READINGS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR WEEK OF FEBRUARY 13-19, 2006:

Tuesday, February 14, 2006:

Please read Chapter 4 (Making the Line (II)) in Writing Poems.

Thursday, February 16, 2006:

Please read Chapter 5 (The Sound (and Look) of Sense) from Writing Poems.

And here's the memoir prompt from The Autobiography Box for blog posts due on Sunday, February 19:

Is there a piece of music that reminds you of a particular time and place in your life? In Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, there is a violinist named Vinteuil who plays a simple and not very interesting theme of music. But as the years go by, Marcel finds that even a mediocre piece of music can carry with it lots of memory. The music that may cause an outpouring of memories for you may be a Beethoven sonata or a silly pop song. Thin of one of these tunes and describe the memories that come to you.

Don't forget that Poem #2 (A Poem About Family and/or Childhood Memory) is due on Tuesday, February 21!! Here are the guidelines :

Please write a family-related poem and/or a poem of childhood memory.

The challenge of this assignment is to write a poem dealing with family and/or chilhood memory that completely avoids hackneyed language, cliche, and sentimentality.

The poem should incorporate concrete details and sensory images.

Be sensitive to the music of language, and carefully consider how sounds are determined by word choice, line length, line breaks, etc.

Please make sure to give your poem a title, and that your poem is typed/word-processed.

And finally, here's a link to the upcoming Vermillion Literary Project’s Poetry Festival (click on the menu links on the left side for information about the featured writers, festival schedule, etc.) that you might want to check out! (Don't forget that you can do write-ups of outside literary events to replace up to two absences and that you will need to attend a minimum of one outside literary event to write one of your Writerly Immersion Papers :

VLP 2006 Poetry Festival