice and Usage

The two most common areas that beg improvement are simply choosing better verbs to communicate your thoughts and then using them with better precision and concision.

Diction, or word choice, is a key factor in all writing, particularly when it comes to the selection of verbs. Verbs carry a sentence. You want to choose vivid, active verbs to communicate your ideas with meaning. A verb like “portrays” is overused and generally not used very well by most of you. More than that, it really ends up being kind of empty and void of meaning in the essay. Instead look for more interesting alternatives. This is when a thesaurus comes in handy. You need not “thesaurize” the whole paper, but using the tool to find better verbs or simply better options than “portrays” would be an improvement.

The precise use of verbs or verb phrases also remains an issue. In most instances, this is an clunky oddity in the phrasing. Far too many essays are riddled with phrases like, “is given” or “is shown” or some other variation of a present, helping “to be” verb followed by past tense active main verb. This construction is completely unnecessary and awkward, when simply “gives” or “shows” would not only be more concise but clearer.

Just going back and paying particular attention to your verb choices is probably the simplest way to improve an essay. It is an extremely quick way to begin your revision process. Of course, there may be larger problems with any essay, but beginning to notice verb choices is a small way to earn significant benefits, especially in terms of grades.

From “Creativity Crisis” to Clutching Connections

The most interesting thing about Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman’s “The Creativity Crisis,” from the July 10, 2010 Newsweek, was what was left out of the article. There were a lot of references to people and past research that roused my curiosity. For example, I had never heard of E. Paul Torrance prior to reading this piece, at least I don’t remember ever hearing about him. Yet, a came to learn that he is a kind of creativity pioneer, developing some of the seminal research in the field. I feel like I must have come across his name at some point, for the life of me I can’t recall a time. This article became a point of departure for me to look a little deeper into his work , as well as the work of some of the other academics named, chiefly Kyung Hee Kim, Marc Runco, James C. Kaufman, Johnathan Plucker, and Rex Jung.

Shortly after reading the article, started Googling various academics referenced in the article. It didn’t take long to recognize how many of these academics were cross referenced with one another or by other sources. It was yet another confirmation of just how small the world can be sometimes. I discovered, that  Dr. Kim actually worked with Torrrance, before his death while he taught at University of Georgia, which also now houses the Torrance Center for Creativity & Talent Development. Dr. Runco is actually the director of the Torrance Center. He also received the National Association of Gifted Children‘s 2000 E. Paul Torrance Award for creativity research. Dr. Kaufman has written a number of books on creativity and regularly writes a column for Psychology Today. Additionally, Kaufman received the 2008 E. Paul Torrance Award for creativity research. What’s more, the year before that Dr. Plucker received the same award. In fact, the Kaufman and Plucker have authored a book together, Essentials of Creativity Assessment. The only real genuine departure from this seeming bubble of tightly connected people is Rex Jung, but that is probably because he is more focused specifically on neuroscience. Consequently, his work seems to branch out far beyond just the study of creativity, also including intelligence, gender differences, as well as mood and personality. All in all, it turned out to be about a two hour Internet odyssey of information that spun a web of intersections that were nearly as interesting as the material about creativity. I had well over twenty tabs open in my browser as I was writing this.

Undoubtedly some of the authors’ finding came from working on the book NurtureShock together. While the book seems to be more about parenting, the mentions of children and education in the article draw a thin line to their research for the book. I also began wondering if it was, at least in part, linked to the release of The Power of Creativity, by another Torrance acolyte Garnet Millar’s. That volume looks to be comprehensive look at the Torrence’s longitudinal study of creativity, that has lasted over fifty years. That is an awfully long study by any standard and certainly deserves a lot of attention.

As far as the article itself is concerned, I am most interested in the results that showed a decline in child creativity since 1990. Since I have two little ones at home, this caught my eye. It stirred up a lot of my already existing fears about how much television I let them watch. It also made me wonder how primary schools handle gifted kids. For awhile, there seemed to be a genuine parental movement for gifted education as a kind of counterweight to special education. Yet when money gets tight all too often these programs are seen as little more than enrichment and expendable, a point the article makes. It also made me recall how fortunate I was as a kid in a school with a separate teacher for what then were called talented and gifted students. I remember doing some of the coolest lessons, projects, and even field trips of all my schooling because of that program. There is all kinds of stuff I learned then that is still with me today. It kind of disheartens me to think that other kids, potentially including my own, have not or will not have a similar chance that I had as a kid. Still, I wonder how much of it is a crisis and how much of that is simply to sell magazines.

I particularly liked the way that the piece opened and closed with a tight focus on one of the “Torrence kids,” Ted Schwarzrock. Using a specific example that is related but not necessarily key evidence to the overall story is a great technique. Plus, it provides the kind of human interest angle that makes a topic as heady as this personal and relaeable to any reader. It is a good example for any student writer of how to use this kind of technique to compose an interesting introduction and conclusion.

Ultimately, I ended up finding the mini-hunt that it inspired even more interesting. Like any article in a mainstream general news publication, like Newsweek or Time, it only skims across the surface, providing a mere introduction to the topic and the players. That is great for most people, and in this way it is a pretty good example. I couldn’t help bu wonder what the original draft of this article must have looked like. It had to have been chopped down from a much longer piece. It had all of the kinds of tiny gaps from a tough editing job. Still, even if it only proved the foundation for a fascinating flight of fancy, I found it pretty worthwhile and a great example of how a relatively superficial article can become the foundation for some fruitful research.