SLEEPING ON THE WING Assignment No. 2: Emily Dickinson

Read the poetry available at the hyperlinks below. Then, after reading the directions that follow, write your own poem.

..... ..... .....

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I_heard_a_Fly_buzz_%E2%80%94_when_I_died_%E2%80%94

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wind_took_up_the_Northern_Things

http://www.poems.md/emily-dickinson/bee-im-expecting-you-3679.html

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/11052

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Crickets_sang

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Because_I_could_not_stop_for_Death_%E2%80%94

“Write a poem that is written in somewhat the same way as ‘I Heard a Fly Buzz’; that is, write about something that is terribly significant to you--the end of the world, the beginning of the world, your death, your birth--and in the same poem write about something that is very insignificant--a leaf dropping, the sound of a footstep, the telephone ringing, combing your hair. Don‘t say what your emotions are, and don’t try to make an obvious connection between what is important and what isn’t. Let them simply be happening at the same time: ‘I heard something drop when the world began.’ It may help if you think of it all as having happened a long time ago--if you’re thinking of another century, you can probably calmly and objectively imagine both a rose blooming and a volcano erupting. Great distances of time and space make everything begin to even out.

“Try using very short lines and very simple words. Use dashes and extra capital letters if they seem inspiring.”

--from the Emily Dickinson chapter of Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell’s Sleeping on the Wing (Vintage, 1981).