Poetry Illustration Assignment

Assignment:Extending our units in poetry and the graphic novel, this assignment asks you to explore the relationship between image and poetry. You will illustrate a poem by an international author with two images. With each image, you will also explain and analyze the relationship between image and text, considering what the image reflects about the poem and how it augments or complicates our understanding of the poem.

Approach: • Your first step will be to select a poem you would like to illustrate. This poem should not

be one that we have read together, but it should be a poem by an international author. A great website to find a poem is the Poetry Foundation. Here you can search for poets by period and region, and I encourage to read around a bit to find a poem that speaks to you. I also have a few World Literature anthologies in my office, and you can feel free to stop by anytime to take a look. In addition, I have had the library place on reserve two anthologies of world poetry: World Poetry: An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our Time and The Poetry of Our World: An International Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. You can check out either of these books for three hours and find a poem you like. Just be sure to make a copy of it so you can analyze it later.

• There are several things to consider as you select your poem. Most importantly, it should be a poem that you understand well by the time you begin illustrating it. I want you to choose a poem that you enjoy and that you believe speaks to you in a powerful way. In addition, it should be a poem that has rich images or ideas to explore; please note that not all poems will work equally well. Not surprisingly, the best poems to illustrate are often ones filled with figurative language and concrete imagery.

• When you begin illustrating the poem, you have a couple of options. If you wish, you may generate your own illustrations by taking photographs or drawing/painting them. Alternatively, you can use the Internet or the library to find another’s work, as long as you cite the source of any image. A place to begin is http://images.google.com. (You can enter in a variety of key words to try to locate an appropriate image.)

• Once you’ve selected your image, you will select a short quote or passage from the poem and write an analysis of how the words and image complement and/or complicate each other. For details on what to analyze, see below.

• The final step is to design and present your image, quote, and analysis in a polished document. While it is not required to use a design program, it is an easy way to spice up your work. Feel free to use whatever digital tools you like, though Canva is incredibly easy and fun to use, and includes a variety of templates to work with. Just make sure you spend most of your time with the written analysis and explanation of the image. Don’t spend more than a few hours on designing. If you do decide to use Canva, make sure that you publish (and then download) your posters as a PDF document. You can then upload your PDF to a shared folder that I will create for the assignment.

ENG 203: World Literature University of Southern MississippiProfessor Craig Carey

Suggestions:• It’s important in this assignment that you don’t just think literally – think symbolically

and thematically as well. Explore the poem’s metaphors. Consider the poem’s tone. What kinds of images fit with the poem’s language? The strongest assignments will not use literal images to go with the poem.

• If you do choose a literal example of one of the poem’s images, work hard to find an appropriate one, and explain what led you to that particular image versus other similar ones. What is it about this particular image that led you to select it? Also, does the image have an important historical or cultural context? How do those factors speak to the poem?

Requirements:• For each of the two images, you need to accurately quote the lines from the poem that

you will be illustrating and analyzing. (The quantity of quoted material can vary from a few words to a few lines. Include the author and title of the poem as well.)

• For each image, you need to include at least one weighty paragraph of explanation and analysis. Please draw upon the tools for interpreting poetry in your analysis and quote words or lines when appropriate. I am looking for quality instead of quantity of writing.

• At the bottom of the page (or somewhere), indicate where you found the image (a link or byline is fine)

• At the end of your assignment, please also place a photocopy of the entire poem you have chosen. Your original photocopy of the poem is fine. For those uploading their documents, you can attach a copy of the poem to your PDF or turn one in during class.

• You do not have to illustrate all of the lines of your poem.

Grading:

I will be grading on the originality and sophistication of your pairings between image and text, the clarity and thoughtfulness of your analysis, the depth of your understanding of the poem, and the care you take in assembling the final document. I will also be looking for creative and varied image choices.

Here’s an example of what I’m looking for, designed and presented in three different ways:

• Traditional Word Document• Slides (using Canva)• Poster (using Canva)

“Poetry Illustration Assignment” is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

ENG 203: World Literature University of Southern MississippiProfessor Craig Carey

Example

“A strange arrangement to comfort the heart—someone has made that possiblein a corner of the cellwith giving, generous hands” – Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Fragrant Hands,” lines 1-4

In the opening lines of “Fragrant Hands,” the speaker creates an image of a surprising object that has been delivered to his jail cell in order to comfort him. The epigraph at the start of the poem, as well as words like “fragrant,” “bouquet,” and “arrangement,” reveal that the object is a bouquet of flowers, but in these lines the speaker draws more attention to the effect of the flowers than to the bouquet itself. He notes that its purpose is to comfort—or to create a feeling of coziness and warmth—which is why I chose this image of a quilt. In addition to physically creating warmth, quilts also have the power to put people at ease emotionally, because they are frequently made by close and loving family members or friends. The poem emphasizes this form of comfort by noting that the flower arrangement comforts “the heart.” Because quilts are handmade, they also bring the quilt maker to the user’s mind, much in the same way that the bouquet of flowers immediately evokes for the speaker the “giving, generous hands” that made it. In the poem, however, the person who gave the flowers is anonymous, described as simply “someone,” which is why I selected an image that does not include people. The speaker also mentions that the flowers are placed “in a corner of the cell,” which reminds the reader that the speaker exists in the dark, confining, and hopeless space of a prison chamber. My chosen image evokes that same contrast between colorful beauty and stagnant darkness through its inclusion of black areas in the corners and the bottom of the picture. Finally, because the quilt is rumpled, worn, and patched together from a variety of fabrics, it suggests that it has a specific story and individual history, which are qualities also important in this poem. In reading the lines, readers never discover why the speaker is in jail, or why he has received the bouquet, but they realize that another story lies beneath this poem—a story that relies upon a particular context and the speaker’s specific actions to fully understand.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_ORedXBtaTsc/TSHMkIEJ_ZI/AAAAAAAADng/UmLpdhDC5M0/s1600/grandmas_quilt.JPG

ENG 203: World Literature University of Southern MississippiProfessor Craig Carey