For my Intro Poetry class’s midterm assignment, I was tasked with creating a poetry anthology comprised of 5 poems in response to assignment prompts given to us throughout the semester until now, and poems of our own consistent with or revolving around a certain theme from our thematic journals. For my Midterm portfolio, all of my poems from my thematic journal revolve around love– and not just romantic love, but familial love, friendly love, love towards oneself, love towards one’s nation (patriotism), and love towards objects or animals. The assignment poems were:
1. A villanelle,
2. A Frank O’Hara poem (I wrote one about my high school buddies),
3. A poem derived from one line of a selection of poems by Stephanie Mallarme,
4. Three Object Poems (written in the Objectivist style a la Francis Ponge– I chose to do poems about a school desk, a flash drive, and a Natural Spring Water bottle).
5. A Documentary poem based on a legal text or the exact account of an event (I did a twofold poem for this one about Bill Clinton’s simultaneous apology to the descendants of the Tuskegee syphilis studies for the death of their ancestors in the name of “scientific research”, and the President’s second apology for the Monica Lewinsky scandal).
Below is the pdf of the anthology, whose title is inspired by the harsh circumstances of my premature birth among other more abstract concepts of universal love across the cosmos. The anthology ends off on a particularly epic note with the last poem being the longest and about a trip to the Central Park Zoo. Since this is a midterm assignment, my final assignment will be this anthology but much longer and far more developed, containing TEN assignment poems rather than the five I’ve listed above, and more poems about love of all kinds.
Intro Poetry Midterm Portfolio (A Nebula of Bleeding Hearts)
