This week, you will work on two creative assignments:

(1)     Instagram: Add 5-7 more images to the Instagram account. You may continue to develop the vision you discussed in your IG presentation/artists’ statement, or you mgiht consider trying something narrowly focused—a focused series on subway portraits or signage; photography dedicated to people interacting with public art, etc. Please post your images by FRIDAY at 9 pm (this is a slight change from the usual Sunday deadline!)

(2)     Blog post: Word and image.

STEP ONE: Read the Walt Whitman poems and article(s) for next week. These are posted under “Reading.”

STEP TWO: choose an image posted on the class IG after today (ie, from the second batch of pictures)—an image by one of your classmates.

STEP THREE: In the style of Walt Whitman, write a poem inspired by the image.

STEP FOUR: Post your poem + the image (or a link to it) on the blog.

This exercise is an imitation (a mimesis, though maaaaybe we’re stretching Aristotle’s original sense of things a bit here!) in two ways: you will recreate the photograph in words, in some way, and you will copy Whitman’s style of writing: his rhythms, his sentence and line structure, his manner of punctuating, his use of the first person, of nouns, etc. Attend closely to the details of how his poems are constructed, and borrow his techniques to create your own.

I am not setting a precise word count for this–make it over 200 and under 1000 (Whitman’s style, as you will see, lends itself to expansiveness!)

Due Monday at 9 pm (so that you have time to look through the IG and craft your poem)