PREAP ENG 2 THIRD SIX WEEKS ORB ASSIGNMENT INSTRUCTIONS TASK: Construct a poem about a character/person/group of people in your

novel/book. Your poem MUST follow the conceptual and structural (syntactical) pattern of Abandoned Farmhouse by Ted Kooser. Notice the use of concrete details, imagery, contrast, sentence inversion, and personification. Imagine your characters/persons house or environment once he/she has abandoned it. What clues would be left behind as evidence of your characters personality and the events that occurred there? STANZA ONE: Introduce the character/person by employing concrete detail. Remember to use personification and inversion. End with a contrasting detail (but not; see lines 7-8 of Abandoned Farmhouse). STANZA TWO: Introduce a secondary character/person using concrete details, some of which may hint at problems or conflicts within the relationship. Again, be sure you use personification throughout the stanza and inversion in the first half of the stanza. STANZA THREE: Imply or directly state the conflict (problem) central to the novel/book and the characters. Use concrete detail about the state of the general environment, but maintain a sense of mystery about what exactly happens. Again, be sure you use personification and include a rhetorical question. Finally, be sure the answer to your question begins with a simile, lists three concrete details, and contains a hyphen that precedes these details. Be sure you end your poem by repeating the beginning of stanza three (Something went wrong, they say).
NOTE: Each stanza should be about the same length (within one line) as each stanza of Abandoned Farmhouse. If they are not, you are not following the conceptual and structural pattern of the model poem. NOT FOLLOWING THE CONCEPTUAL AND SYNTACTICAL PATTERN will result in a SIGNIFICANT grade penalty. You WILL NOT earn a passing grade if you do not adhere to the model. It is IMPOSSIBLE to adhere to the conceptual and syntactical pattern without looking at the model poem while you write your own. If you read non-fiction, your characters may be groups of people, and the conflict/problem should be the main subject of your book. Please ask for help during class today or come in for tutoring if you need help! When you are done with your rough draft, use a thesaurus to help you refine your diction. As you construct your final draft (what you will use to type your final copy), be sure to spell-check and proofread! Pay special attention to subject-verb agreement (proper use of say and says) and the proper use of commas (again, see the model poem for clarification and imitation). Proper subject-verb agreement, the use of commas, and sophisticated diction are ALL part of the grade!

PRESENTATION (all count as part of your final grade): 1) TYPE your character poem. Be sure to separate each stanza, and justify your poem in the center of the page. 2) GLUE your poem to the inside of a FOLDED piece of construction paper. 3) Using blue or black ink or typing, write the title of your book and the name of the books author on the cover (front of the construction paper). NOTHING SHOULD BE WRITTEN USING PENCIL!! 4) Create a cover design/illustration. You do not have to draw this yourself; you may make a collage, find pictures on the Internet, or create a computer-generated cover. Do not merely photocopy the front of your bookyou will earn no points if you do so. If you have other ideas, please ask for approval beforehand. 5) Bring your rough draft(s) to class to turn in, but DO NOT staple or affix them in any way to your final copy. OTHER GENTLE REMINDERS: 1) Remember, you are demonstrating you read and understand your whole ORB. 2) This assignment counts as a major grade (project/product) for the fourth six weeks average. 3) DUE DATE:_______________________________________________________ **If you are absent on the day the poem is due, it MUST be turned in the day you return to school (usually the next calendar day). It will be counted late if you do not turn it in on the day you return, regardless of whether or not you have English that day! 4) As always, please come to tutoring (Tues. and Wed. afternoons) if you need help!

Abandoned Farmhouse
Ted Kooser

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes on a pile of broken dishes by the house; A tall man too, says the length of the bed in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man, says the Bible with a broken back on the floor below the window, dusty with sun; But not a man for farming, say the fields cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn. A woman lived with him, say the bedroom wall papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves covered with oilcloth, and they had a child, says the sandbox made from a tractor tire. Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar-hole, and the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames. It was lonely here, says the narrow gravel road. Something went wrong, says the empty house in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste. And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard like branches after a storma rubber cow, a rusty tractor with a broken plow, a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.