UPDATE: 09.01.11

As the previous post mentions, you will need to write a review of Trey Moody's Climate Reply for our next class session, which will be on September 12th. While you will want to address elements of craft and technique for the entire collection, I want all of you to particularly focus on individual poems. Below, I've created a list that assigns specific poems for each of you:

Miranada: "What We First Said"
Kelly: "The Listener, The Land"
Matthew Carter: "Climate Reply"
Matthew Chanlynn: "Dear, Ghosts (1 and 2)"
Kimberly: "Dear,Ghosts (3 and 4)"
Katlin: "This Forest Isn't a Room"
Samual and Alyssa: "The Book of Flattened Hands"
David: "One Question"
Taylor: "The Seating"
Jennifer: "Dear, Ghosts (5 and 6)"
Jessica: "Dear, Ghosts (7 and 8)"
Ashley: "We Didn't Believe"
Rachel: "Birdsong"
Hailey: "A Feather Protruding from the Mouth"
Lindsay: "Dear, Ghosts (9 and 10)"
Hanna: "Island of Sanity"
Luke: "We Used Spoons Mostly"
Joseph: "Remembering the Original"

Also, I want you all to come up with three questions about Trey Moody's Climate Reply, at least one of which addresses some element of poetics that we've read in Kinzie's A Poet's Guide to Poetry. While the other two can also derive from this source, you can ask more general questions about the his writing, if you wish, as well. Please, email me your question on or before Thursday, September 8th.

Finally, I'm adding an additional caveat to the composition process of your new poem for our upcoming class. Not only do I want you to write your first-draft as a 250 to 300 word prose meditation (although, if you'll remember, the revised and lineated second-draft is the version you'll be emailing to me), I want your poems to be composed in "the style of Trey Moody." Why, you may ask? As Kinzie writes, as a writer learning how to create poems, "Your goal should be to sound like others rather than create a completely original composition" (4); this need to create a poem that "sounds" like someone else's poetry derives from the fact that, especially as novice writers/poets, you need understand that a poem is not "a mere wildcat product of will, but rather a rescue, within the horizon suggested by convention, of a sequence of new turnings" (2). Or, as Kinzie states elsewhere: "Without tradition, there can be no sense of what the outer limit" (26). As such, think about the images you find within Climate Reply, as well as the line breaks, diction (i.e. word choice), and half-meanings.