“Experience” by Carrie Fountain
Description Details Attached Files (1)
Discipline English Language
Assignment type : Essay
Description
Writing about a Poem’s Meaning
You will write a five-paragraph essay that discusses the meaning of the poem “Experience,” by Carrie Fountain (see attached below).
The essay should discuss the poem’s meaning. Your introduction should include the author’s full name and the poem title, as well as a thesis and plan of development statement about the meaning of the poem. Your thesis should mention the theme of the poem (theme and meaning are the same thing). Organize your essay around three smaller ideas explored in the poem. So here’s an example of what a thesis and plan of development statement might look like (except that the content is complete nonsense that I made up, so don’t use my exact example):
“Based on the poem, Fountain believes that experience is something you are born with, and she explores this using three smaller ideas: the wilderness makes young people smarter, bodies are made to be abused, and getting what you want makes you a good person.”
Make sure what you say is reasonable. Stick to what you can support from the text of the poem itself. Don’t interpret the poem using your own personal associations. Remember that a poem may remind you of something personal, like a family member, but writing about that would be off topic because it focuses more on you than the poem.
Note: You are NOT allowed to use critical sources or to work in groups. It is just you and the poem. You do NOT have to include a Works Cited entry, but you should quote generously from the poem and document lines quoted in your paper using MLA citations. For this paper, your quotations should be about 20% of the total length of the paper.
How to cite lines of poetry: When quoting lines of poetry, don’t use page numbers but line numbers. Also, use a forward slash ( / ) to indicate where the line break occurs in a poem. (A line break is where a line of poetry ends and the next line begins.) Here’s an example:
Talking about the past, Fountain says, “Thank god time erases everything / in this steady impeccable way” (17-18).
I only quoted two lines here, but the two lines make sense together because they form an actual sentence. There is a slash between the words “everything” and “in” because that’s where the line break occurs in the poem. The citation refers to the line numbers that I quoted. The sentence I quoted goes from line 17 to line 18, so I show that by using a range separated by a hyphen, like this: (17-18). Don’t write the word “line” or “ln” or any other abbreviation before the line number.
Format MLA
Academic Level: Undergraduate/Bachelor
Volume of 1 page (275 words)
Type of service: Custom writing
