Blackout Poetry In class we read the Poems "Let America Be America Again," and "Harlem," both by Langston Hughes. We got inspiration from these two poems to create "blackout poetry." Black out poetry is when you take a poem and black out certain words so that in the end you have a cohesive poem. For our poems, we had to choose a universal theme to correspond with our blackout poems. We also had to design our poems in anyway, abstract or not. Here is mine regarding the theme of hope
"The dream of love is real in the dark, and stars. Bring back the hope full of endless gain. We must redeem our dream."
"In Cold Blood" Essay For our essay on "In Cold Blood," the book we read as a class this semester, we had to choose 1 or 2 critical lenses to focus our essay on. For mine, I decided to go with a psychoanalytic and reader response lens. I chose this one because I wanted to talk about the psychoanalysis part of the book, but I also wanted to incorporate some reader response so show my own opinions on why Capote wrote his novel the way he did. This essay defiantly took a long time to gather all my ideas together and getting textual evidence, but in the end I think my essay does a great job really demonstrating these two lenses.
Imaginative Non-Fiction The longest and most developed part of our final projects was the imaginative non-fiction portion that we did with our partner. The first thing we did was pair up with someone and had to tell our "life story" to them. Each partner had to choose one piece, or "nugget" from their partners story, and create their own imaginative non-fiction poem, song, play, or short story, incorporating that piece. I wrote a short story using the "nugget" of a bad breakup. In my story I really tried to show not tell by using descriptive language and really painting out a picture rather than telling a story.