10/25 Plot, Handbook, 70-93; Time, Handbook, 219-243
Assignment:  Analyze Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” in terms of its use of time and tense.  How many different time periods occur in the story? How quickly or slowly does time move?  Divide the story into parts (present action, past action) and kinds of time (subjective, objective), noting specific places in the text that indicate time.  What actually happens in this story?

11/1 Workshop on Craft Exercise #4: Plot and Time
Poetry Recitations: Christy Barbour and Catherine Rankin

11/8 Figurative Language, Handbook, 245-258, 295-303
Poetry Recitations:  Donna LaNigra and Carol Pappas
Assignment:  List ten concrete nouns, preferably everyday things (e.g., corn, room, towel, moon, chain, etc.) and ten present tense, active verbs (e.g., drip, bloom, swim, flare, floats, etc.).  Draw lines arbitrarily connecting a noun with a verb and make a metaphor (e.g., the corn swims, the towel blooms, the moon flares, the chain drips, the room floats).  Pick one or two of the examples and write several lines developing the metaphor.

11/15 Workshop on Craft Exercise #5:  Figurative Language
Poetry Recitations:  Kate Tobin

11/22 Workshop on Craft Exercise #6: Allusion,  Symbol, and Voice
Poetry Recitations:  Cory Merrill and Kay Cyr

11/29 Sound and Sense and Rhythm: Handbook, 258-273
Poetry Recitations: Melissa Cutting and Rachel Henderson

Assignment:  Select one of the following poems from the Handbook and analyze its use of sound.   Is there a rhyme scheme?  Are their end rhymes?  Slant rhymes?  Does the poem use other kinds of repetition (of a line or a sound)?  Is the repetition a form of assonance or alliteration?  How is sound important to the meaning of the poem? You can analyze the poem by drawing lines linking words with similar sounds, circling different repeated sounds in  different colors, etc. (Plath, "Daddy," 65;  Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays," 111;  Eamon Grennan, "Lying Low," 250)

12/6 Workshop on Craft Exercise #7: Sound and Sense
Poetry Recitations:  Jeff Burns and Caitlin Regan

12/13 Workshop of Craft Exercise #8: Meter and Conventional Form
Poetry Recitations: Heidi Ulbrich, Robert Phillips, and Hillary Breton

12/17 Final Portfolio Due by 4:30 p.m. in my mailbox in 311 Luther Bonney (the English Department Office closes at 4:30).