Poetry Lab 3
Manifesto Review and Final Revisions

1. Sitting near your groupmates and talking with at least one member, go to your group's space on the discussion board and review the draft of your manifesto.  Consider making revisions directly to the text and then re-posting it.  (Compare your with the two famous documents: Pound's Imagist Manifesto; Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto; or this page on Dada and Surrealism.)

  • Does it promise a distinctive style of poetry? ("Spontaneous" folks are particularly at risk on this one.) If no, consider how to narrow its range or increase its extremity.
  • Is there a coherent vision projected, or does it read like a group compromise? Consider cutting tenets that cloud the vision.
  • Does the manifesto seem too short? Consider adding some charged description or a few notes about practice (ex. The Anarchists: "We write without rules, we approach chaos brazenly as the matador eyes the bull . . . . our poems are cut from newspapers, dug out of the trash, torn from the static noise scattered along the radio dial.  There will be no self-satisfied authors smiling from our poems, but if we're glimpsed at all, you'll see us flash past barely holding on."
  • Review the name; make sure it seems compelling and appropriate to the group.

2. Designate your most technologically savvy (or most organized) classmate as Technical Editor. 

  • TechEd, use Explorer/Netscape to browse to www. geocities.com and register a web-page for the group, creating a name as close to your group's name as geocities will allow; and then send me the name and address by posting it to the "MAIN" area on the discussion board.
  • Upload your revised manifesto to the main page of your web. (You can use the Yahoo page builder for now, or if you have a floppy disk with you, use MS Frontpage and create a 'new web', which you'll then publish to the geocities page.)
 

First Group Poems

1. If you haven't already done so, post your first group-style poem to the discussion group area for your group. (You may send an emissary to speak with me and have the discussion area name changed to reflect your new name.)

2. Now read at least three of your classmates' poems (preferably all) and comment on them. First tell them what you like. Then consider how well they exemplify the ideas in your manifesto. Offer suggestions, concrete if possible, on what they might do in revising the poem to make it more effective, interesting, powerful, and appropriate to the group project.
 

HW: Browse through the anthology until you find a poem that you like which also seems to exemplify some (or all) of the qualities in your group's manifesto.  Read and reread this poem; mark it so you can share it later with your groupmates; then write an imitation, a response, a pretend translation of the poem yourself. Type it and bring copies for your group to class on Monday.

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Last Updated: 09 December, 2008