DIRECTIONS: Read the poem ONCE, straight through. Answer 1 and 2, and never go back to improve them.
The poem, and who wrote it
After one reading only. What happens in this poem? One sentence, in plain words, the way you would say it to somebody at a bus stop.
After one reading only. Which line stuck? Copy it out exactly and say nothing else about it yet.
Now read it again, slower, out loud if you can. Then turn over.
If there is no poem in the house. Any of these is short, findable in a
library book or an anthology, and worth the trouble: Carl Sandburg’s Fog (six lines) ·
William Carlos Williams’s This Is Just To Say · Robert Frost’s Nothing Gold
Can Stay (eight lines) · Langston Hughes’s Harlem · Emily Dickinson’s
A narrow Fellow in the Grass · Gwendolyn Brooks’s We Real Cool.
Read It Twice
Any poem · Page 2 of 2
Name one thing you noticed on the second reading that was not there on the first. Where is it in the poem, and why do you think it went past you?
What did the first reading get wrong? Say what you thought was going on and what changed your mind. “Nothing” is only an answer if you can name the lines you went back and checked.
Go back to the line you copied in question 2. Do you still pick it? If you do, say what it is doing that you could not see before. If you do not, say which line took its place.
Which line took you longest the second time? Copy it, and name what slowed you down — a word, a piece of punctuation, or something you had to work out.